How's it going guys I'm Thio Joe and recently I decided that I kind of wanted to do an upgrade on my home network
so I could take advantage of the full 10
gigabit speeds that my NAS network attached storage drive can be
capable of, assuming the drives are fast enough, so to do that I
decided that I would probably have to upgrade the wiring in my apartment because right now it just uses CAT 5e
which is only rated for one gigabit whereas
I would probably need something like CAT 6 rated for 10 gigabit, but after buying a bunch of different equipment
I bought a switch I bought the 10 gigabit network card for the computer. I bought even
500 feet of CAT 6 cable so I could run it and then after all was said and done I realized that,
the way the apartment is constructed,
It would literally be impossible for me to run that cable.
So I thought wait a minute instead of wasting all this equipment or returning it,
What if I did try to do CAT 5e?
10 gigabit would it work because if you're not familiar with CAT 5 and CAT 6,
and all that it's the same Ethernet connector. It's the same number of wires
The only real difference is how they're constructed in the extra shielding in CAT 6 so theoretically
They might actually be able to do CAT 5e 10 gigabit
and
I wanted to do that and do a test so you guys might know whether or not you need to actually go out and upgrade
Your whole network if you maybe want to get 10 gig so you might be wondering
What exactly you would need to get everything 10 gigabit well obviously the first thing you're going to need is a computer
that does support 10 gigabit and
Also some other device that supports 10 gigabit because if you don't have two devices that support that speed then
You're not going to ever use it so in my case. I bought a network card
There's one from Asus that has it's about a hundred bucks, and it has 10 gigabit
you just plug it into a PCI Express port load up the drivers and
Windows takes care of the rest at least so on Windows 10 really no can figuration required pop it in and you got ten gig
next on the other side the other device in my case is my
NAS network attached storage server and that has six drives in
RAID 6
Now RAID 6 is not necessarily as fast to some other RAID configurations
So that was another factor in me figuring that well if my NAS
Server wouldn't be able to do a full 10 gigabit anyway
Then maybe the CAT 5 would be able to do enough to
Practically max out my connection where it wouldn't matter if I had CAT 6 and we can look at the results later
but one thing you will need to know is that there's actually two possible connectors that your
Devices may use for 10 gig, now Ethernet is a standard one you're probably familiar with that
But another one not as common, but sometimes on professional equipment. You'll see this type of connector, and it is called an
SFP+ connector this might be optical or in this case it is electrical is just low voltage low latency
But it's much more expensive than Ethernet
Specifically the hardware you need
To use it with Ethernet pretty much most devices that use it are cheap because it's such consumer friendly
And there's very it's very popular, but with an SFP+ connector things get expensive
But it's the only thing that my NAS server supported
So I had to use it now the final component in our network is going to be some sort of thing that
Connects all these devices together either a router or a switch that does support 10 gigabit in my case
I already had a router that I liked and it doesn't do 10 gig so I bought a
Netgear switch that does do 10 gigabit and
Like I said I have to get one that does SFP+. Not just Ethernet CAT 10 gig and
Unfortunately that literally doubled the price of the router would have been $200
I had to drop $400 just so I could get that one extra
SFP+ connector so really if you can avoid it
Just stick to Ethernet
or else you're gonna have to pay up.The other thing you really have to look out for when you're buying a switch or a
Router for 10 gig is to make sure that you have enough 10 gig ports on it
There are some routers out there that just have one
10-gig port and the other ones are just one gig and the reason for that is
Theoretically you would put your 110 gig device like your na s into the router, and then you could have multiple
Gigabit devices accessing it at the same time
But none of them would be able to do more than that
But in our case we want to do full 10 gigabit or at least pretty close to it
Between two devices directly so we need something that has at least two
Network ports that are 10 gate. And in this case all the ports are 10 gig so we don't have to worry about it
There's the one SFP+, and then there's also the 4 that are Ethernet
So now we should have everything set up that
Supports 10 gig so we are gonna do some speed tests of course in this video
But first we want to figure out what we're dealing with and how the current
Wiring is setup and the way I measured it the CAT 5 cable in my walls is gonna be at least
40 feet that's like the minimum, it would be if it was up and directly down into
The connection now the thing about CAT 5e is it's actually rated for one gigabit up to 100 meters
300 feet around there
so
We're nowhere close to that distance so it might be a pretty good chance that we are gonna get a lot faster speeds than what?
