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  • DanNeely - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    This looks like a good first step, I'd really like to be able to go directly to 10gb in about 2 years when I build my new box though.
  • romrunning - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I'd like 10/5/2.5/1GBe controllers to be standard, especially on ITX boards where you don't have an additional slot for a separate NIC. Something like the Intel X550-AT would work.
  • CaptainChaos - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Be aware that Intel currently specs the X550-AT to support NBASE-T under Linux only for some reason!
  • friedpenguin - Wednesday, July 29, 2020 - link

    This is a problem how? :)
  • twtech - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    We have 10G NICs already, it seems strange that it's still so hard to get the other parts of the hardware.
  • Shawn_Hicks - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    The cabling standard requirement for 10Gbe only are higher. The 2.5/5Gbe speeds are intended to accommodate older cable plants that can't support 10Gbe but faster than 1Gbe. If you're already wired for 10Gbe, you'd use a 10Gbe switch. If you have an older spec cable that supported 1Gbe, then there was no motivation to transition to 10Gbe. The new options allow transition to better performance where it's needed without recabling, a nieche for enterprise environments.
  • AnarchoPrimitiv - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I suppose the 2.5Gbe NICs on Z490 boards finally aren't a marketing gimmick. Seriously though, I don't understand why 2.5Gbe is being pushed in the consumer space instead of at least 5gbe. SATAIII SSDs are ubiquitous at this point and I would imagine a 5GBase-T switch would be basically the same cost as 2.5GBase-T as you can now buy brand new 10GBase-T switches for $200 or less. 10GBase-T should be what is pushed next considering the fact that you can buy a 1TB NVMe SSD for literally the same price as a 1TB SATAIII SSD.

    I know many people are going to say they don't need 10Gbe in their home, but once you have the capability, you find a use for it, like I have with the 10GBase-T network in my home (my server/NAS can easily do multiple 4K Blu ray rip streams (with any necessary transcoding without breaking a sweat)
  • senttoschool - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    It's not hard to understand.

    2.5Gbe is here because WiFi 6 can exceed 1Gbps, Cate5e installations are common and does not always support 10Gbe, and home internet connections that is faster than 1Gbps will be possible in the near future. 5Gbpe will be pretty common fairly soon is my assymption.

    10Gbe is only useful right now for homes if have an internal NAS/need to transfer a lot of data on your network. 99.99% of home networks don't need that. "Normal" people don't have home servers and NAS. And those that do can afford 10Gbe.

    You need to step outside of your enthusiast mindset. Once you do, it's really easy to understand why 10Gbps isn't being pushed to homes.
  • Makaveli - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Near future depends on where you are I guess.The ISP I'm on has offered 1.5Gbps Connections since around August 2018. They did mention plans of going 5Gbpe down the road.I do agree use case will be different for normal people vs enthusiast.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Meanwhile, my choices are 10Mbps DSL or 56k on POTS. No provider is interested in building out infrastructure the last few miles to get decent bandwidth to my home yet I'm less than 14 miles outside of a community with a population of 50k people.
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    I live in a city with 5 million people (Melbourne, Australia). I still can't get ANY form of fixed line internet. I'm running off 4G. My neighbours, literally 5 metres away, have NBN.
  • pinchies - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Knock on the door, ask them nicely to offer to split costs of their internet bill.... I'd be surprised if they said no! NBN100 ain't cheap!
  • Notmyusualid - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    I hope you are friendly with that neighbour. I'd be tapping him up for a box of my own, or at least a tap of his existing network. All for a big favour, no doubt.

    My brother nearly bought a house three doors down and behind mine. I knew instantly I'd be dumping my connection, and installing a point-to-point radio link to tap his.... but he didn't buy in the end.
  • twtech - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Normal people "didn't" have those things, but that's because most normal people didn't work from home. That's changing now though for many.
  • nagi603 - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Yep, one of the most common fixes for shitty meeting video is having a damned wired connection, especially in apartment building complexes.
  • close - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    @twtech: Having cheap 10G everywhere would be great. But nobody in the history of WFH (hooray hyperbola!) was ever limited by the 1G LAN connection, That's because even in the office your laptop is pretty much guaranteed to be connected to a 1G LAN (seeing how almost no laptop has anything better). So you're limited by your internet connection. Having 10G or 100G in your LAN will make 0 difference to how fast your Zoom meeting works.

