Gigabit Ethernet - What's the Deal?

[Boyd01]

In order to benefit from it, your entire network needs to be able to keep up - switches, routers, cables and the other machines on the network. Even just (1)-Gigabit LAN is miles faster than any pipe the regular user can rent from their ISP.

Who knows what might happen in the next few years? You might be able to get an inexpensive external disk that plugs directly into your 10gb ethernet port, there have been a number of gigabit consumer devices like this for awhile now. You don't really need a "network" to use these.

And here in the US, Verizon is offering gigabit internet to consumers in many areas on their fiber network right now. 150mb was the fastest they offered when they wired my area in 2017. But I talked with the technician during installation and he said that was strictly a marketing decision from Verizon, and that the system they installed in my home could accomodate gigabit already. He was surprised they were only offering 150mb since they are doing 300mb in other areas nearby.

It's funny that the router Verizon supplies with FIOS doesn't support 802.11ac wifi. I have three computers and two Apple TV's on my gigabit network, but use my MacBook Air over 802.11ac wifi from a Time Capsule that is also on the gigabit LAN. So I can get the full 150mb internet speed, but wouldn't be able to do that with the Verizon-supplied router.

Anyway, I tend to agree with @Cashmonee above... if you need faster than gigabit ethernet, you probably already know.

 

[MAlexB]

And if he needs it in the future, he can buy a TB3 -> 10 GBit/s Ethernet adapter.

Which you can get already today at about the same price as Apple is asking for the feature-upgrade: e.g. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3ADP10GBE/

 

[th0masp]

Who knows what might happen in the next few years? You might be able to get an inexpensive external disk that plugs directly into your 10gb ethernet port, there have been a number of gigabit consumer devices like this for awhile now. You don't really need a "network" to use these.

Well it may come in handy for some use case, sure. But then you could probably just as well get more Thunderbolt devices at around twice (?) the speed. Using the Network port would make more sense to me in a server-client type scenario where you don't want the drive to be directly hooked into your computer.

 

[IdentityCrisis]

Not upgradeable after the fact.

If large or fast NAS is somewhere in your future, get the 10GbE. It’s another 1.25GB/s pipe into your Mac that won’t take away from Thunderbolt or USB bandwidth.

Hmm, not true. You can get a TB3 to 10GbE adapter.

 

[killawat]

Which you can get already today at about the same price as Apple is asking for the feature-upgrade: e.g. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3ADP10GBE/

The sale price on this is pretty amazing. As long as the performance is there, this is the cheapest 10 Gigabit TB3 solution available. Standard aquantia chip as you see in all the other solutions (including our Macs). I was one of the very few using Solarflare cards in PCIe expansion boxes so the cost per port was upwards of $300 dollars and even then I thought it was worth it but now $125 for external. I also have the sonnet solo I paid $175 for.

What a time to be alive.

 

[rmdeluca]

Hmm, not true. You can get a TB3 to 10GbE adapter.

You seem to have missed this part:

It’s another 1.25GB/s pipe into your Mac that won’t take away from Thunderbolt or USB bandwidth.

Which is a legitimate concern if someone is running an eGPU and external NVMe storage or a TB2/TB3 audio interface and is considering high speed NAS.

 

[bigfatipod]

Not upgradeable after the fact.

If large or fast NAS is somewhere in your future, get the 10GbE. It’s another 1.25GB/s pipe into your Mac that won’t take away from Thunderbolt or USB bandwidth.

Do most people access a NAS via cable? I access ours via WiFi. I assumed the majority of home users did the same thing.

 

[rmdeluca]

Do most people access a NAS via cable? I access ours via WiFi. I assumed the majority of home users did the same thing.

I can't authoritatively comment on "most", but likely in most homes, especially single occupant, 10GbE is still a luxury and accessing your NAS over WiFi is fine. However, I can say in all the SOHO installations we regularly put Macs in that NAS is always hardwired. Examples: doctor's offices, small architecture and engineering firms, wealthy client home offices and so on. And in those cases, at 1Gb/s, the NAS is *always* the bottleneck.

