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We Need to Talk about 2.5GbE – Should You Buy It?








Buying the Right 2.5GbE Switch Switch First Time –

Should you Upgrade to 2.5Gbe – An Idiots Guide

The hardware featured in today’s 2.5GbE Guide
2.5G adapters for PC/Mac
USB C to Ethernet 2.5G Adapter, QGeeM 4-in-1 $29.99 –
RSHTECH USB C to 2.5G Ethernet Adapter $22.99 –
EDUP PCIe 2.5GBase-T PCIe Network Adapter $27.99 –

2.5GbE Network Swtiches
TRENDnet 8-Port Unmanaged 2.5G Switch $179 –
D-Link DMS-106XT 6-Port 2.5G & 10GbE Unmanaged Switch $149 –
QNAP QSW-1105-5T 5-Port Unmanaged 2.5GbE Switch $119 –

10GbE Network Switches & Adapters
EDUP 10Gb Gigabit PCIe Card $89.99 –
QNAP QNA-T310G1T 10G-to-TB3 Adapter $269 –
QNAP QSW-M408S 10GbE Managed Switch, $299 –
TP-Link TL-SX3008F 8 Port 10G SFP+ Switch $241 –

Video Chapters
00:00 – The Start, Obviously
00:13 – What is 2.5GbE and What has changed?
02:03 – Future Proofing
04:10 – Shared Bandwidth
06:45 – USB-to-2.5GbE Adapters
08:39 – ISPs crossing the Gigabit Mark
10:44 – Storage Media Faster than 1GbE
13:19 – Multimedia doesn’t really benefit
14:39 – 2.5GbE is not as widespread as 1GbE
16:38 – The cost of 2.5GbE Switches is a bit nuts
18:35 – Cost of 10GbE dropping
19:57 – WiFi 6 & WiFi 6E are here
21:59 – Conclusion

NASCompares Free Advice Area –

Vulnerabilities And Exploits On Synology & QNAP NAS – Stay Updated! –

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Synology DSM or QNAP QTS in 2021/2022, Part III –

Mesh Routers VS Powerline Adapters And Wi-Fi Extenders – Buyers Guide 2021 –

Synology NAS Unofficial Memory Upgrade Guide –

How To Switch From Google Photos And Drive To Synology NAS – A Step By Step Guide –

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49 Comentários

  1. I think 2.5GBE is underrated. Getting over 280Ms for file transfer speeds. Its pretty fast for what I do with editing videos

  2. Thank you for this video, when I renovated my place with Cat 6A cables I moved to a2 gigabit internet connection just this year, however only recently I have purchased USB 2.5 gb singles to upgrade my connections and it has been amazing, thank you for your video it was informative and helped me make the right decision to wait for a year and then move up

  3. We don't need discuss 2.5 GbE, 1 GbE has effectively been the standard for LANs at the edge for over a decade. Thanks to Moore's Law, computer power doubles, every 18 months (or less), so very quickly LAN speeds need to improve by an order of magnitude (x 10) to be significant.
    What few (none?) of the network companies have realised is that computers now come equipped with Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports and Thunderbolt Hubs. Over our PANs we are already doing 40 GbE. We need switches with TB4 ports, Fairly predictably, network equipment brands have fallen into the trap of treating 2.5 GbE as the new normal.
    The new normal is 40 GbE.
    We can do 7+ Gb over 5G mobile networks.

  4. 2.5g isn't futureproofing. 10g has been around for much longer than 2.5g or 5g… if you're going to use cat5/6 cables, just go to 10g. the only reason I can think of that companies are feeding us 2.5 and 5g right now is in attempt to segregate a market that started and should be homogeneous. 10g is the way of things right now, today. but even that's not futureproofing. if you want to futureproof, you should get 10g sfp+ switches and nics and use om3 fiber and/or dac cables to make your connections. the reason for this is that sfp+ is 10g, uses less power, and if you use fiber connections, that fiber will later be able to run 25g, 50g, and 100g (and probably more later on) via bonding multiple frequencies of laser communications together in a single strand of fiber. if you're building a house today, put om3 in the walls and be happy. worst case scenario, you want to use one or more rj45 based network devices and you buy a 3-5 port sfp+ switch and use sfp+ to 10g ethernet modules for the devices you want to use. the biggest reasons to go with 10g: copying large files (such as videos you've got today with your nice video camera), photos from a dslr camera, high resolution audio recordings, backups to and from your NAS. virtual machine migrations for high availability or automatic resource re balancing for homelabbing and/or hosting of services from your home such as nextcloud, video game servers, plex server so you can store your dvd and blu-ray collection on your NAS and distribute that content to every computer, tv, phone, and tablet in your home and outside of your home when you travel, etc. and now that residential fiber is FINALLY gaining traction (I live in rural ct (I can literally walk to cows) and was just offered symmetrical 5 gigabit fiber (I took them up on the symmetrical 2g fiber because it was the same $110 I was spending on 600/25 from charter spectrum cable)), and in some other places, you can get up to symmetrical 10g now.