    Unless your job is to have a 10G connection at home...

    The reason we don't have 10G is that people don't even understand what it's for (e.g. you). Putting a hefty price tag on something they already don't understand makes it a hard sell for regular people, even those who just buy shiny numbers they don't understand because someone said it will make their WFH faster. People who *need* 10G have it already.
  • rahvin - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    The same things were said of the earliest network standards to 10Base-2 to 10BaseT on up through to 1G network.

    Standards evolve, data transfer increases. In time 10G will the home standard if wired isn't totally displaced by Wifi 6 as the last connection in the network segment as some are predicting it will do.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    You keep missing the point, the bottleneck is the internet connection to the house. You can easily stream 4k over a 1G connection, and the honest truth is that despire 2 decades of evolution consumers still dont have a need for faster then 1G speeds 99% of the time. That's why 10G penetration has been so limited.

    We have a LONG way to go before even 2.5G internet is widely available, let alone 10G, and until then there will be no demand from home users for these faster speeds.
  • Holliday75 - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    My switches at work have 10gbps trunks and its rare to see them jump above 10% utilization in a building with 500 people who are all using copper and/or WiFi along with our automated services and camera system.

    If anything we're getting more efficient data usage per device. The only reason our data usage is going up is we are adding more gear to use it the bandwidth. I am trying to fathom what the average person at home would be doing to need something that wide. Maybe some day we'll have audio/video sensors all around the home that stream data to an AI service. As it stands now I cannot use even a small percentage of that bandwidth even if I tried.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    "You keep missing the point, the bottleneck is the internet connection to the house."

    No, you keep missing the point. There are things that happen on home networks that don't require the internet.
  • HardwareDufus - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    i'm not sure what you are doing internally in your home that requires 10GB.... and I don't want to know...
  • close - Thursday, July 23, 2020 - link

    @Gigaplex, sure there are things that happen on home networks that don't require the internet. Just that 99.9999% of them don't need 10G either. If they do then you already have it ;). If you're here complaining that you need 10G but don't have it then you don't *need* it, you *want* it for cheap bragging rights. Most people use WiFi for almost everything anyway. For a NAS and a main workstation a 100E (give or take) eBay switch with 2x10GB ports is already overkill for almost everyone. That's the thing, nobody cares about or wants to pay to subsidize YOUR needs.

    You don't have 30" water pipes in your house just because of that 1 guy who wants it cheap to empty the pool really fast. Or a 100 A, 480 V electrical wiring because 1 guy needs his high power welder.

    @HardwareDufus, the answer is bragging. But somehow a type of sad bragging that admits they can't afford to buy a 10G switch today even if the used market has some for ~100E.
  • senttoschool - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    So what work tasks do “normal” people do at home that require a 10gbps network gear?

    Please don’t tell me they have to setup home servers. Those aren’t “normal” people.

    And again, those who need it can afford 10gbps.
  • rahvin - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    Do you know how many times I've heard similar statements about technology in the 25+ years I've been building and using computers? I heard exactly those same things about 10Base-T back when 100M was the expensive upcoming standard.

    Why not argue normal people don't need wired network at all? Or that we don't need wifi at all now that LTE exists. Your argument is old and tired.
  • PeachNCream - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Do you know how many times those statements were correct in the context of the present day? Most, if not all of them were correct at the time. While there is nothing at all wrong with pushing advancement along in terms of bandwidth in anticipation of greater future demand, the point people are making that you are attempting to refute is that present day home networks (mainly running WiFi anyhow since the vast majority of people buy computers that don't even have a wired ethernet port these days) would not benefit at the moment from increased wire speed. No one is arguing that in the future, there won't be a need. They are saying that currently households will not see a significant benefit.
  • FreckledTrout - Wednesday, July 22, 2020 - link

