Pfsense as a cheaper 10gbe router?
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I am interested in upgrading my FreeNAS system as well as my gaming system with a 10gbe card, however 10gbe routers are really expensive. A quick pcpartpicker list shows that I can actually build a cheaper 2x1gbe, 2x10gbe capable pfsense box for less than the price of netgear's cheapest 10gbe switch.
____PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/z8vTZ8
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/z8vTZ8/by_merchant/CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor ($109.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: ASRock H170M-ITX/ac Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard ($97.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: Avexir Core Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($41.88 @ OutletPC)
Storage: VisionTek GoDrive 60GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($38.02 @ Amazon)
Case: Silverstone Sugo SG13B Mini ITX Tower Case ($45.98 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Silverstone 300W 80+ Bronze Certified SFX Power Supply ($48.49 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $382.34
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-12-23 10:37 EST-0500____I would get an intel x540 t2 10gbe NIC from ebay to complete the system. 1 gbe port will be used as a wan port (for my 1gbps internet connection ;)) and the other one would be used to connect to a gigabit switch meant for the rest of my devices. Does anybody know if this would setup would be powerful enough for me to get ~500mBps from my nas to my gaming pc and how large would the performance hit from bridging the 2 10gbe ports together be? Not too sure if I should go down the pfsense route or whether to just spend the extra cash to get netgear's 10gbe switch.
I am aware that netgear's switch provides more 10gbe ports/$ but it is highly unlikely that I will need more than 2, so this will not really be affecting my decision.
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I am answering a slightly different question, leaving the original one open:
Do you need 10GBit/s for a NAS?
Since.. typically, you do not. If you have magnetic drives it probably does not make sense at all. Theoretically, you can get more than the ~100MB/s you can get via 1GBit/s LAN. In practice though, you will hardly ever get it, since most IO will be random and the drives will limit you.
If you put SSDs into the NAS - which would be a waste I think - you will still not get as good IOPS as when you have the SSDs locally. Those could fill a 10GBit/s line to a reasonable degree, but for smaller files you will probably also notice a little bit of the network latency, which will render the SSDs a little less responsive.
So: if you have magnetic drives, 1GBit/s should be enough. If you want to buy SSDs, putting them locally will make you more happy.
As for pfSense, I have no clue of the CPU requirements, but for simple routing you might get away, whereas VPN and filtering probably is not possible anymore at all (but you also do not want the latter). You could try to measure CPU load and latencies with 1GBit/s and then scale up.
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have you considered just direct-connecting the two 10G devices?
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Since.. typically, you do not. If you have magnetic drives it probably does not make sense at all. Theoretically, you can get more than the ~100MB/s you can get via 1GBit/s LAN.
Gigabit interfaces have since long been the NAS performance bottleneck and better sub $600 NASes today are often equipped with 4 gigabit interfaces that already a 4 disk RAID 5 with modern magnetic disks will fill. But it requires a managed switch, port trunking and at least four concurrent clients to get there. With 10 Gbit interfaces, a single client could move the bottleneck from the LAN to where we expect it to be, the disk array or more likely the client itself. Of course it won't be 10 Gbit/sec with mechanically rotating disks in the NAS but with reasonably up to date hardware it would easily be multi gigabit.
10 Gigabit interfaces are now available as standard in sub $1000 NASes. Yes the performance testing was done with SSDs but also with 8 magnetic disks in RAID 6 or RAID 10 (I wouldn't recommend using RAID 5 with 8 disks but that would be even faster) the performance should be way beyond gigabit.
In practice though, you will hardly ever get it, since most IO will be random and the drives will limit you.
Why would it be random? In home applications the main use is usually file copying, which is as sequential as it gets.
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Do you need 10GBit/s for a NAS?
Since.. typically, you do not. If you have magnetic drives it probably does not make sense at all. Theoretically, you can get more than the ~100MB/s you can get via 1GBit/s LAN. In practice though, you will hardly ever get it, since most IO will be random and the drives will limit you.
I have a hdd raid 10 array that should be capable of ~250mBps and I have plans to add more hdds to the system to allow the system to be able to achieve ~500mBps, so yeah I would need the extra bandwidth provided by the 10gbe nics. @P3R:
In practice though, you will hardly ever get it, since most IO will be random and the drives will limit you.
Why would it be random? In home applications the main use is usually file copying, which is as sequential as it gets.
And that too, most of my use case would be file copying and loading games from the nas.
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have you considered just direct-connecting the two 10G devices?
I would if I could, but my gaming pc is in my room while the nas is in another room, and there is only 1 ethernet port (cabled with cat6a cables so it can scale up to 10gbps) linking the two rooms - I am unable to add another ethernet port linking the 2 rooms cause it will require me to do some major renovation works. If I were to direct connect I would not have any internet access on my computer and would not have another ethernet port to provide the internet connection.
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have you considered just direct-connecting the two 10G devices?
I would if I could, but my gaming pc is in my room while the nas is in another room, and there is only 1 ethernet port (cabled with cat6a cables so it can scale up to 10gbps) linking the two rooms - I am unable to add another ethernet port linking the 2 rooms cause it will require me to do some major renovation works. If I were to direct connect I would not have any internet access on my computer and would not have another ethernet port to provide the internet connection.
Rather than throwing another machine into the mix, I'd run the gaming PC to the NAS, use the NAS as the bridge. You'll get whatever bandwidth to the NAS that it's capable of supporting, and the traffic going through the NAS to the rest of the LAN/WAN is basically negligable.