Multigigabit networks are here to stay, the possibility of transmitting data at a speed greater than 1Gbps is nowadays necessary to transfer a large amount of GB of information in a few seconds. In recent months, home NAS servers with 2.5GbE Multigigabit ports are appearing, is it worth buying one of these servers with faster connectivity?
Gigabit Ethernet ports on NAS servers
Until a few months ago, NAS servers used to have one or more Gigabit Ethernet ports, that is, at 1Gbps. The internal software allowed to configure a link aggregation (Link Aggregation) to unite all the physical links in a single logical link, and achieve speeds of 2Gbps, 3Gbps or 4Gbps if we linked two, three or four ports to 1Gbps respectively. Although it is not necessary, it is highly recommended that to make link aggregation you use a manageable switch with this feature, to make use of the standard itself and that the performance and load balancing of the different physical links be perfect.
The negative part of this, is that we had to have several cables connected, and, in addition, it is possible that 2 ports at 1Gbps was not enough to squeeze the most of the NAS server hardware in question, having a significant bottleneck.
The 10Gbps ports of the NAS servers
The higher-end NAS servers have one or more 10Gbps ports, either with an RJ-45 connector or with an SFP + connector, but the price of these devices increased quite precisely due to this fact, since the network electronics at 10Gbps Today it is quite expensive compared to network electronics at Gigabit speeds. To take advantage of these speeds, we need to buy Cat6A or higher cabling, and above all, a switch with 10G ports, since if not, we could not take advantage of the maximum performance of 10G cards, and these types of devices (the switches) are quite expensive if we want it to be manageable.
There are some NAS servers that allow the incorporation of 10G cards via PCIe, this is a solution if we want to improve the connectivity of our NAS server without having to buy a new one, but you should bear in mind that the entire network should be at 10Gbps if we want to squeeze to its full potential.
In this article we have a complete tutorial on 10Gbps networks for home , where you can see all the recommendations that you must take into account to set up a high-performance network.
2.5GbE Multigigabit ports: halfway between Gigabit and 10G
NBASE-T multi-gigabit networks are the ideal solution for faster connectivity, without having to spend a lot of money. Thanks to the Multigigabit standard, we will be able to use «intermediate» speeds between 1Gbps and 10Gbps networks, specifically we will have speeds of 2.5GbE and 5GbE.
To enjoy Multigigabit networks the most important thing is to have a Multigigabit switch, or a router that supports these speeds, otherwise, we will not be able to take advantage of its full potential. However, compared to 10G networks, these devices are much more affordable, so you can transfer data at high speed without spending too much money.
In this article we have had the opportunity to thoroughly test the QNAP TS-253D NAS server, a team that has two 2.5GbE ports to squeeze its hardware to the maximum, and that is that in our tests we have achieved speeds of around 285MB / s in reading and writing using a single 2.5GbE link, more than double (approximately 120MB / s) that we would achieve in Gigabit Ethernet network environments and about 50MB / s than if we used Link Aggregation with two physical 1Gbps links.
Is 2.5GbE connectivity worth it?
Cheap Multigigabit switches and the popularization of 2.5GbE network cards are just around the corner, in fact, many mid-high-end motherboards already incorporate this type of connectivity to get the most out of the local home network. Therefore, of course it is worth buying a NAS with 2.5GbE ports today , to be ready in a few months to launch new Multigigabit equipment, since currently with hard drives in RAID and with SSD cache acceleration we have a big bottleneck in the local network.
