Can You Do 10 Gigabit Over Regular Cat 5e Ethernet? (The Results Will Shock You)
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- Опубликовано: 28 авг 2024
- Do you REALLY need to upgrade your cabling to get 10 Gigabit LAN?
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I recently bought a bunch of Cat 6 cabling and tools to rewire my place with 10 gigabit. But soon discovered that would be impossible, and I would have to live with the existing Cat 5e. But would that be good enough? Both Cat 5e and Cat 6 use the same RJ45 connector and cable pairs, they are just constructed differently. So how fast CAN you get with Cat 5e, and would it still allow me to get multiple-gigabit speeds without doing anything?
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⇨ / thiojoe
⇨ / thiojoe
⇨ / thiojoetv
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Cable: Cat6 10Gb
PC: Gigabit Ethernet
Router: 100 Meg Ethernet
ISP: 5 Mbps
Outstanding setup! Hahahahahaha
human brain: 10 kbps
@@JC.72human brain understanding what's coming in: 10 bit/s
When I first started working in IT, my first job was working at a business with only dual T1 lines for their internet connection and an RV042 VPN router. SOOOOOOOOOOOO fucking slow.....
Here at a venue in London, we are running 1Gb *internet* dude.
If you look at what it takes to move 4k video around in realtime, you will find that you need *bundles* of 10GbE.
The name for the standard ethernet plugs is RJ45.
Thank you, weird Linus :)
Deformed Linus
Deep fake Linus.
what? lol
Totally choked on this video bc I thought it was Linus
LOLOL
The reason for the shielding in the cable is not necessarily for outside interference, it's for reducing crosstalk between the cables inside the wire caused by electromagnetic fields generated by the current running through the wire. Running at higher frequencies (200mhz vs 750mhz) causes more cross talk, resulting in worse data integrity
You also have to take into consideration that such standards are also taking into consideration how much shielding is needed when a lot of such cables are squeezed into a cable canal for dozens of meters, to avoid crosstalk and have the right impedance. Basically, for a worst case scenario. At a home such worst cases almost never occur so you'd certainly have more slack with a cat 5e cable alone.
True, I will be adding a cable trunk of at least seven cables (for switch port replication), but ultimately it will probably end up as ten or more in the end. So I'm going with Cat 6A, shielded.
I like these newer type of videos where ThioJoe is honest, instead of Pranking people. Seems like he is growing up now. Also, I wish he'd done RAM to RAM, then we would know actual max speed.
I have a 100' run of 20 year old solid copper core CAT 5 (note not even CAT 5e and yes it is from 1999), the same Asus 10g NICs, and the 8 port version of that switch (XS708E) and I get between 766 and 852 MB/s.
10 Gigabit allows you to transfer memes at warp speed
ThioJoe i beat you to comment
What about the dankest?
(THE YEAR IS 2050) my grandma: only 10 gigabits, lol i have 100 TERABITS
shit
Memes are d0pe
Great video, I switched to 10G last month, works fine on my 5e home network at full speed. Worth noting that if you have high quality 5e (In my case Molex Powercat) it will usually be overspecified to begin with which helps your chances of having it work. By contrast you'll never get 10G using those fake fake Cat6/7 flat cables off Amazon lol.
cat 5e can only do 5 gigabit, your cable is probably fried by now
just upgrade to cat 6 it isn’t expensive and it actually supports 10 gigabit
@@Jon844W Wow, how wrong can you get lol. Okay firstly you can't "fry" a cable with ethernet, it all uses the same voltage right back to the old 10 Mbit standard. Secondly when you say Cat5e can "only do" 5 Gbit what you're actually referring to is that manufacturers only certify it to do 5G at it's max distance of 100 meters, this does not mean that it can't do 10G over shorted distances, the Cat5e in my house is rated for 10G up to 45 meters and none of the cabling in my house is that long. Thirdly, rewiring a house is actually expensive, and add to that the Cat6 you recommend is only rated for 10G up to 55 meters anyway (in order to be fully compliant for 10G up to 100M you need Cat6A not Cat6). Lastly you could have learnt quite a bit of this simply from reading my original comment :P
@@llynellyn did I ask
@@Jon844W Go away from computers and networking cause you are as dumb as a brick.