    The other side of that coin is that if technology lags to far behind it really sucks like many people here talking about there slow internet. I personally would rather see technology you don't need today ready to go for when the day comes for the average person to need it.
  • Beaver M. - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Oh please... Home servers are very common.
    10 Gb would be overkill I guess. But 5 Gb would be nice. 2.5 Gb is simply stupid. Reminds me of SATA, which is dying right now because they couldnt get out a fast enough standard in time.
  • PeachNCream - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Servers in what sense? Pretty much everyone with a router has a DHCP server issuing out IP addresses to internal devices so those are common, but dedicated server hardware that hosts say network file storage or acts as a media/entertainment server is an obscure oddity that the vast majority of households even in first world countries to not operate. We technical sorts do that on occasion, but we are a small portion of the first world population (plus a lot of us in the tech industry don't bother with doing that sort of thing at home which cuts down the appeal to only a portion of information technology workers).
  • Beaver M. - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    Home server is home server. What are you talking about DHCP servers? Stay on topic!
    It doesnt matter if NAS or a self built server or even a rack. Home server is home server. Lots of people use one to store their media. Music, videos, photos. Simple as that. Everyone I know has one, even those who are not very tech-savy. Weird, huh?
    Not really, because its very easy to install one.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    "Home server is home server." " Everyone I know has one..."

    Odd how people resort to nonsense and embellishments over such an unimportant topic in order to defend an already shaky argument made up to support a needlessly aggressive opinion. You would have been better served (pun very much intended) in not responding rather than trying to respond with transparent falsehoods.
  • Beaver M. - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    Says the guy who claims home servers are not common.
  • close - Thursday, July 23, 2020 - link

    @Beaver M. for a very creative definition of "common". Or "home-server". It's clear that you have a fuzzy understanding of this which is why you come up with these fuzzy concepts and not a single concrete example of what would use 10G. As I said before, if you need it you already have it and it wasn't even cheap. If you don't have it you're just wanking around waiting for other people to pay for your wet dreams in order to drive price down. "Common" is to have WiFi, no "home servers" or nothing that can't work just fine on 1G. And if you actually have a home server that needs to be able to transfer things at 10G often enough to warrant the investment that's not common. The market proves that.

    For example I need to stream raw 16K 120FPS video to every one of my 140 16K TVs in each of my gold plated rooms (see, it excludes WiFi). That's like... 300GBps (capital B). So run along and start buying this until it's cheap enough for me to afford it.
  • Reflex - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    1) Home servers are not common, although there is a prosumer market for NAS devices
    2) People who use them for mass storage are not loading them with NVMe drives
    3) Gigabit can saturate most large HDD's
    4) 2.5Gbit can saturate most SATA SSD's
    5) SATA is dying because it's at the end of it's lifecycle and was replaced by other technologies. Also it's not really dying, so far there is no alternative for bulk storage in the consumer space.
  • Beaver M. - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    1) They are very common. Else there wouldnt be such a huge market for them. Sorry.
    2) Why would they? Why is that relevant? RAID is very common though.
    3) Nope. Large HDDs run 200 to 300 MB/s. That is far above 1 Gbit.
    4) Almost all SATA SSDs run 550 MB/s. That is far above 2.5 Gbit.
    5) Who are you trying to fool here? I was there when it happened. I saw all the people who cried for years for a new SATA standard because the old one was simply too slow for SSDs. It went as far as stuff as U.2 popping up, in hopes manufacturers adapting it. M.2 was a mess at the start too, mixed with SATA, because people still hoped for a new SATA standard. SATA Express popped up and was just a complete failure because it didnt go far enough.
  • close - Thursday, July 23, 2020 - link

    1) They only need 1Gbps, "Else there wouldnt be such a huge market for them".

    "Huge"... lol. "Two inches of hard.... home-server baby". The market for home servers is insignificant by any measure. Most of it is RPis anyway. I'd say that you delude yourself thinking that your needs are relevant but I'm somewhat confident that these aren't needs even for you or you would have already addressed them instead of fantasizing here...
  • Samus - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I remember reading in 2016 when NBASE-T was pitched that the 2.5Gb speed was pitched at being the presumable maximum read speed for hard disks at the time, where most consumer and SMB data lies. The 5Gb sped was pitched as, you guessed it, the maximum throughput of SATA3. This all ignored the NVMe-based drives of the time because they conveniently didn't exist.