We also use TONs of NAS for security video storage in restaurants, strip malls, storage facilities and so on. The limitation of 1GbE is particularly onerous in that situation - it's easy to exceed 125MB/s with 16 or more cameras if you're not using H.264. Caching can't fix the problem in live NVR use - you have to have the sustained throughput or else you drop frames.

For a video production house, the difference between 1GbE NAS and 10GbE NAS can literally be game changing. One or more people scrubbing video over 1GbE can be painful so you avoid doing it if at all possible. Over 10GbE (assuming the array itself can keep up) it's quite usable. Granted, NAS is not the only way video production is done, local caching is still preferred most of the time. But that's partially because NAS even a few years ago was simply not fast enough unless you paid an exorbitant amount for it.

Times are definitely a changin' w/r to the blurry line between hobbyist and professional though. For me, the 10GbE and i7 were the easiest choices to make when configuring my Mini. My goal here is not to convince anyone else to make those same choices (well, maybe the i7 a little ) - it's to share the information I have as best as I can.

 

[Cashmonee]

Do most people access a NAS via cable? I access ours via WiFi. I assumed the majority of home users did the same thing.

The majority of home users don't know what a NAS is, much less have one.

Honestly, this is a super niche feature that over 99% of users have zero need for. It is totally meant for legit professional use. Home internet is likely to go 5G wireless, not 10 Gb wired. Most people don't have a NAS, and if they do, don't have or want to invest in a LAN fast enough to handle 10 Gb. I would only purchase this upgrade after I have satisfactorily upgraded everything else on the mini and all of the peripherals I was connecting to the mini and I had $100 I really didn't want to see around anymore.

I know there are users here that need it or simply want it to have the best. If you don't already know that, you are honestly throwing away $100.

 

[IdentityCrisis]

You seem to have missed this part:



Which is a legitimate concern if someone is running an eGPU and external NVMe storage or a TB2/TB3 audio interface and is considering high speed NAS.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is hooked up to the network through a switch. It doesn't use a TB3 port.
[doublepost=1543185241][/doublepost]

I can't authoritatively comment on "most", but likely in most homes, especially single occupant, 10GbE is still a luxury and accessing your NAS over WiFi is fine. However, I can say in all the SOHO installations we regularly put Macs in that NAS is always hardwired. Examples: doctor's offices, small architecture and engineering firms, wealthy client home offices and so on. And in those cases, at 1Gb/s, the NAS is *always* the bottleneck.

We also use TONs of NAS for security video storage in restaurants, strip malls, storage facilities and so on. The limitation of 1GbE is particularly onerous in that situation - it's easy to exceed 125MB/s with 16 or more cameras if you're not using H.264. Caching can't fix the problem in live NVR use - you have to have the sustained throughput or else you drop frames.

For a video production house, the difference between 1GbE NAS and 10GbE NAS can literally be game changing. One or more people scrubbing video over 1GbE can be painful so you avoid doing it if at all possible. Over 10GbE (assuming the array itself can keep up) it's quite usable. Granted, NAS is not the only way video production is done, local caching is still preferred most of the time. But that's partially because NAS even a few years ago was simply not fast enough unless you paid an exorbitant amount for it.

Times are definitely a changin' w/r to the blurry line between hobbyist and professional though. For me, the 10GbE and i7 were the easiest choices to make when configuring my Mini. My goal here is not to convince anyone else to make those same choices (well, maybe the i7 a little ) - it's to share the information I have as best as I can.

In a way yes. But unless you have FLASH/SSDs in that NAS, you will not be able to support more than around 2GbE of bandwidth. Regular NAS drives can't handle the write/read speeds of 10GbE networks.

So in reality, unless you spend large amounts on a 10g switch, 10g NIC, 10g nics on the NAS, SSD/Flash in the NAS and cabling that can handle it, no one in a home will ever need that type of bandwidth.

