Upgrading My Homelab to 10 Gbps

Table of Contents

• 1. Why 10 Gbps?
• 2. What I Was Running Before
• 3. The Hardware
  • 3.1. Switch
  • 3.2. NICs
  • 3.3. Cabling
  • 3.4. Cost
• 4. The Upgrade
• 5. Benchmarks
  • 5.1. Before
  • 5.2. After
• 6. Was It Worth It?

1. Why 10 Gbps?

The short answer: fiber finally became available at my current residence, so I jumped on it immediately.

The slightly longer answer is that I'd previously enjoyed proper 1 Gbps fiber, but for a while now I'd been stuck limping along on "1 Gbps" cable from Cox that, in reality, often crawled along at 100 Mbps regardless of what I did to fix it. New modem, new cables, different ports, calls to support - nothing mattered. It ran at whatever speed it felt like that day.

So when Google Fiber showed up in my neighborhood, I ordered the 8 Gbps package immediately. I'll…