Sorry but this video has so many problems..
- You cannot test 10 Gbps if your drives are only capable of write speeds at 400-500MB/s. That's barely hitting 4 Gbps.
- SFP+ "is" still Ethernet. The connector type has nothing to do with the protocol and standard used in the communication.
- You were peaking at around 4Gbps from which we cannot tell if you were having 10 Gbps on cat 5e or just 5Gbps - 802.3bz Ethernet which was specifically designed for this.
- Well this one is not technical but on the side note.. this is the first video I've seen on this channel and I constantly had the feeling you wanted to make it long even though it contained information for like a 5 minute video.. the rest is just talk without much information. I was like when you will actually start doing something.
Maybe a little more research would've made this video much better.
Massive Fail!
Who cares about the drives, the download speed shouldn't be affected. The files are caches to the RAM.
I came here to say exactly this, thank you for pointing out all the things that made me cringe in this video! Good day sir.
Also, I wouldn't trust Windows measurement on speed. These are the same people who stated a 3MB file could take 12 days to download then 13 seconds. I found the most accurate way to calculate speed of network is using wireshark and take the size of file, and divide by the difference in time of the starting and ending packet. The limitations on Cat 5E would be noise on the line, thus why CAT 6 has the annoying plastic cross divider. For him to accurately do this, he would need stripped raided 4 ssd on both the desktop and NAS. He would probably be better suited with an OS will less protocol overhead than Windows as well. This video ultimately highlighted what technologies have been saying for years, your limitation is the hard drive read/write speed.
R/woooossshhh
I worked at Teranetcs, PLX and Aquantia pioneering 10GBase-T and NBase-T. 10G will work up to ~55 meters with CAT5E and CAT6... for 100 meters you will need CAT6A or CAT7. It is the PHY layer and regardless of the cable, if you get a link it will run at line rate (10G, 5G, 2.5G, 1G, 100M). However, with bad/long cables or with many connectors (spec is up to 4) you will see the BER (bit error rate) increase. By spec you are allowed about one error every 100 seconds. But if you see that it's really rare and bad... If you want to test it hard use longer cables and wrap 6 around 1 cable all with active traffic...
Makers of the spec said an analogy of the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the worst cable length, connector model, and noise (cross talk + alien cross talk) is equivalent to trying to catch a frisby during an atomic bomb explosion. Hats of to all the engineers and companies that worked on 10GBase-T. More than half never even could get it to work.
Yeah...cat 5e and cat6 are very similar, I'm surprised they didn't make the number jump up to 6 with cat6a and make cat6 like, cat5h or something.
A lot depends on how well the CAT 5 was installed. No kinks, no staples, properly punched down on the wall jacks and the quality of the cable. Factory ends on the cables connecting each device are also preferred over hand crimped ends. Also your computer will have a big affect on data transfer speed. The faster the hard drive and the more RAM your computer has, the faster your data rate will be. And some Antivirus programs scan files as you copy them and that can affect your speeds.
What you are most likely seeing here is performance within the 2.5 - 5Gbps spectrum. Cat5e and Cat6 were recently re-certified for the NBASE-T and MGBASE-T standards allowing for 2.5 Gbit/s over Cat5e and 5 Gbit/s over Cat6. Both the Asus XG-C100C network card and Netgear ProSafe XS505M switch are capable of these standards which is why you are seeing file transfers between 320 - 480Mbps. Also, remember to enable Jumbo Frames (up to 9000 MTU) if your network card, switch and NAS support it.
Excellent practical approach to things. I have been an electrical engineer for over 50 years now and been involved in the creation of several IEEE/ANSI standards. A new standard definitely is sausage making. What the standard finally says is always a huge compromise among practical engineering, theoretical considerations. and commercial/marketing interests.
