alt Hacker NewsI'm waiting for 3 DACs and a few other bits to arrive today to move closer to 10G networking at home. Moving house soon and the new place will have 2.5Gbps FTTP (both up and down) so I wanted to be prepared for that. Given my existing broadband is only 500/75Mbps FTTP I was fine with a 1GbE internal network and Wifi-6 meshing. I could have planned to move to 2.5GbE but it may have been a bottleneck at some point, so may as well push straight on to 10G.
I have a USW-Aggregation with 8 SFP+ ports arriving today too. Just have to install Intel X520-DA2 cards in two of my servers (Proxmox host and a general Linux server), and the NAS also has a 10G SFP+ port, and then connect it all up.
Most of it second hand from eBay for half the usual retail price.
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How many PCIe lanes are you allocating?
The card is obviously 16-lane, but it also has two ports; 40Gb total. In a server that’s fine, but if you want 10G in a desktop you’ll have a problem.
I’m probably not telling you anything new. NICs using newer PCI generations are rare as hen’s teeth. It should be possible to do this with four lanes, but isn’t…
Unless you find a 25G dual-port card, in which case the single lane my secondary slots hand out does at least suffice for 10G one way.
I really have to wonder what can you use 10G for? I have 500M down from my ISP, and it is faster than I can imagine ever needing, unless I get into data-hoarding 8k movies.
I did similar with the Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN and some surplus eBay gear. The nice thing is the NAS and my MacBook dock both have 10G and are connected - and it’s noticeable.
> Most of it second hand from eBay for half the usual retail price.
You were scammed. X520 is old enough to drive a car, the shop should pay you to get it off their hands.
I just went through the same process over the last few months. I had a USW agg and ran out of ports so now I have the big dog 24-port version. Mainly wanted L3 routing capability but it’s nice having more ports to lagg connections.
Nice work, that agg switch is excelllwnt.
I went with some cheap eBay cards and slotted them into a synology and PC.
They work great and have for years.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/384094168784?_skw=connectx+mellanox...