    Of course 4 years go by and NBASE-T is finally at a price to become mainstream, and is unsurprisingly "outdated" regarding current storage trends. Still, a 2.5x improvement is huge considering that is per port capacity. If you can upload a 10GBASE-T to a few NBASE-T ports, that gives a full 2500Mbits to each node on a small network from the host.
  • close - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    You're a regular driver, do you have a 1000HP EV?
    You're a regular media consumer, do you have an 8K TV?
    You're a regular application user, do you have 256 CPU cores at 2 TB of RAM?
    0)
    I'm a regular user. Tell me what I need 10G for today. Think of a real scenario that would appeal to any regular user. Just please don't say "work from home" like someone above did ;).
  • Gigaplex - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    Lots of people are moving towards consumer grade NASes for storage. 1Gbit is a big bottleneck.
  • Reflex - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    What operations are regular users performing on a regular basis that can saturate 1Gbps? Consider also that these NAS's you speak of typically use HDD's, which gigabit can saturate.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Gigabit can do ~110MB/s. A single spinning platter HDD can do more than that. An array of them (such as a consumer 4-5 bay NAS) easily exceeds that. My 3-drive array (Seagate Ironwolves) would still be bottlenecked by 2.5Gbit.
  • Beaver M. - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Dont need 5 Gb. But I sure as hell could use 5 Gb. 2.5 Gb is a joke. Sorry.
  • Beaver M. - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    "dont need 10 Gb" I mean of course
  • Jorgp2 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I think it's mainly the ability to reuse existing cabling.

    But I don't understand why a 10G/5G/2.5G switch wouldn't be better for that case
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    It would be better. It would just cost a lot more.
  • Ranari - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    As a low voltage technician (we're the guys who IT personnel hire do the network/fiber installations), there are a few reasons why 2.5Gbe will become the new standard:

    1. Cost; 10GBase-T hardware is more expensive and 2.5G is a nice lower/middle ground in terms of cost. When you're a business needing 180-300 drops, this cost adds up quickly.

    2. Existing infrastructure; most businesses are wired with Cat5e which won't reliably handle 10GBase-T (or handle it at all) unless they're either really, really short runs, or laid and terminated super perfectly. Note, most network cabling is NOT installed very well, haha. CAT6 will handle 10GBase-T over short runs though, and CAT6A a little longer than that, but I've only seen CAT6A used in industrial settings.

    3. Upcoming Fiber; Fiber to the home, which is fiber run directly into your home (or FTTH for short), is rated between 1.25-2Gps. This uses a single bidirectional fiber strand instead of the normal one-way fiber (so you need 2 fibers for a connection), which is a lot cheaper for mass in-home distribution. That said, bidirectional fiber is a lot slower, so it'll be a while before the optics and technology is developed for 10GBase-T at super cheap cost using a single fiber strand.

    4. What the USA tends to drive; In the USA, you see a lot of fiber used, like everywhere, even in businesses, whereas in Europe you see more CAT7/A used, so copper adoption (ie, 2.5GBase-T) tends to follow what is capable in the fiber world. This kinda explains the above #3 point.
  • rahvin - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    FTTH is capable of far more than 1G-2G. That may be current installation speeds but the point of FTTH installation is it's nearly endless upgrade capability.
  • Shawn_Hicks - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Older top end equipment (3rd/4th gen core i7) can struggle to move packets faster than 3Gbps, even with PCIE 3.0 10Gbe adapters. 4k video maxes out at 60Μbps, run 15 simultaneously on 1Gbe.
  • nucc1 - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    Citation needed.
  • Strom- - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link

    4K video definitely does not max out at 60 Mbps. A triple-layer UHD BluRay can sustain 144 Mbps. HEVC Main 10@L5.1@High profile which is used on UHD BluRays supports up to 160 Mbps.

    For a specific example let's take the Italian UHD BluRay release of Midsommar. It has an average bitrate of 80 Mbps and peaks at 95 Mbps.

    That's just the video though, HD audio can easily take an additional 5 Mbps.
  • jeremyshaw - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    So what IC/MAC/PHY is this using?

    Is it the flawed Intel lineup (lineup, now, since it appears there are two broken versions of the 225, with the 3rd hoping to fix the 5vs8 byte gap issue).

    https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...

    You can see the B1 (flawed), B2 (flawed), and now B3 revisions on their ordering page. The B3 revisions are later than the supposedly "fixed" MM/Spec Codes Intel notes in their documentation.
    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/pro...
  • extide - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I highly doubt it's using the Intel stuff -- most likely Realtek PHY's and then who knows what switch chip it's using. Probably doesn't have a traditional MAC as it would be using some form of MII (Media Independent Interface) between the PHY and the main switch chip.
  • jeremyshaw - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Ugh. Intel PHYs connected to Broadcom Switch chip. The BCM switch chip is somewhat interesting, since it supports management, has four 2.5GbE interfaces, and two 2.5/5/10GbE interfaces, so it could be used in a much more interesting product.

    https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-connect...

