The point of a 10G NIC is to be 10x faster than a 1G NIC. Most 10G NIC’s only work at 1G and 10G, they do not do the new 2.5G or 5G, for that you need a newer 10G NIC that will use these lower speeds which in terms makes no sense because you can just get a 2.5G or 5G NIC instead. You confuse your internet connection with your local network. Your local network can run at 10G while your internet runs perfectly fine at 1G, the other way around the same. If you have a 10G internet connection you need a 10G local network to actually make use of that 10G internet connection. If you have a 1G internet connection, the only reason to have a 10G local network, is because you have lots of data that you regularly move around, and you think 125MB/s is too slow. Other than that, there is no need for 10G in any home network.

LAN traffic not WAN. So yes your internet is limiting but ONLY to the internet. Otherwise a workstation to a NAS/server could be up to 10x faster

It’s mostly for internal stuff with a NAS. Uploading and downloading files off a NAS or streaming 4K content can all benefit from 10G

It’s useful for local transfer between computer like NAS. You do need to upgrade other equipment to 10G as well.

For the LAN, faster local transfer if you use huge file or if you have a lot of computers accessing your server.

It’s also useful if you live in Europe since a lot of country has 10Gbps as long as you have access to fiber since half a decade now (the krone world wide being Switzerland with a 25Gbps home offer on dedicated fiber).

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In your case, router will be the bottleneck so not worth as long as the router isn’t upgraded, you’re always tied to the slowest part.

uhhhh…

to get 10G speeds on your network!

It makes handling the TBs of data on my NAS way nicer.

Router doesn’t need to be 10G. Get a 10GB switch to connect your 2.5 mobo to your NAS on 10GB.

Local transfers.

I have my PC connected to my NAS directly, with only NIC - Cable - NIC, and it helps with large transfers.

But honestly I only did it because I moved my drives from my PC to the NAS, and did not want to downgrade from the SATA SSD speeds.

Network traffic is reduced to the speed of the slowest component along the journey.

10G is expensive and often irrelevant. You need SSD to SSD transfers and / or lots of simultaneous other transfers to use up all that bandwidth.

If you don’t do that much then 10G is not worth the high entry price at the moment. Seems like a while until it might be, also.

2.5G seems a better value target to aim for but many people argue that isn’t worth it either yet.

On prosumer side, it allows for higher LAN transfer speeds and also allow for higher WAN speeds (such as 2.5Gb) and future proofing. They are common in the enterprise environment when one device aggregates the data from many other devices.

From the sounds of it, you are using an AIO networking device, which combines routing, switching, and modem functions all in one. So yes, you are correct. Internet speeds AND local speeds between devices would be throttled to 1G.

If you want to make the switch to a full 10G network, which is really nice for up to 10Gbps internet and large local transfers, it’d be best to build a custom pfsense or opnsense router with 10G SFP+ NICs. Also, to “send out that speed” to all other devices locally, it’d be best to get a 10G SFP+ switch so that the router doesn’t do all the work. Personally, I have an 8 port Mikrotik SFP+ switch which works great for me.

Main point is, with a 10G network setup, you can get SSD speeds over the network for large file transfers like 4k movies if you want to upload to a media server. 10Gb/s (gigabits per second), or 1.25GB/s (gigabytes per second) is more than double 2x what most SATA SSDs get around 500MB/s. So you can even get PCIE 3.0 NVME speeds over the network, which is pretty cool.

Note: Many 10G nics aren’t capable of 2.5G and will downgrade to simple gigabit with devices (including switches) that are 2.5G.

The point of 10G nics is faster data transfers that most home networks don’t really need or noticeably benefit from, although during something like a full backup/restore to an NAS on your home network you might benefit.

In 99% of cases, 10G makes no sense in home servers.

Because in 99% of cases “homes” typically have predominantly 1G networking and Wifi as the “Access network” with only a handful of users on it, usually not at the same time.

To upgrade this “1G” standard home network to anything faster will require the infrastructure be made available for higher speeds AND that the client devices are capable of taking advantage of it.

Concretely speaking, you will need to introduce a “switch” with higher speeds as well as upgrading the NIC in any currently 1G devices to the faster speed as well.

Practically and budget consciously, 2.5Gb is the present day sweet spot for consumer/pro-sumer “home” networking. It is relatively cheap, compared to 10G which “can” require a rewire if the CAT5e is substandard.

I have a single 10G link. It goes between two 1G + 2.5Gb switches. I used a simple “DAC” copper link between them.

I have 2 additional 10G ports, so I could link the two Proxmox servers which would take advantage of that speed during migrations and backups, but nothing else on the network is 10G capable or even close to needing to be 10G capable.

10G hardware typically costs a lot more to run. A 10G port might consume twice the power for the same data, even if it’s never hit more than 900mbit/s.

Use-cases which could justify a house-wide 10G upgrade might be, video streaming. I don’t mean playing a remote MP4 off the NAS via plex. I mean real time video streaming, such as lossless video conferencing, remote desktop with full 4K 60FPS playback capabilities. HDMI over Ethernet and so forth. Live uncompressed security camera footage etc. Remote gaming, ie. having a single beast of a gaming server with enough bandwidth to stream 2 clients at 60FPS. More bandwidth = less compression = less CPU = less packetisation delay = less latency = better gaming.