It is rated for and that's what we want to find out and in the case of CAT 6
It's actually rated for 10 gigabit up to 55 meters
So that's about a hundred eighty feet so ideally you would use CAT 6
And then that's gonna be long enough for any moderate sized home
But CAT 5e is not rated for 10 gig at all
But we want to find out if it can do maybe those speeds anyway if it's short enough below the full gigabit
300 feet spec so considering I still had this box of 500 feet of CAT 6 Ethernet cable
I didn't want to put it to waste so what I did instead was make a super long cable
And then I could run that directly from the PC to the NAS without having to go through the walls
It's just running across the apartment that way we can compare what the CAT
5e speeds are versus what it would have been if we did wire it with CAT 6 and maybe it wouldn't even make a difference
depending on the hardware
limitations and read/write speeds of what we're using
so it might be the case where it doesn't even matter all right so now that we have that all out of the way we
Know the background we can finally get to the good part
You've been waiting for the speed tests the moment of truth so to do this
I'm using my computer, and I'm copying the files between the NAS and my SSD and the SSD has read and write speeds around
500 megabytes per second so we can figure out if that is going to be maxed out
Over the connection or not because the way I see it in most cases an SSD is gonna
Be really the fastest that any consumer computer is going to have
So it's not really gonna matter if you get the full 10 gig as long as we can get it fast enough
And we'll see so for these tests. We're going to be using a giant 34 gigabyte file
Just gonna copy them from one device to the other and look at the speeds very simple very practical real-life situation all right
So here's the first test and this is going to be computer-NAS and we can see here that it's pretty darn
consistent at
500 megabytes per second so either the read speed or the
Of the SSD or the write speed of the NAS one of those is limited at about 500
Megabytes per second and that's gonna be our baseline on the other hand going from the NAS to the computer
We can see it's around 400 megabytes per second, that's about 3.2
Gigabit so either the read speed of the NAS or the write speed of the SSD is limited around there
And we can use that as our baseline again
so now that we have that information we can go to the moment of truth and use the CAT 5e wiring built into the apartment and
actually find out would it have made a difference so first we're gonna copy from the
computer to the NAS and here we can see that it's still holding about
475 to 500 megabytes per second however
There's a little bit of extra fluctuation
It wasn't super consistent like CAT 6
But it still seems to be maxing out the hardware
So now going the other way from the NAS to the computer
It's again a little bit over 400 megabytes per second
So this shows that we're kind of getting the same speeds
We're using CAT 5e or CAT 6
At least at these relatively short distances that you might have in a home
So what can we kind of take away from this and
first of all it answers the question do you need to rewire your whole house if you want to do 10-gig and
The answer is probably.
Not you might not get the full 10 gig and it does seem like if you're gonna do CAT 5e you're probably gonna get some
more fluctuations, it's not going to be as consistent definitely from signal loss.
You're not having as much shielding as CAT 6, but it's still my work in my case
I at least did four times the speed up to four gigabyte and that was
even with hardware limited it probably would be.
Faster if it wasn't so practically speaking, if you just want faster than one gigabit, it would still be worth it in my opinion
depending on the distance of course to get 10 gigabit hardware because you'll probably get maybe around five gigabit speeds and
unless you have a very, very, fast SSD like an NVMe or something like an M.2
which is capable of much faster than even a SATA Drive, then you're probably gonna max it out. Even if you have CAT 5e.
Obviously your mileage may vary and it's gonna depend a lot on maybe, I don't know, interference around your house or something like that
but I would at least suggest if you are planning on doing CAT 6 upgrade.
Maybe just try it without it try. Just CAT 5e before doing anything you might find it might not be necessary.
So hopefully you found these results pretty interesting. I know I was actually surprised. I wasn't expecting to for it to do that.
Well you hear these ratings though
It can only do up to a gigabit and you think they're right
but it could probably do a lot of faster than they say so you guys can let us know what you think down the
comments
You know maybe are you gonna switch to ten gig now that you don't have to rewire everything?
Who knows let us know if you want to keep watching. I'll put some other videos right here
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I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Have a good one