    Intel SLN8A, which launched Q4'19, per Intel's site. Maybe these were unaffected? Given the price and lack of features, I'll pass for now. Qnap's $180 four SFP+ and 8 GbE RJ-45 managed switch is a bit more interesting to me, anyways. I'd rather not waste the fast ports on something mundane, such as a printer, an old NAS, TV, etc and the Qnap M408 seems to better fit the bill, though a bit more expensive.
  • romrunning - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Yeah, I wonder if this switch is one of the ones that the Intel i225V has problems with maintaing 2.5GBe throughput. It would be really annoying if you finally get a cheaper multi-port 2.5GBe switch, and then find out your flawed Intel controller can't keep up the new faster connection.
  • romrunning - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    For more info on Intel's Inter-Packet Gap problem - see Intel's PDF: https://cdrdv2.intel.com/v1/dl/getContent/621661 under the "Erratum"
  • Samus - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I've been using the XG-U2008 for a few years between my torrent PC and main PC, just so I can unrar stuff faster over the network (250MB/sec is about the read speed of the hard disk so it was a match made in heaven) but it would be awesome to have more than two ports. I also paid like $200 for the Asus switch, this is half the price and more ports. So glad this is finally happening, not sure why the industry things the demand wasn't there. I have a lot of friends in IT and they have been waiting for this to become economical for small offices of a few workstations where Quickbooks just crawls over gigabit.
  • imaheadcase - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Anandtech keeps saying "finally" or something close to that in every article about this stuff, but these switches have been available at good price points for consumers for awhile now. Not sure if they don't understand how to search for them or if they only check certain brands.
  • imaheadcase - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Also, these switches are still not really needed for consumers still. Unless you have a home with more people than you should in the first place you be hard pressed to get the 1gig port saturated.

    Even then, that many streams you be limited by hard drive speed anyway.

    Onside the very rare setup, no reason to spend more for this.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    "Unless you have a home with more people than you should in the first place you be hard pressed to get the 1gig port saturated."

    Speaking solely for myself here, I'm network-bound any time I transfer large files between my desktops and my NAS. Or even between the GPU testbeds for that matter. 115MB/sec is well below what these systems can do.
  • extide - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    You are obviously just thinking of internet -- which is not necessarily what these are for. Sure, hopefully we will start to see >1Gb internet connections soon, but the primary advantage these will provide is faster file transfers between machines on the local network. 1Gb is super slow these days considering even a single sata hard drive (NOT SSD) can do ~2Gb (~230MB/sec) in a sequential read/write these days,
  • cbm80 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    "gigabit" cable service from Comcast is actually 1.2g/s max (downstream). So gigabit ethernet has been an Internet bottleneck for years (well, at least a bottleneck on speed tests...)
  • rrinker - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    If you actually get anything near that - I did hit the gig Ethernet limit when they first upgraded me to gig speed, but the best I get the past few weeks is 650Mb.
    But transferring large files between my main desktop and my server - the GigE is definitely the bottleneck, if I had 2.5GbE I would definitely see faster transfers.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    If you are in one of the select areas where such speed is offered. Much of the comcast netowrk was limited to 50 Mbit downstream until 2 ish years ago, most STILL cant get the 1Gbit speed, and those that can cant maintain such speed for more then a few seconds.
  • mooninite - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Are you one of those guys that says "go EBAY and buy 10gb switch!!" -- Wake up. Those are used, enterprise, LOUD, sometimes SFP-only devices that have no business in a home. SFP has no business in a home. Is your DSL/Cable modem SFP? Is your wireless AP SFP? Didn't think so.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    I'm happy to admit fault. But who else has a passively cooled, 4+ port (RJ45) switch for $100?
  • extide - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Name one then.
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    I've been searching for a long time to find an affordable switch. I was about to drop a ton of cash on the Netgear MS510TX ($650 AUD) because I couldn't find anything. This changes everything.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Ok, where? Name one. Because I cant think of any sub $100 2.5G switches that were redilly available for consumers.
  • ksec - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    When can we start seeing 2.5Gbps Port on Routers.

