How long before we see affordable consumer 25 GbE switches?

[bugacha]

must make inspecting your banking statements of lost fortunes a rapid affair.

How much does it improve fortnite over 10gb?

What are your "lots of use cases" beyond bragging rights about bandwidth to the local exchange? You backing up the internet again?

$800 for a 25gbps switch and $50 for a dual 25gbps capable card doesnt warrant an inspection of a bank statement fella

I don't play fortnite, its boring. I play CoD or CS:GO

 

[bonox]

you're conflating internet and local network speed again. Plenty of us enthusiasts have high speed NICs to a NAS, most of us just point to point without a switch i'm guessing, because what's the point of using two ports out of dozens and I save electricity and money. And those who have a switch, have a used ex enterprise one, just like the NICs. They're plentiful because no-one wants them anymore, not because someone's decided to make new ones at low cost for home users. And where I come from, and I suspect most of the world, US$800 will buy a lot of food and rent well before joe average would consider paying that for a switch.

I've never disputed there's a use case for gigabyte per second networks at home - it's just not a CONSUMER use case. It's a business case that you've decided to use in a home environment.

But what's the consumer use case for 25gb internet that might justify a third port on a switch? Getting your apparently inflated bank statements just a bit faster? Who are you connecting to, that a consumer might expect to connect to, that not only supports that kind of bandwidth, but for which they have the gear in their NAS to support it as well? I've got 60 disks in 5 vdev's in mine and I still can't outpace the 10gig network it's connected to. And that's definitely NOT a consumer NAS or consumer use case.

You need to be careful on forums like this - you're talking about stuff with people who have similar interests who are definitely not average computer network users. Finding people who share your interests in dropping a grand on a switch and couple of network cards (plus many more thousands on a NAS that could actually handle that bandwidth) doesn't mean a great deal more people than that share the same interest and would outlay similar amounts.

 

[bugacha]

you're conflating internet and local network speed again. Plenty of us enthusiasts have high speed NICs to a NAS, most of us just point to point without a switch i'm guessing, because what's the point of using two ports out of dozens and I save electricity and money. And those who have a switch, have a used ex enterprise one, just like the NICs. They're plentiful because no-one wants them anymore, not because someone's decided to make new ones at low cost for home users. And where I come from, and I suspect most of the world, US$800 will buy a lot of food and rent well before joe average would consider paying that for a switch.

I've never disputed there's a use case for gigabyte per second networks at home - it's just not a CONSUMER use case. It's a business case that you've decided to use in a home environment.

But what's the consumer use case for 25gb internet that might justify a third port on a switch? Getting your apparently inflated bank statements just a bit faster? Who are you connecting to, that a consumer might expect to connect to, that not only supports that kind of bandwidth, but for which they have the gear in their NAS to support it as well? I've got 60 disks in 5 vdev's in mine and I still can't outpace the 10gig network it's connected to. And that's definitely NOT a consumer NAS or consumer use case.

You need to be careful on forums like this - you're talking about stuff with people who have similar interests who are definitely not average computer network users. Finding people who share your interests in dropping a grand on a switch and couple of network cards (plus many more thousands on a NAS that could actually handle that bandwidth) doesn't mean a great deal more people than that share the same interest and would outlay similar amounts.

I just gave you the use case that you outright ignored.

 

[bonox]

really? I guess two paragraphs about your PC to NAS using 25gb was just ignoring it somehow. This is why these kind of questions and arguments are titillating but ultimately useless, because it's rare people actually read responses, you cherry pick parts, or you flip/flop between things like lots of use cases for 25gb internet and then switch to a local network NAS as an example of one of those use cases without making a cogent argument.

Anyway, the answer to the original question is the 17th of February 2036, but they still won't be cheap because of a new world of tariffs making everything expensive again. It'll have a realtek chipset and overheat every 12.36 hours and randomly drop packets for the amusement of the chinese overlords.

 

[bugacha]

Because you response just ignores everything I said. You for some unknown reason claimed in capitals that its not a consumer use case.
Stop being ignorant and accept that people have different use-cases.

You're saying you have 60 disks, but at the same time you keep talking about my bank statements when I mention $800 25G switch. Stop being a hypocrite.

 

[i386]

what is a "consumer"?
what is a "business"?
what is workstation?
what is a server?
what is a pc?


(sorry I'm feeling a little bit cranky and don't understand all the analogies/posts on the last two pages )

 

[Oarman]

Just because you can't come up with a use case, there are no use cases of other people.

My main use case is post-processing photos/videos from NAS on my PC over the 25gbps network. I'm in into photography and I'm only shoot RAW, which results in 120-160Mb files. Previously I would download them to my PC to put on NVMe, work on them and copy to NAS for storage.
Obviously if NVMe fails, I loose everything. Buying redundant stuff for PC is silly as I already have a powerful NAS.
So today I work over 25gbsp network powered by $800 Mikrotik CRS510 and 2 x $50 Mellanox Connect-X 4-e Lx.

Hell, I even can work on my laptop via one of these devices today and be happy in Lightroom

I do this same thing. I dump the RAW files (enormous, thanks Sony) to laptop NVMe storage, process them, upload processed images online, and then back everything up to the NAS over Wifi in the background at a rate I don't care about. If I wanted to reprocess files from the NAS, I'd just copy them back locally in the same way.