 

[rmdeluca]

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is hooked up to the network through a switch. It doesn't use a TB3 port.

Again:

The two Thunderbolt controllers in the Mini have a total of 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes available to them. An eGPU uses 4 of them. A TB2 audio interface uses up to another 2, whereas a TB3 audio interface uses up to 4.

If someone is using a fast external NVMe connected to their Mini, that also uses up to 4 PCIe lanes.

Therefore, in any combination of the above scenarios, a 10GbE ethernet adaptor connected to TB3 is not an option because 10GbE needs 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes of its own.

Thus, because the built-in 10GbE option on the Mini does not use any of the eight PCIe lanes available to Thunderbolt, it can be fully utilized even in the above scenario, without taking any bandwidth away from Thunderbolt.

In a way yes. But unless you have FLASH/SSDs in that NAS, you will not be able to support more than around 2GbE of bandwidth. Regular NAS drives can't handle the write/read speeds of 10GbE networks.

There are multiple use case scenarios with NAS that can easily exceed 2Gb/s even with conventional drives (full-duplex 1GbE NEVER reaches 2Gb/s). For example, multiple volumes, RAID 5/6 (or even RAID 0 if you like living on the edge), use of an SSD cache in a traditional array and so on. I've mentioned SSD NAS several times now.

So in reality, unless you spend large amounts on a 10g switch, 10g NIC, 10g nics on the NAS, SSD/Flash in the NAS and cabling that can handle it, no one in a home will ever need that type of bandwidth.

A key thing to remember with 10GbE NAS is that not every device on the network needs to be 10GbE to benefit from it. This is why you frequently see multiple 1GbE ports on NAS' that can be combined when using a network switch that supports link aggregation.

A 10-port gigabit switch with two 10GbE uplink ports (perfect for small NAS applications) is currently $200 on Amazon. A 5+4 bay, 10GbE NAS from a reputable manufacturer is around $700. 1TB SATA Evo 860 SSDs are currently $128. 6TB, 220MB/s Barracuda Pro HDDs are about $225. For about $2k you can put together a totally game-changing SOHO 10GbE NAS setup from which to run VMs, video production, shared CAD/engineering workloads and so on. This same NAS likely would have cost $4k a few years ago and would have been nearly impossible a decade ago. When the barrier to entry to potentially game-changing tech is dropping that rapidly it's ill-advised to make blanket statements like "no one in a home will ever need that type of bandwidth."

There are plenty of people who work at home or in SOHO environments (such as myself and many of my clients) that needed and started using that bandwidth years ago.

 

[IdentityCrisis]

Again:

The two Thunderbolt controllers in the Mini have a total of 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes available to them. An eGPU uses 4 of them. A TB2 audio interface uses up to another 2, whereas a TB3 audio interface uses up to 4.

If someone is using a fast external NVMe connected to their Mini, that also uses up to 4 PCIe lanes.

Therefore, in any combination of the above scenarios, a 10GbE ethernet adaptor connected to TB3 is not an option because 10GbE needs 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes of its own.

Thus, because the built-in 10GbE option on the Mini does not use any of the eight PCIe lanes available to Thunderbolt, it can be fully utilized even in the above scenario, without taking any bandwidth away from Thunderbolt.



There are multiple use case scenarios with NAS that can easily exceed your arbitrarily derived 2GbE even with conventional drives. For example, multiple volumes, RAID 5/6 (or even RAID 0 if you like living on the edge), use of an SSD cache in a traditional array and so on. I've mentioned SSD NAS several times now.



A key thing to remember with 10GbE NAS is that not every device on the network needs to be 10GbE to benefit from it. This is why you frequently see multiple 1GbE ports on NAS' that can be combined when using a network switch that supports link bonding.