When is linus coming over to give you 100000TB of storage?
results shocked me
THAT'S WHAT I SAID
Als ob du auch hier 😂👍
The reason some switches only have 1-2 SFP+ ports is to uplink to another switch.
I do structured cable for a living I install a lot of network cable however I do it in commercial and Industrial applications. Ethernet is 300 feet with patch cords 328 ft. Most people forget about that part so if you're not using patch cords you can exceed that 300 ft. limit up to 328 ft. Also keep in mind that one thing that may have affected the test on the 5e cabling in the walls is the jacks and Patch panels whenever you're using a RJ45 connector and a jack and Patch cords you will have more loss due to the connection points then. simply using a cat 6 patch cord made of solid wire makes a difference. because most patch cords you bye are made from Stranded cable which actually has a higher amount of loss than solid wire but are more suitable for patch cords because they are more flexible in the wire is less likely to break. One thing that may help is by replacing the jacks and Patch panels and Patch cords with Cat6 components and leaving the wire in the walls.
Some manufacturers have cable that will exceed those limits there's a company called ber-tek that makes a Cat6 cable that has a maximum length of 344 ft. With a maximum overall length of 372 ft. This is a expensive high-end cable. Also most people do not realize there are different grades of Cat6 in the industry. The main application for Cat6 cabling is poe. The gauge of the wire is a half a gauge larger then 5e or 23 in a half. 5e is 23 gauge wire. Cat 3 wire which is regular phone UTP cable is 24 gauge So it can carry more power. They will soon be approving if they have not already 60 in 100 watt power over ethernet. Imagine being able to charge your laptop simply using the ethernet port. The main problem with running 10 gigabit over 5e cable or Cat6 cable is what we in the industry call alien crosstalk. Which occurs when you have a large number of cables that come together at a point and run for a distance together that are all different lengths which creates amplitude differences which can create interference from an adjacent cable due to amplitude differences. So to fix this problem there is a cable called cat6a which will allow for 10 gig up to 300 feet with cat6a patch cords 328 ft. And if you're not exceeding these long distances and do not have a lot of cabling in your house you will probably be okay with a 5e cabling or a 6 cable. Which the test have pretty much showing that you've done Because alien crosstalk occurs under certain conditions that usually do not happen with a small number of cables that are relatively short in length. One other thing to keep in mind 10 base t 100 base t 1000 base t or 10g base T are methods of transmitting across ethernet and they operate within certain parameters which means it doesn't matter if you're using the full capacity or not the cable has to be Suited for the standard you're trying to send across it.
I came to the same conclusion a few years ago that it was not worth my while ripping out the cat5e in order to replace with cat6 as nothing ran fast enough to warrant it, perhaps in a graphics office with several computers sharing a switch but for the home no.
Amen to that ... CAT5E is the best for the $$ and still is today. Heck streaming 2160P does not take 100M ... maybe 25M at most. But standard CAT5 you may have an issue streaming 2160P because its only rated at 10M ...
My entire house is CAT5E, even out to my shed about 150 FT away is CAT5E ...
Ethernet is a communication standard not a connector type. Your SFP+ cable and your traditional networking cables are both use the Ethernet standard. The traditional "phone jack" style connector is called RJ45 (registered jack 45) in contrast to the SFP+ connector. Generally, I like what you are doing. You spread knowledge and interest in technology to a younger generation. Please take the time to understand the concepts and technologies before teaching them to others. I have several other gripes like your use of "router" as an umbrella term.
You mean 8P8C? RJ45 has a tab that keys it.
I agree with you. LTP does the same thing.
no traditional phone line is RJ11
Did you really just call a Phone Jack RJ45.....
Phone jack is rj 11.
Nice experiment :)
If I was getting cabling done for anywhere I might want to live in, I'd still get Cat 7 cables laid just to be thorough. It's not *that* much more expensive and might save me a lot of frustration in the future, especially when we move beyond 10Gbit.
Be quite a while before you get over 10Gbit. And, need for it will be very small.
How hard are those cat 7 to bend?
I’m already shocked so this will be interesting.
3 years later and I'm still shocked by the results!
