This year I set up 10Gbps networking in my home lab since I am lucky enough to have 10Gbps internet and it didn’t make sense to pay for that but not have it for all my machines.
Or at least I tried to set it up. 10G pcie cards are now cheap enough, but routers are not. Thunderbolt adapters are also expensive, bulky and use a ton of power[1]. I’m keeping my eye open for a surplus router and cheaper adapters but in the meantime I am only using a 2 port card in my main machine to serve at 10Gbps to one other machine. I wonder if I could also serve my m1 MacBook using thunderbolt 3.
[1] In my work life I also tried to use Ethernet in some embedded projects. It turns out Ethernet is just power hungry in general. Even 100Mbps Ethernet uses about 0.5W per port. There are standards for lower power but I’ve yet to see anyone use them.
Have you considered using an x86 machine with dual 10G NICs as your router, and then all you’d need is a 10G switch which may be cheaper than a router. I’ve considered the approach but haven’t undertaken it yet.
Or at least I tried to set it up. 10G pcie cards are now cheap enough, but routers are not. Thunderbolt adapters are also expensive, bulky and use a ton of power[1]. I’m keeping my eye open for a surplus router and cheaper adapters but in the meantime I am only using a 2 port card in my main machine to serve at 10Gbps to one other machine. I wonder if I could also serve my m1 MacBook using thunderbolt 3.
[1] In my work life I also tried to use Ethernet in some embedded projects. It turns out Ethernet is just power hungry in general. Even 100Mbps Ethernet uses about 0.5W per port. There are standards for lower power but I’ve yet to see anyone use them.