    I mean you need to get Router sorted out first, otherwise the switch would be useless.
  • DanNeely - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    as long as all your 2.5gb items are attached to the switch, the connection from the switch to the router is irrelevant. the switch send the data from port A to port B via its internal connections.
  • extide - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    He's talking about >1Gb internet.
  • extide - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    You can always build yourself a pfSense box with faster ports.
  • Catalina588 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Comcast's latest third-gen Xfi router has three gigabit ports and a 2.5Gb port. So the 2.5Gb solution to the Internet is now in place and coming to market. All good news. https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/broadband...
  • cbm80 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    also AT&T's latest router has a 5gb LAN port (of course also 2.5g capable).
  • rhysiam - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    "Comcast's latest third-gen Xfi router has three gigabit ports and a 2.5Gb port"

    Wait - so you can only use your >1Gbps Internet connection if you spread the load over several ports? Each single host is limited to 1Gb? That's not a good solution at all! I suppose it's better than a 1Gbps router, but still, that seems like a huge limitation to me.
  • lmcd - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link

    I assume one of the ports (unmentioned) is a coax that supports the needed bandwidth.
  • romrunning - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    A few of the more expensive routers have them - for example, the Netgear Nighthawk AX12 has a single 5/2.5/1GBe port along with 4 1GBe ports. I'd pay an extra $100 to get all the ports with 5/2.5/1GBe.

    Well, what I would rather have is a 4-stream only router with all 5/2.5/1 ports for much less than the 12-stream AX12. So Netgear's $100 basic model, but with all 5/2.5/1 ports, for a total of $200. I'd buy that right away!
  • Brett Howse - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    There are routers with 2.5 GbE as well. We have one for the laptop test bed:
    https://www.anandtech.com/show/15485/at-101-wifi-6...

    Plus as others have stated it's not always about WAN performance. You can be easily bottlenecked on the LAN with just 1 GbE these days.
  • Jorgp2 - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Why?

    Might as well go full 10G ports on your router, since it will only have a few interfaces. There are already many 10G router out there.
  • Makaveli - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    If they released one of these with a SFP+ port that can sync 10/5/2.5/1Gbe and network management I would buy it for about $250!
  • xplorn - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    So the Mikrotik CRS312-4C+8XG-RM seems like a good deal. They also have a 4pt SFP+ switch. The S+RJ10 transceiver is multigig.
  • mode_13h - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    While it's over 2x the price and has a PWM fan, I think the Netgear MS510TX deserves an honorary mention.

    It has 9 RJ-45 ports: 1x 10-Gigabit, 2x 5-Gigabit, 2x 2.5-Gigabit, and 4x 1-Gigabit. All of these can also down-negotiate. It also has 1x 10-Gigabit SFP+ port.

    There's also a PoE version.
  • pixelstuff - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    Interesting that this isn't from a traditional switch manufacturer. Are the big companies putting more R&D into a full line of 2.5G switches before they release anything, or are they sitting around thinking they have a captive market so why bother to innovate?
  • xplorn - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    The Aruba 2930 series of switches has a module slot that supports a 4pt multigig module. None of this is cheap in the consumer sense, but reasonable for a business switch. You can do things like get a 24pt POE or not 1Gb switch and use the module slot for a few APs. They also offer multigig switches partially or fully populated multigig interfaces. These have been available for quite a while.

    I think it is easier to just do 1/10Gb, and if you feel the need for wireless bandwidth to find an AP with dual 1Gb ports instead of the extra expense and rarity of multigig.
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    QNAP does consumer NASes, they're probably hurting since traditional switch manufacturers are the bottleneck on improving NAS performance.
  • Holliday75 - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Seems logical to me.
  • CaptainChaos - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link

    My 2 cents...