A 10-port gigabit switch with two 10GbE uplink ports (perfect for small NAS applications) is currently $200 on Amazon. A 5+4 bay, 10GbE NAS from a reputable manufacturer is around $700. 1TB SATA Evo 860 SSDs are currently $128. 6TB, 220MB/s Barracuda Pro HDDs are about $225. For about $2k you can put together a totally game-changing SOHO 10GbE NAS setup from which to run VMs, video production, shared CAD/engineering workloads and so on. This same NAS likely would have cost $4k a few years ago and would have been nearly impossible a decade ago. When the barrier to entry to potentially game-changing tech is dropping that rapidly it's ill-advised to make blanket statements like "no one in a home will ever need that type of bandwidth."

There are plenty of people who work at home or in SOHO environments (such as myself and many of my clients) that needed and started using that bandwidth years ago.

No sir. I work in my field on enterprise level storages like EMC VNX, Unity, and XtremIO. These costs around half a million each. The VNX5300 couldn't even max out our 8gb FiberChannel bandwidth with 15k disks and flash in it. Actually it barely made it to half that bandwidth. You are completely wrong if you think regular spinning disks that are not 10k rpms in a consumer grade NAS will be able to max or even get close to maxing out that 10Gbe pipe.

Dell will not sell you a server with a 10Gbe card unless you put SSDs in it because even with fast hard disks it will not be able to provide the bandwidth.

Again, no one in a home will ever need 10GbE and won't for the next 5 years till prices drop. You just proved me right about the costs. Thank you.

 

[triptolemus]

Again, no one in a home will ever need 10GbE

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

 

[rmdeluca]

You are completely wrong if you think regular spinning disks that are not 10k rpms in a consumer grade NAS will be able to max or even get close to maxing out that 10Gbe pipe.

Fortunately, I never said that. I do however easily exceed your aforementioned 2Gb/s even with prosumer Synology RackStations and modern hard drives - we do it constantly in NVR applications.

Dell will not sell you a server with a 10Gbe card unless you put SSDs in it because even with fast hard disks it will not be able to provide the bandwidth.

Roger.

Again, no one in a home will ever need 10GbE and won't for the next 5 years till prices drop. You just proved me right about the costs. Thank you.

Again, my clients already *do* need and use 10GbE in their home offices. I'll personally be utilizing it next year for video production.

You do realize you're trying to prove a negative, right? Instead of making more strawman arguments, perhaps consider that there are other people out in the world with different use cases than the ones you are most familiar with?

 

[Cashmonee]

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

To be fair, wired technology is not the future of home use. There are surely professional uses for this, and wired will always have a place in mission critical settings. The average user (and enthusiast) has no real legitimate reason to get a 10GbE card in a mini, and it is unlikely anyone ever will before most homes simply switch to wireless internet altogether. I think that needs to be mentioned here.

The vast majority of people looking at whether they should get this upgrade would be better served putting that money towards other upgrades.

 

[IdentityCrisis]

Please provide us some data (screenshots) from your customers that exceed or get up to 10GbE bandwidth with spinning disks in a NAS. I'll be waiting. Until then, I am done with you.

Fortunately, I never said that. I do however easily exceed your aforementioned 2Gb/s even with prosumer Synology RackStations and modern hard drives - we do it constantly in NVR applications.



Roger.



Again, my clients already *do* need and use 10GbE in their home offices. I'll personally be utilizing it next year for video production.

You do realize you're trying to prove a negative, right? Instead of making more strawman arguments, perhaps consider that there are other people out in the world with different use cases than the ones you are most familiar with?

 

[rrl]

Data is only as fast as its slowest link. Don't buy yourself short.

 

[rmdeluca]

Please provide us some data from your customers that exceed or get up to 10GbE bandwidth with spinning disks in a NAS. I'll be waiting. Until then, I am done with you.

I think that would be best.

For the benefit of those who are passively engaged in this conversation, and are now unsure how a lowly NAS array of traditional HDDs can exceed 1Gb/s (or 2Gb/s, since that number was brought up), thus obviating a 10GbE connection, here's my typical use case when we build out NVRs for our customers.