1 gigabit for home use is by far more than enough for a long time to come. With 1 gigabit you can do 40 simultaneous streams of 4K video or 10 of 8K video. Basically a consumer in home doesn't need more. 10 Gigabit is pointless in home unless you're a professional editing tons of uncompressed 4K or 8K video and transferring the files back and forth between your NAS or server. Also it's unlikely any ISP will offer 10 gigabit or 40 gigabit in residential areas in the next 20 years.
If you run shielded cat5x and shielded 6x you'll notice they're identical in speed transfers. Cat6/7 is very hard to work with and a lot of bulk cable comes with a nylon/plastic cross-hammock so you don't stretch the pairs in the field. Try crimping those things down a few times!
In our family house i ran mixed cabling (Cat5E and Cat6A), i can confirm the latter is much more pain in the *ss installing as bulky, very rigid and higher turn radius, takes about double time both for passing the cables into the sheaths and crimping the keystones terminations at the wall sockets and patch panel.
You are using multigig switch with multigig NIC over cat5e which is the whole purpose of 802.3bz standard. The 2006 standard 802.3an require higher rates cables and plugs. Are you sure you are not connected at 5gbps over the cat5e cables?
You should have tested network performance, like packet loss, while the transfers were ongoing. 400 MB/s is cool and all, but if it causes 10% packet loss on other, simultaneous traffic on Cat.5e, then Cat.6 would still be totally worth installing.
Tip for anyone installing cables. Always install the best cables you can at the time. I wouldn't go any less than cat 6a at this point. I have now even installed my first fiber cable at home as you never know whats coming next.
Also, in the past I have had no trouble with second hand server grade 10 gig Intel NICs. You may need to play with the drivers more but you may get them cheaper or even a 2 port one.
Or just run conduit through inaccessible walls\areas
remember when this guy used to title his videos "HOW TO TURN YOUR PS3 INTO A PS4!!"
lmfaoooo
I suggest a remake, taking the storage devices out of the picture. Try using Lanbench or iPerf for a realistic evaluation of network link speeds. No need to cloud the issue with disk drive limitations which are going to be the same regardless even if they're in the same box.
Your video exactly covered my question, because I get 10Gbit connection from my ISP and (probably) Cat5e ethernet in my walls.
I'm shocked.. And it's your fault
The results shocked me
Zigafide Me too
Zigafide pp
Ok LL LL LLknb on pk to p
Ok LL LL LLknb on pk to p
I'm just I'll like know
Nice video. Would you be willing to re-test the full speeds using a RAM drive on 2 different systems? It would be cool to see the maximum potential.
Sfp+ is actually a lot more common because they draw less power so in huge data centres that all adds up. Also the reason why spf+ cards are slightly cheaper than there 10gbaset counterparts. Just because something isn’t common to you doesn’t mean it’s less common. 👍🏽
any 8-wire TP cable can do any speed - it just depends on how short the distance or how high the construction quality.
So yea - cat 5e can work ok for shorter distances of 10Gbit.
Of important note - you don't need a router (the most expensive part of any 10Gbit setup) if all you need is a fast link between your NAS and your main computer.
It works fine to direct-link 2 computers. (adding an override to the hosts file in windows may be needed to force the 10Gbit link to be favored for the NAS-PC route rather than your regular 1Gbit connection if that also connects to your NAS)
using SFP+ network cards secondhand from ebay you can get away with paying very little for the whole setup - depending on the cable length you need it can be cheaper than a single RJ-45 ethernet NIC. I'm not saying I necessarily recommend this for most users, but for true nerds on a budget? sure...
Very informative, I was looking at doing 10 gig for a future home server project, now it's looking more enticing.
Sounds like you are using a SATA SSD, not NVMe
You covered all the bases, thought of everything and all the information you'd want to know in order to present to us an amazing, and informative, presentation. Well done! You helped me out tremendously!
He didnt even saturate 10Gbits...