  5. My ISP model is 2.5GbE, most recent motherboards are 2.5GbE, NAS more often come with the red 2.5GbE socket now. It's a no-brainer to just get a 2.5g switch and be done with it. gigabit network is basically slowly dissapearing with the current hardware being sold.

  6. will you notice or need 2.5 times better throughput for local file transfers vs 1gig? if you don't do much transfers, and you are not running a time critical business(or personal req) that requires it, then probably not.

    but where it may matter is for the upcoming wifi 7 stuff will will benefit from multigig (without it, you will simply be bottlenecked. if you are going to get wifi7, get multi gig networking gear to go with it, e.g. switches, nics etc)

    homelab networking enthusiasts may also appreciate more than the standard 1gig.

    Also in 2023, a lot of motherboards nowadays have 2.5gbe. You would have to go out of your way to go for the cheapest possible motherboard to get a 1gbe port.

  7. The issue with 2.5G is the switches… If you poke around, you can get 10GbE for the same or less than 2.5G, especially if you like old Enterprise gear as I do. I can set up 10gig for way less than I can for 2.5gig, as Enterprise skipped 2.5Gig thus it's not around in the used market. If you need managed switches, like I do, then 2.5G actually costs more than 10gig. Since regular cat6 cables can handle 10gig speeds over shorter cable lengths, it's less of an issue than you make it out to be.
    2.5G may be on a lot of new devices, but if the supporting hardware is more expensive than 10gig, it's pointless.

  8. Your talk about futureproofing really hit me. Its one of the reasons (having GbE FTTP WAN/Internet already) I was determined that when I finally paid a decent chunk for a new router, it MUST have at least 2.5GbE WAN and LAN, rather than the 2.5Gbe WAN OR LAN which seems common, and rather defeats the point IMO, as you've got an instant bottleneck. (I ended up spending ~£300 on the Asus XT12 which has 2x 2.5GBe, and for a router a very fast CPU and RAM, meaning it should not keel over as the traffic hots up)

    I am looking to upgrade the backhaul around my house fairly soon, as it will mean even if my NAS is still only running 1GBps, I will have full capability to max out the internet AND NAS at the same time across the network, or. if its via a machine with 2.5GbE, maximise the internet AND NAS usage at the same time, all the whilst having overhead so other devices on the network can still communicate with each other. Also means I will not be instantly having to run to upgrade equipment if I 1.8/2/2.5Gb FTTP becomes available.

    Im not expecting all of this to happen now. But it may well in the next few years, and will also give additional overhead room for shared bandwidth on the network if multiple machines are heavily active at a given time. Again, not designing around whats capable now,. but what may happen in the next few years.

    The only thing delaying the upgrade is the cost of 2,5GbE switches at the moment, multiple machines around my house already have 2.5GbE NICs, but whereas I can get GbE NICs for pennies, a 2.5GbE Switch is still over £100.

  9. .900 Gigabit/s= 112.5 MegaBytes/s = a single spinning rust slow sata hard drive speed
    1.1 Gigabit/s= 137.5 MegaBytes/s = a single spinning rust fast sata hard drive speed
    2.3 Gigabit/s= 287.5 MegaBytes/s = generic 2.5Gbit/s Linux data rate
    4.4 Gigabit/s= 550 MegaBytes/s = a good sata ssd
    60 Gigabit/s= 7500 MegaBytes/s = some Gen 4 NVMe PCIe SSDs capable of 7500 MB/s

  10. 10 GB network is expensive and only makes sense with fiber optic cable. 2.5GB Ethernet can use old CAT5e, CAT6 cables. It also uses less power than 10GB copper Ethernet. Unfortunately, 10GB SFP can not switch to 2.5 GB but then fall back to 1GB.

  11. I work in business and small datacenter networking, and anything between 1 and 10 Gbps does not exist. SFP, sure, they're 1, 10, 25, 40, 100 Gbps.

