Help needed building cheap 10gb network

[arqrenderz]

Hi guys, we need your help building cheap 10gb network, we are using a file server and nodes connected to a 1gb network and we are seeing a big bottleneck with just 2 users on the network.

So we are looking for a cheap 8 port 10gb switch, it can be refubrished, only condition is no fiber, we want to use cat 5e or 6
We also need cheap 10gb network cards, i know Juraj mentioned some intel ones and the asus cards were a pain to work on

If you can also share with us some tips and tricks on this implementation would be greatly appreciated!!

(our file server is working on a raid 10 with some sppining hdds, some day we will upgrade them to ssd,  im very nervous about sudden failures of those type of discs)

[johan belmans]

Hi there,

we recently switched towards a 10Gb network.
Just awesome :-)
Whenever you open or save a large file in CIE or Photoshop you feel the speed.
Opening a large Max file with Xrefs, feels still slow, although instead of 12 minutes, it took 7 minutes.

We had to buy a new file server because the previous one did not have expansion slots for 10 GB network cards.
As a switch we bought the XS712Tv2 12-Port 10-Gigabit Smart Managed Pro Switch.
In our workstations we installed the ASUS XG-C100C Single 10GbE network cards. These are the once that Juraj mentioned. Yes, we had some troubles too, but after disabling in the advanced options the TCP/UDP Checksum offload for IPv4 and IPv6, everything works fine.

Cables: CAT6a SSTP
Renderfarm and Backup server are still on 1 Gb network.
Attached you find a speed test.

edit: new server has a mixture of SATA HDs and SSDs both in Raid 5. Qnap has a feature called Qtier which controls which data will be located on slow disks and which on fast disks.

[Rhodesy]

Sorry to jump the thread here. I have not long set up a 10GB network and to be honest dont see that much difference so maybe I have a problem. Ive just done that same AJA test and I'm getting 367 write but only 152 read! No idea why my read is half the speed of write! I also find saving large C4D and Photoshop files slow. But its really quick to drag over a 2GB C4D file from desktop to the network drives but quite slow for a 2GB photoshop file. Why the difference?

[arqrenderz]

What about your server hdds? mecanical or ssds?

[Rhodesy]

They are mechanical 7200rpm iron wolfs. Its just odd that the write speed on the tests at least is comparable to others but the reads are half the write speed, which seems the wrong way around. Im using a Synology 1817+ with 10GB card and the asus 10GB cards in the workstations with cat 6 and an 8 port netgear 10gb unmanaged switch.