My house is so old it doesn't even have Ethernet in the walls, just 240 volt power
And my isp only provides my area with 40 Mbps
Kryštof Píštěk i get 4
I get 8 mbps
I get 120 volts and ~25 mbps.
Ilane Tech Reviews I get 4 mbps
I can't believe people are dissing this guy? He's just pointing out that likely the hardware is the limit (outside of the network).
@ThioJoe, thanks for posting and sharing this. Of all the tech stuff I have purchased over the last 15 years of my life, my NAS and my 1Gigabit Switch are the oldest and arguably best tech investments I made when I was younger, but in 20/20 hindsight, I rarely pushed my network to its max 1Gigabit speed. My advice to you is to save your money.
Cat 5e can run 10Gb at up to 10 meters about 30 ft. Problem with it is cost of a switch is high. If you are doing a true SAN you can get a fiber connection card and if under 9 meters fiber you do not need the extra connectors. You are actually negotiated at 10Gbs, but your actual transfers are around 6 to 8Gb. At 40 meters you will not get consistant transfers at 10Gb.
Hey, you made impossible quite possible. By the way, can you make a video on Synology NAS describing about its different editions and features.
okay so if you having issues getting to wires that are ran through a wall the best way to change out a wire is to to take the existing wire thats in the wall attach one end to to a end of what you are trying to replace it with something like tape then from the other end of the ran wire just pull it through till you get to the change over of cables. tbh when wiring a house if i see pre existing ran wires its like Christmas for me because it makes things so so easy
Make sure your 5e has all 4 pairs before you get mad at Joe for your contractor being cheap.
why would it NOT have all 4 pairs ..??
@@ACommenterOnRUclips Since it only uses 2 pairs there are some shit companies that make it with just the 2. People try and save a buck on it not understanding how important the 2 dead sets are for insulation
1st off the 2 dead pairs are NOT for insulation because you cant insulate 2 pairs with 2 other pairs when they are twisted in the same fashion. It does not work that way.
The only way to insulate those 2 pairs is to put a shield around the bundle of 2 pairs just as how CAT6A is done.
Those extra 2 pairs were put for 3 reasons:
1 was to future proof for GigaBit transmission (even though Gigabit still works on 2 pairs)
2 they were also put there so that you could get 2 internet lines on the same cable.
3 they were put there for POE, 2 pairs for the data and the other 2 pairs were put there to carry the power to the camera
So if you think those other 2 pairs were put there to provide insulation, i would like to see HOW that is possible ... UNLESS ... the plan was insulation and it FAILED (expected to happen) so they came out with CAT6A which had actual insulation which WORKS ...
@@ACommenterOnRUclips "Noise" insulation. And no it doesn't really work.
Nice! Very sensible real-world testing. Most of my RAW files are 90MB+ and I could really use the added speed.
5:22 "current wiring..." lol... i laugh every time ...
Use a program called soft perfect ram disk it treats your ram like a temporary hard disk so you can get the full potential of your 10 gb/s speed
I did some speed tests today, I'm doing 1GByte/sec transfer speed (10Gbps) from Nvme to Nvme through a "Mikrotik RJ45 10GB Switch" using 10 years old Cat 5e cables.
So there is no way I'll be buying expensive Cat6 cables in a near future. Thanks for the video!
I successfully have 1Gb speeds over cat5 non E cable at a distance of 30-40ft. Will be trying 10Gb soon.
Now it is informative and practical.
I like this kind of video
Wow it's Insane!! I want it now!!!
Also I love your channel.Full of tech knowledge
Here's something to think about. Interference can be a problem in older homes. If your wiring internet into your home, just bite the bullet and put in the best Ethernet cable of the time. Right now in 2020 cat7 is the best you can get. Maybe in the future we'll have cat8 or even cat10. But if you don't want to spend the money for the best, one thing to consider is the age of your home. If your house was built in the 50's or 60's, the house wiring can cause problems if it's still using older electrical wiring since grounding wasn't always required and especially if your home still uses that old knob and tube wiring. The Ethernet cables with the better shielding might be best. My house was built in 1916 and had electric added later on. I use the better shielded Ethernet cables because of this. If your in a newer home, electrical interference might not be as bad.