    Even in my home use, I'd rather get everything on 10 Gbps than pay the barely supported premium for 2.5 or 5 Gbps, especially on managed devices.

  12. its complete overkill. more people than not dont yet have access to fttp in the UK for even 1gb and thats going to take a good 5 years at least.

  13. I think 1Gb/s will be sufficient for most house/small business users (except NAS storage, iSCSI) for next 5 or more years.

  14. Moved entire network to 2.5gbe. Pickup up a 453E and a bunch of 2.5 to USB3 and some new switches. Real nice speed boost! No fans, so it is quiet.

  15. I think at this point it’s pretty safe to say that for most non enterprise applications 2.5Gbe is the horse that is firmly in the lead over 5 and 10

  16. I took your advice and went 2.5gbe and also bought a Asustor AS6702T Nas with NVME storage, I am having the easiest of times setting up the Nas it is so simple. Watching Blu-ray files from the Nas is super fast. Thanks for all your help. Looks like I’m planning for 10gbe in the near future.

  17. I only have 1Gbe router. If I buy a 2.5Gbe USB C Ethernet adapter, would the speed increase compared to a 1Gbe connection?

  18. Workstations have 10gbit on almost every port now USB etc. Except for the one you use the most, your network interface port. It is not overkill, it's falling behind in my opinion. A lot of people rather have wifi for network connections nowadays cause it is surpassing their cabled network speeds and it is more convenient. If you still care to put a cable through the ceiling you better have something that makes it worth it! Large capacity NAS at the read and write speed of local SSDs.

  19. I have 2.5GBe right now. no switch either. just added an extra 2.5g nic in my server and desktop, and have them as an additional direct NIC. updated hosts file on my server and voila, my server can be accessed at 2.5g for $50.

  20. Hi m8, watched a good few videos regarding NAS, are you interested in a video tutorial setting up a semi cheap NAS setup with semi total noob build. I Have the parts etc, but cache disk, OS and RAID setup are still total nightmares for someone like myself still surfing channels to find a definitive answer to my questions?

  21. I belive wifi ratings include the overhead and payload of packets, where ethernet speeds are just the payload, something to keep in mind

  22. I have 2.5G fiber (upgraded from 1G a couple months ago) in my house. I'm still waiting for a router with multiple 2.5G ports. Most only have it on the WAN or the LAN, but not both. Really frustrating. Hopefully that changes with the upcoming Wifi 7 routers.

  23. Only the newest 10GbE equipment will negotiate down to 2.5 or 5 gigabit. Those speeds were not available until 2016, when 10 GbE had already been around for a decade.

  24. I picked up a QNAP TS453D not long back to replace an older Qnap with the dreaded bad firmware update. It's got twin 2.5Gbe ports on it but the trouble I've found is there's limited routers and network switches currently available to actually utilise this feature. I even decided to update to a wifi 6 router (as I've got a wifi 6 laptop). While the routers got link aggregation, they're still only 1Gbe ports. The only router that did have 2.5Gbe (ASUS) was considerably more pricey and didn't have link aggregation either – so barely worse off having twin 1Gbe ports.
    Besides, the features only useful IF the laptop had 2.5Gbe capability too. But still OK if you're running a few devices concurrently sending data (at least the transfer speeds aren't bottle necked).

  25. Wish 2.5GbE would become standard, 1GbE is way too slow these days.
    My pc has 2.5GbE, My Router has 2.5GbE, My Synology 5 bay NAS has 1GbE 🙁
    Network is only as good as the weakest link.

  26. You touched on it, but to expand:
    You are only going to get a maximum speed equal to the weakest link in the chain.
    If your Internet and router is 2.5gbps, but your switch is 1gbps and your old laptop's network card is 100mbps, then you will never get performance from that laptop faster than 100mbps.
    I have 300mbps ethernet and 1 PC with 1gbps LAN, and 2 PC sticks with 100mbps LAN.
    The PC sticks will only ever send/receive at a max of 100mbps to either the internet, the other PC stick, or the PC.
    The PC will only get internet of 300mbps and the communication between the PC and the sticks will be 100mbps max.

  27. I don't really need 2.5g everywhere , but I would like it on my core connections. sadly I cannot find a cheap 4 or 8 port switch (unmanaged) with a 2.5g uplink port and the rest as 1GB ports . If anyone knows of one , comment below.