    I think most ordinary folks if they feel constrained by 1GbE will be happy with 2.5GbE for several years. A few outliers.will be better off with 5GbE or 10GbE if they have the hardware and application to actually put it to use.
    In my case I have 3 Xeon-D FreeNAS spinning rust machines with plenty of RAM: an 8-core 6-drive & two 4-core 4-drive boxes all formated with parity ZFS. ZFS block sends from the 8-core to the 4-core machines run a bit over 1.5GiBS individually using 10GbE DACs through a Microtik switch. If I overlap the writes from the 8-core to both 4-core boxes then traffic peaks at about 3GiBs, probably due to large ZFS RAM cache.
    It appears that several factors are holding my speeds down such as using the consumer grade spinning drives (5900 vs 7200 RPM vs SSDs), parity instead of mirror ZFS pools, and not using dedicated cache drives. When I built I assumed the boxes would be constrained by the (now ignored) integrated 1GbE. I think I assumeded correctly!
    I'm looking to slowly move other PC's off their integrated 1GbE in a cost effective way (I have a large collection of machines!). Some will have to use USB based 2.5 or 5GbT, while others can use Thunderbolt or internal PCI cards. Mixing the different speeds into a single network is not exactly straightforward. SFP+ Twisted-Pair modules are not exactly cheap and can run quite hot (though cooler at 2.5/5GbE speeds) so stacking several into a passively cooled switch can be problematic and expensive. Having an affordable unit like this QSW-1105-5T might be a good option for me. Better though if it also could do 5GbE! Maybe soon!
  • nagi603 - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Finally a better-than-1G-for-every-port-and-still-fanless switch... now to go to 10G...
  • MadAd - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Interesting. Was set on a GS110MX (2x10GbeT + 8x1GbeT) but I would hold out if there was a newer version with say, 4x2.5 + 2x10.
  • keenanj - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    The EnGenius ECS2512 2.5Gb also just dropped in PoE++ and non PoE versions https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/advanc...

    I did a review here on them with speed testing https://www.keenansystems.com/wordpress/2020/07/03...
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    It's also ~5 times the price of this QNAP
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Plus Anandtech already covered the EnGenius back in January.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/15452/engenius-reve...
  • Holliday75 - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link

    Looks like a shameless plug on his part.
  • spaceship9876 - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    i
  • spaceship9876 - Saturday, July 18, 2020 - link

    Oops, i pressed enter and there was no way to edit my post.

    What i was going to say was i wonder what the idle power consumption is.
  • seerak - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    Too little, too late, at least for me. 10GbE has already come within affordable reach.

    I just completed an upgrade last month to 10GbE for an outlay of around $320. That included two NICS, a Mikrotik CRS305 10GbE switch, a transceiver for the RJ45-equipped NAS and a DAC cable to my SFP+ workstation. Try as I might, any switches I found that were capable of 2.5 or 5G offered no savings vs. the Mikrotik, and QNAP only has 10GbE upgrade cards for my NAS anyway, so I'd have saved maybe $50 on my workstation NIC... and then I found that used Mellanox SFP+ NICs on Ebay went for the same price as 2.5G new.

    Good thing, as my NAS exceeded my performance expectations and would have been bottlenecked at 2.5G.
  • sorten - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link

    I need 10GbE because I have 7 kids and they all want to stream *different* 4K movies from my NAS, simultaneously. /s LOL

    The number of people referencing their ISP's advertised Internet connection speed is funny. Or sad.
  • olee22 - Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - link

    I was looking for reviews on this switch. So for 10GbE there are two options: T-base or SFP+ (direct copper or optical).
    The main issue with 10 GbE 10GBase-T (over Cat 6 and Cat 6e twisted pair) that is very hot. Both the controller card, and the switch. It needs active cooling, or it is like big aluminum brick if it is external adapter with TB3. Also, this is still new, and cards and switches still more expensive, no second hand opitons, a new consumer card minimum 100+ USD, and a switch 200+ USD.
    For example, the Asus RT-AX89X router, which has 10 GbE ports, has a fan, always on.
    Switches without active cooling usually have only one 10 GbE RJ45 ports, or maximum two.

    10 GbE in SPF+ however is much cheaper, there are a lot of sever pull cards second hand for 20 USD, SFP+ passive direct copper cable has a max distance of 3-5 m can be had new for 20-30 Euros (lot of Intel X520 cards, etc. check the SmallNetBuilder forums). Optical cable costs more.
    See fs.com for cable prices.
    The main advantage of SFP+ is that is low power, no active cooling needed.

    One can buy a SFP+ to RJ45 transceiver, which allows plugging in a RJ45 copper cable into an SFP+ port, but it will become extremely hot. If there is no active cooling, the chip can either overheat or not. Maybe it works for 1 SFP+ port, but really not for a lot of ports next to each other.

    I also have an external USB-C to 5 GbE RJ45 adapter from QNap, and it is crazy hot after long file transfer sessions.

    2.5 GbE seems to the max that can be done with existing cabling, and without active cooling and expensive components.
  • Raghav2984 - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link

    Any industrial type with 2.5Gbps? I need to use to connect to blackfly flir poe camera and another port to a motion controller. Any help/suggestion is appreciated.

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