To get 10 Gigabit you need Cat 6 ? WAIT 6 cats ? I have already two of them but they don't like LAN cables. How can I fix this issue ?
(By The Way The Results Shocked Me)
Just add one dog and you should be fine.
Ok thanks I will try to get a hot dog
On our farm we had 6 cats, but never 10Gbit?
But... there are non-standard and other things you can try if you have Cat5e to get you there. Most people say 45 feet is the maximum distance, but it depends on the quality of the Cat5e and the power at each end. Old Cat5e may be limited to 10m or even much less. For a while there were some Cat5e cables that were rated at higher frequencies and those may work fine at longer distances. If your house has Cat5e, and it connects but is slow because of dropped packets, rather than tear holes in your house or apartment, you could try shortening the cables as much as possible and use shielded connectors on the ends. This might also buy you a little more distance, and is relatively cheap. Then on the little more expensive side, you could try a 5 port switch at one or each end of the cable with high power active SFP+ transceivers. So here are some 10gbit considerations I have run into. I had a home router with a 10Gbit SFP port that had a limited spec to low power SFP+ direct attach or optical transceivers and would overheat with active SFP+ 10Gbase-t transceivers. So I used a passive direct attach cable for 3 feet and took it to a switch designed for active SFP (I used Mikrotik CRS-305’s, $140), then connected the active ports through 10gbase-t RJ-45 ethernet, since the Synology didn’t have SFP+. I noted the standard 10Gbase-t ports on the Synology didn’t get anywhere near as hot as SFP+ 10Gbqse-t transceivers. You can theoretically go 33 feet with passive direct-attach. The active SFP+ transceivers for 10Gbase-T get very hot to the touch, and the switches are heat-sink’d to an aluminum chassis so they get very warm.. For really long distances > 328 feet with cat6a, you can use optical transceivers, which have lower latency, or if going into more Cat5e cable after a long run, you may need another switch to use as a repeater which can boost the signal again (you will need a power connection for each switch). With each switch, you (theoretically) gain an additional 328 feet with Cat 6 cable. Your mileage will definitely vary using Cat5e this way, but you may gain an additional 50 feet (or more) this way if the S/N is acceptable.
Yes. Short runs only (in cabinet patching in my case). It worked fine.
I have done 10gbit runs in a DC using cat5e. Cat5e costs pence and any numpty with a punch down tool and a crimp can terminate it. Fiber costs a fortune, is a pita to terminate without faff and requires actual network engineers to do so.
This is exactly what I wanted to know.
I just renovated my house, pulling cable everywhere and now, a few months later I'm sitting with a 10Gbit capable computer.
It'll be a while till I use more than Gigabit because of the router, but I actually am getting 600/600mbit net soon. This means Gigabit wouldn't quite cut it even if I got a new router.
This isn't completely surprising. Ethernet has something like a 10^-13 error rate. I _think_ this means that, on average, you'll only get a single bit error when sending around a terabyte of data. So everything is very highly engineered to produce these very low error rates, and thus the length limitations and need for better cable becomes important.
Using wire that's not up to spec likely just means you'll increase the error rate above 10^-13. For a home environment, that's likely fine in most cases.
Depending on how _much_ this increases, you could get some increased latency, and jitter when you have to re-transmit packets though. This could be anywhere from significantly noticeable, to practically immeasurable and you'd never notice.
It's be interesting to see information from your raw ethernet card interface about how many errors it detected, and had to re-transmit. Ethernet has error detection built into the protocol, so errors shoud be detected at the physical interface level.
You could've run some tests using a RAM-DISK. Good info, thanks.
Yes, that'd give more accurate info and provide the max speed. But, yes, I said same thing.
thanks, I actually tried this and it worked. I just got 9gbps internet and my place is wired with cat5e, I was about to rewire my office with cat8 but decided to test it. Im able to get full 10gbps down/up very consistent. Im guessing the cable is only about 60-80ft long, I also compared it to cat8, and its exactly the same performance.