  28. Fun future-proofing story – built my house over 20 years ago. The town had no cable internet yet, but I still had every phone plate box run with 2 Cat 5 cables. First, wired for multiple phone lines, then DSL came. When real ISP came, 4 wires got me 100Mb speed. As we didn't need the phone lines for dial up, over time I rewired each port to have full 8 wire 1Gb connectivity.

    At 2.5Gb, it's only one room that needs this. My home office with multiple computers and NAS. Exactly right that 2.5 is pretty cheap to add, and my spinning drives aren't saturating that. Unless I change to a RAID configuration on the desktop, this setup will work for quite a while.

  29. 95% homes have cat5e, so there's no question of 10GbE without ripping the walls, which isn't a problem at 2.5GbE. 95% of WiFi6 APs have 1 GbE LAN, so how do you want to use the full WiFi6 bandwidth, between laptop and NAS, laptop and internet etc. If you want to take full advantage of WIFi 6, you have to buy the most expensive AP which has, guess what… 2.5GbE LAN.

  30. Yes but only if you buy basic nas's, 10gbe is better , you can buy 10gbe 2nd hand switches and nics so cheaply now and often only need a switch with 2 x10 for your main pc and nas.

    1100mps is what your nas can do in a raid or with m.2 on 10gbe.

    280mps is good for budget nas's where you have max 2 drives mech models or cheap Sata SSD's its good to see entry level at 2.5gbe

  31. Synology is sadly missing the Boat. I have 1 2.5 Gb Network on almost all the workstations Server, 2.5GBe I will have Fiber connect soon. Qnap and many other have Nas have 2.5Gbe , I have talked to Synology Tech Support no word on any 2.5GBe sadly Nas box after 2.5GB Fiber, will be the slowest device in the Network , Does anyone have and info on 2.5GBe from Synology
    Qnap has had it for years

  32. Nice! Would like to see a 2.5gb video showing a setup. Maybe with connectivty to NAS devices that don't have a 2.5gb adapter (usb or card added) and a more modern one. What Cables do i need? Virutalization station concerns? Port binding? that sort of thing.

  33. Don't forget to check your specs. Many early 10Gbe chipsets don't support 2.5Gbe and 5Gbe. Buying cheaper switches may leave you stuck at 1Gbps if they don't support the middle speeds.

  34. I went with 2.5Gbe on my 4 bay NAS. It's an older Asustor unit. Several computers need to access it at the same time. My Plex Server saves all DVR files there and my Transcoding setup transfers files off and back on. It really helped with congestion when streaming from Plex. I'd go up to 10Gbe with my next NAS.

  35. I really love your videos! You explain things in such clarity just one thing, why are they so long?
    I noticed that in one of your videos you repeated the same thing 4 times (different examples) before getting to the heart of the issue.
    Can you please try to make your videos shorter?

    Thanks!

  36. Want full 2.5/10Gb speed? Full DATA PATH upgrade is always required 🙂

    2.5Gb should be an entry data speed standard. 1Gb is to just slow for current performance of internal devices. Also 2.5Gb might be last standard that can be thermally manageable in laptops or SFF/Thin clients. 5 and 10 are just too hot. Also 5 and 10Gb are fast but use of external USB/Thunderbolt devices is not what you would call stable…

  37. Thank you for putting this out, practical thinking is hard to do when speed is the topic. Time to stay grounded and avoiding distractions is the way for me. Lol. Cheers.

  38. I’m just starting to move everything to 2.5gb with my truenas running a 10gb. But I’m also seeing better performance from my 1gb devices.

  39. Firstly, I am impressed by your ability to count by 2.5. I have a new PC arriving today that has 2.5GbE built in. Luckily, it also has 10GbE built in. (It's a Core i9 Intel NUC 12 Extreme.) I've been 10GbE in my home lab for nearly a decade, starting with a Netgear switch, progressing to as used Arista Networks switch and finally installing a Ubiquiti aggregation switch a few months ago. The Ubiquiti switch has four 25GbE ports as well, so I've gone an upgraded my two Dell PowerEdge servers to 25GbE with Mellanox fibre cards. I've upgraded my two big Synology NASes as well. The Synologys support the Mellanox cards out of the box. I consider the 2.5GbE standard a "feature" aimed at consumers to get them to buy hardware (again). 10GbE is and has been an enterprise solution for a very long time now. It's too bad vendors have been so slow to get on the 10GbE bandwagon. A 10GbE NIC or switch shouldn't have to cost more than a 1GbE or 2.5GbE NIC or switch.

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