NOTE this is completely academic w/r to the original point of the OP, I'm just doing what I can to address some misinformation that is being presented in this thread.


So, typically, we'll get something like this:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/RS3618xs

And stuff it full of whatever the modern HDD of the time is, such as:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-barracuda-pro-10tb-hdd,5210-2.html

You'll probably notice a few things:

* The NAS doesn't have a 10GbE connection by default.

No, it doesn't, traditionally we've aggregated multiple of its 4 1GbE ports to get more bandwidth out of it.

* The slowest sustained speed of those drives (when writing to the innermost sectors) is about 100MB/s.

Which immediately begs the question "how do you get to 2Gb/s (250MB/s)?" The answer is we configure them in an array. Traditionally, we'll stuff all 12 bays with drives and configure it RAID-6 (two drive fault tolerance). When configured this way, you get an aggregate speed of the array that is greater than the maximum of any one drive because small bits of information are being written to each drive instead of all information being written to only one.

The result is much greater throughput - we can easily saturate two 1GbE links in a typical 20-30 camera NVR when there is lots of activity.

Here is a review of the previous version of this NAS getting 1.12GB/s (8.96Gb/s) in iSCSI (how we use it for NVRs) with older SSDs:

https://www.storagereview.com/synology_rackstation_rs3617xs_review

"But wait, those are SSDs!"

Yes, but the max write speed of those 4-year old SSDs is about 400MiB/s (about four times the SLOWEST write speed of the HDDs we're using). So you can see the array gives you about 3X the write speed of any single drive, which has been our in-the-field observation as well, even with HDDs.

The moment you stick a caching SSD in a traditional array though, all bets are off. Especially with the newer, prosumer arrays that don't hold tons of drives but do have slots for NVMe caches. Stick a 118GB Optane in there and you nearly instantly have multiple gigabits of useful throughput for most applications. Modern NAS' are getting *really* awesome.​

 

[IdentityCrisis]

I think that would be best.

For the benefit of those who are passively engaged in this conversation, and are now unsure how a lowly NAS array of traditional HDDs can exceed 1Gb/s (or 2Gb/s, since that number was brought up), thus obviating a 10GbE connection, here's my typical use case when we build out NVRs for our customers.

NOTE this is completely academic w/r to the original point of the OP, I'm just doing what I can to address some misinformation that is being presented in this thread.


So, typically, we'll get something like this:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/RS3618xs

And stuff it full of whatever the modern HDD of the time is, such as:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-barracuda-pro-10tb-hdd,5210-2.html

You'll probably notice a few things:

* The NAS doesn't have a 10GbE connection by default.

No, it doesn't, traditionally we've aggregated multiple of its 4 1GbE ports to get more bandwidth out of it.

* The slowest sustained speed of those drives (when writing to the innermost sectors) is about 100MB/s.

Which immediately begs the question "how do you get to 2Gb/s (250MB/s)?" The answer is we configure them in an array. Traditionally, we'll stuff all 12 bays with drives and configure it RAID-6 (two drive fault tolerance). When configured this way, you get an aggregate speed of the array that is greater than the maximum of any one drive because small bits of information are being written to each drive instead of all information being written to only one.

The result is much greater throughput - we can easily saturate two 1GbE links in a typical 20-30 camera NVR when there is lots of activity.

Here is a review of the previous version of this NAS getting 1.12GB/s (8.96Gb/s) in iSCSI (how we use it for NVRs) with older SSDs:

https://www.storagereview.com/synology_rackstation_rs3617xs_review

"But wait, those are SSDs!"

Yes, but the max write speed of those 4-year old SSDs is about 400MiB/s (about four times the SLOWEST write speed of the HDDs we're using). So you can see the array gives you about 3X the write speed of any single drive, which has been our in-the-field observation as well, even with HDDs.