The real speed limiter, the room for marginal gain in this workflow is generally the GPU capacity (and to a lesser degree CPU) to process the images, especially with all the AI NR stuff etc. If I wanted meaningful improvement, that is where I'd spend the money, and where the vast vast majority of photo people would spend the money. Beyond that the workflow improvement gains are largely in user interface (better monitor, keyboard/tablet etc.) Any modern PC's PCIE 4x4 m.2 drives are going to be orders of magnitude faster than networked storage, to where they simply aren't a factor in the total workflow. Flash storage capacity increases faster than RAW file size and I'd expect it to continue to do so; if I really thought the laptop NVME drive was going to die in the few hours the files were local, I could 1) cheaply add another M.2 drive for RAID1 2) just not delete the files from the camera cards until I was done. Online file upload speed is completely bottlenecked by the host.

Local transfer speed is simply not an issue. For the people that are shooting terabytes of images a day (or doing uncompressed video) they go to a flash-based DAS setup, which is worlds cheaper and easier than a 25gB network. Even if they use a NAS beefy enough to use in this manner, they'd be better off with a point-to-point link, since there's no third component in this workflow that can use this speed to justify a switched network.

Your use case example is working backwards, you built apparently a 25gB network and a NAS that would saturate a lesser connection, then tried to find uses for it. I am trying to convey that for certainly the photo normie and even out to the computer-nerdy semipro, if you didn't already have this hardware, this use case would make zero sense. You've spent 800+ dollars (and I'm sure far more on the NAS itself) and added a 24/7 30w+ power vampire and gained essentially zero meaningful workflow improvement. Most people would see that far better spent towards a better GPU or a new lens.

 

[Stephan]

sorry I'm feeling a little bit cranky and don't understand all the analogies/posts on the last two pages

What is a bikeshed topic? This will have 50 pages in no time. ;-)

What hasn't been mentioned yet that leader Apple in expensive consumer tech will either lead the way, or it is much less likely to happen.

 

[bugacha]

I do this same thing. I dump the RAW files (enormous, thanks Sony) to laptop NVMe storage, process them, upload processed images online, and then back everything up to the NAS over Wifi in the background at a rate I don't care about. If I wanted to reprocess files from the NAS, I'd just copy them back locally in the same way.

The real speed limiter, the room for marginal gain in this workflow is generally the GPU capacity (and to a lesser degree CPU) to process the images, especially with all the AI NR stuff etc. If I wanted meaningful improvement, that is where I'd spend the money, and where the vast vast majority of photo people would spend the money. Beyond that the workflow improvement gains are largely in user interface (better monitor, keyboard/tablet etc.) Any modern PC's PCIE 4x4 m.2 drives are going to be orders of magnitude faster than networked storage, to where they simply aren't a factor in the total workflow. Flash storage capacity increases faster than RAW file size and I'd expect it to continue to do so; if I really thought the laptop NVME drive was going to die in the few hours the files were local, I could 1) cheaply add another M.2 drive for RAID1 2) just not delete the files from the camera cards until I was done. Online file upload speed is completely bottlenecked by the host.

Local transfer speed is simply not an issue. For the people that are shooting terabytes of images a day (or doing uncompressed video) they go to a flash-based DAS setup, which is worlds cheaper and easier than a 25gB network. Even if they use a NAS beefy enough to use in this manner, they'd be better off with a point-to-point link, since there's no third component in this workflow that can use this speed to justify a switched network.

Your use case example is working backwards, you built apparently a 25gB network and a NAS that would saturate a lesser connection, then tried to find uses for it. I am trying to convey that for certainly the photo normie and even out to the computer-nerdy semipro, if you didn't already have this hardware, this use case would make zero sense. You've spent 800+ dollars (and I'm sure far more on the NAS itself) and added a 24/7 30w+ power vampire and gained essentially zero meaningful workflow improvement. Most people would see that far better spent towards a better GPU or a new lens.

I had been working like you described many years before I moved to 25gbps/NAS - its painful

What ends up happening is de-synchronization of local NVMe copy and NAS and its nightmare to reconcile later. I even created python scripts to try to keep 2 in-sync.

You obviously not a robot and don't post-process all photos at the moment you download them from the camera, you come and go and so on and so on. What I like to have is a single Lightroom catalog where all my photos are imported. Lightroom cache obviously sits on a local NVMe but when I download RAWs from the camera, they go straight-away to NAS and I import them over 25gbps network.

25gbps is 2.8GBps which is enough for me as import speed, this is a trade-off I'm willing to take to have a single source of truth for my photos with a proper data resilency.




All the rest stuff that you mentioned: GPU, CPUs - is completely orthogonal to this thread's discussion. I have all that and its great.

 

[pimposh]

Some numbers.

Cheapest known to me 25Gbps switch that actually CAN be put and used on desktop / home / without earplugs is QNAP QSW-M5216-1T.
Circa 1270$/1350€.

Quality 10Gbps desktop switch is (not mentioning Alixpres stuff here) 200$/180€.

Although comparison isn't completely fair (qty/ports) it shows clearly that it's loooong way to go before it fits into 'affordable' category.

 

[bugacha]

Some numbers.

Cheapest known to me 25Gbps switch that actually CAN be put and used on desktop / home / without earplugs is QNAP QSW-M5216-1T.
Circa 1270$/1350€.

Quality 10Gbps desktop switch is (not mentioning Alixpres stuff here) 200$/180€.

Although comparison isn't completely fair (qty/ports) it shows clearly that it's loooong way to go before it fits into 'affordable' category.

 

[pimposh]

Yes i am aware of it, got one. But can't be easily plugged into existing home network (100Mbps) + it's not that quiet as one mentioned earlier.
Nevertheless, it's 1000$ vs 200$ game.

 

[bugacha]

Yes i am aware of it, got one. But can't be easily plugged into existing home network (100Mbps) + it's not that quiet as one mentioned earlier.
Nevertheless, it's 1000$ vs 200$ game.

Fans can always be changed to Noctua.

No one said 25G is cheap today. But it might get as cheap as 10G today in 2 years.