SFP+ got much cheaper now, so you can get 10 Gbps way easier than in the past.
The issue seems to be switching. To switch so much data you need either a powerful CPU or some kind of ASIC and apparently all those ASICs are proprietary and no one wants to make 10 Gbps switches with open firmware becasue of that.
You can get some relatively affordable 10G-BaseT SFP+ transceivers these days too. My home server has a DAC to a switch whilst my desktop is connected at 10G over Cat6. I don't really have the ability to saturate 10G but can quite easily exceed 1G for file transfers. It would be nice to get a laptop dock with 2.5G+ Ethernet as well, but I haven't gotten that far yet...
Yeah, haven't tested it on Windows, but they supposedly support it too.
I was also looking for some good passively cooled switches for SFP+ and they are hard to find. Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN looked good, but I'd prefer something with open OS on it. They don't seem to exist.
Comments
SFP+ got much cheaper now, so you can get 10 Gbps way easier than in the past.
The issue seems to be switching. To switch so much data you need either a powerful CPU or some kind of ASIC and apparently all those ASICs are proprietary and no one wants to make 10 Gbps switches with open firmware becasue of that.
You can get some relatively affordable 10G-BaseT SFP+ transceivers these days too. My home server has a DAC to a switch whilst my desktop is connected at 10G over Cat6. I don't really have the ability to saturate 10G but can quite easily exceed 1G for file transfers. It would be nice to get a laptop dock with 2.5G+ Ethernet as well, but I haven't gotten that far yet...
You can just get 2.5GbE USB dongle (which are pretty cheap) and use pretty much any usb-c/3.0/thunderbolt dock :)
I just noticed that SFP+ has passive interconnect between two ports without a transceiver as well, for up to 7m. That's really nice.
Yes, those are are called DAC cables and they are pretty cheap and use little power too.
Though annoyingly USB 4 SFP+ adapters are pretty expensive.
Usb4 ~= thunderbolt 3 so you can use a 15$ thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter and 50$ thunderbolt 2 to 10gsfp+ external card
I found one with Aquantia chip: Sonnet Solo10G SFP+.
Nice! What OS do you run it with?
Linux. It worked out of the box. But some details here: https://docs.kernel.org/networking/device_drivers/ethernet/a...
Yeah, Linux is really nice for running 10g cards. Being from Sonnet, I'd expect it to work with OSX too. I've had worse luck w/windows .
Yeah, haven't tested it on Windows, but they supposedly support it too.
I was also looking for some good passively cooled switches for SFP+ and they are hard to find. Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN looked good, but I'd prefer something with open OS on it. They don't seem to exist.
I went the other way with AliExpress mokerlink unmanaged. It's cheap, and my network is pretty simple