The moment you stick a caching SSD in a traditional array though, all bets are off. Especially with the newer, prosumer arrays that don't hold tons of drives but do have slots for NVMe caches. Stick a 118GB Optane in there and you nearly instantly have multiple gigabits of useful throughput for most applications. Modern NAS' are getting *really* awesome.​

Again, anyone can research this themselves. No mechanical hard drive will support speeds of 10gb period. None. Not possible. Ssds for cache with it can in spurts.

The fastest mechanical hd read is 225 mb/s. It takes over 1000 mb/s to do it.

Even a raid 0 which is one of the fastest raids with 15krpm drives can’t do it. That includes an array which I work on daily.

Like I said, you need to show your tests that prove otherwise because there are plenty out there that show it’s not possible.

 

[rmdeluca]

Again, anyone can research this themselves. No mechanical hard drive will support speeds of 10gb period. None. Not possible. Ssds for cache with it can in spurts.

Are you mixing up units? For the third time now, I’ve never claimed 10Gb/s (10 gigabit/s) from HDDs, either standalone or in an array.

 

[killawat]

Please provide us some data (screenshots) from your customers that exceed or get up to 10GbE bandwidth with spinning disks in a NAS. I'll be waiting. Until then, I am done with you.

Give me a second to dust off my nas for screenshots as well.

Half million dollars lmao I'm done.

 

[IdentityCrisis]

Give me a second to dust off my nas for screenshots as well.

Half million dollars lmao I'm done.

Umm yes sir. That’s how much our enterprise level storages cost.

 

[F-Train]

I just want Apple to be a bit more like 10GE in delivering my 10GE mini. I ordered it on Friday morning, it's now Sunday night, and they haven't even finished with processing my order. You'd think that we were back in the dark ages, around about 1995, maybe even 2000 or so, when most people, even in OECD countries, were still on dialup. Or maybe even in the days, not so long ago, that if one was in, say, Barcelona, it was necessary to go to the central telephone exchange if one wanted to make a long distance call to another country.

I think that this thread is likely to make pretty funny reading in a few years.

 

[Cashmonee]

I just want Apple to be a bit more like 10GE in delivering my 10GE mini. I ordered it on Friday morning, it's now Sunday night, and they haven't even finished with processing my order. You'd think that we were back in the dark ages, around about 1995, maybe even 2000 or so, when most people, even in OECD countries, were still on dialup. Or maybe even in the days, not so long ago, that if one was in, say, Barcelona, it was necessary to go to the central telephone exchange if one wanted to make a long distance call to another country.

I think that this thread is likely to make pretty funny reading in a few years.

It might. But if I were betting, I would bet that we will never see widespread wired 10 Gb connections in residential neighborhoods, which I think was the original question in the OP, whether this is necessary for future internet and internal wired networks. I think it is pretty clear that ISPs are going to do everything they can to get us off wired internet and go completely wireless.

So, if the question is, "should I get 10 Gb because I will regret it when I sub to 10 Gb internet?" The answer is absolutely not, because I believe wired internet is not the future. However, if you use a NAS or other network attached devices that can now or will reasonably soon saturate gigabit, then sure, go for it, but you already know to do that. As I said earlier, 99% of Mac mini buyers do not fall into the later category, so I think it is prudent to advise people to spend that $100 on other upgrades in the mini or get an external drive for backups, get a good keyboard, put it toward a chair or monitor, etc. The exception are those that know they need it.

 

[F-Train]

I realise that some people here take this discussion very seriously, but I have to say that there is a refrain here that makes me sort of say "What?".

There is a legion of Apple users whose number one complaint about Apple is dongles. So what do I read here? Post after post saying "don't spend a hundred bucks for 10GE, if it turns out that you want/need it, you can buy a dongle".

Every time I read that, I crack a smile.

Never mind what that particular dongle currently costs.

Sorry, I'm just having trouble taking a lot of this discussion seriously, and in particular the obsession that some participants clearly have with what they evidently see, based on what they think is their superior knowledge, as saving people from themselves.