What is the connection from your Synology NAS to the Switch? Do you get additional card for the NAS to get 10G cat-6?
Cat 5e should work with 10 gig up to 20 or 30 meters, Cat 6 to 50 and Cat6A to full lenght of 100 meters.
Cat5e (100-350mhz) is good enough for 5 gbps over a short run but CAT6 is the minimum for 10gbps. This guy use a NbaseT connection, not 10GBaseT.
Actually I expected these results.
The network cables doesn't have active components (on the other hand the SFP one does, i think), they're just copper wires, so they don't have something like a speed limiter according each CAT
Great vid!
Rewire or new install, go agead with Cat8 and GG45 connectors. Be future-proof.
Awsm vid Thio. Pls keep doing more. And thx for the tips btw dude rly appreciate it!
Thio! This is brilliant you’re proving what I suspected but never got round to personally test out. I have been installing structured cables such as CAT5e, CAT6 and CAT6a for 20+ years and this just confirms what I have suspected all along. CAT5e is still capable providing the cable length is not too great. That the bottleneck is hardly ever going to be the CAT5E, CAT6 or CAT6a it’s going to be the network cards, switches, read/write speeds of drives and usb connections etc. Thanks for the upload. Just out of interest have you tried this test using greater cable lengths than 15m for CAT5E and CAT6? It would be interesting to know at what distance the speed starts to really drop off.
you could build 10gb switch yourself just and the best thing is that ebay 10gbe and for that matter 40gbe infiniband nics are cheap af and you can make it with vyos
Thanks a lot for this information on real-world testing of this! Boosting my confidence on the (overkill) wiring i'm installing today.
In fact i'm half surprised about that, as when we installed into a flat, i looked at the installed cabling, well, wired as telephony only (only the center pair connected, no big deal rewiring correctly the wall sockets with all 4 pairs and adding a proper patch panel at the network center), and cables are PTT298 (an old french standard somewhat between Cat3 and Cat5).
While i first envisioned replacing all cabling with at least Cat5E (well, i replaced one line that was partly cut about 3 meters in the sheath -1 pair damaged- as a result of botched job by some tenement builder's contractor, so put Cat5E instead by the way), all cable runs were about 15m max, and according to some internet forums many saying gigabit ethernet runs fine on this cabling up to about 25m.
Tested it and works flawlessly.
While at the meantime in a family house i'm running mixed categories (our smallest standard sheath diameter here allows either 3 x Cat5E or 1 Cat6/6A + 1 Cat5E): Cat5E + Cat6, 6A for the most important nodes, well, for now they all handle 1G, and some theoretically will handle 10G, but it looks that they'll probably be able to handle 10G each (25m max) and maybe the 6A's have some extra margin for handling future standards like 25G, maybe 40G though i wouldn't bet too much (lol, at least i can say those are cabled once for my whole lifetime, internet access in this rural house is only 25Mb dn/18 up, so no much need except faster NAS access) )
Looking at 6/6A's the pair separator and/or individual shielding, while being much more cumbersome while wiring cables, is probably a very good addition to counter crosstalk, but just seems like it's not yet mandatory, and as Ethernet standards were initially business-oriented i suppose they kept large margins to guarantee consistent reliable performance in any situation so as a side effect us home power-users can benefit by pushing the limits on decently installed short-runs.
About benchmarking the actual performance of your network, to abstract SSD/HDD speed limit (and getting even more awesome raw figures :), you should test with tools like NTttcp or iperf which transfers network data directly to/from RAM.
all you're testing here are the SATA interfaces -- *not* what the network interfaces are capable of!
While I applaud the general premise of the discussion, you're missing a few major factors. One, how much harder are your NAS and PC working to keep up with packets that are corrupt because of the inefficient cabling? You're testing point-to-point device connectivity, but once you add in all of your home IoT devices, the 4k streaming television, the streaming music services, many of which may be using your NAS as their server or switch as their core switch, do you hear skips or see picture freezes, because your SAN is spending an inordinate amount of time having to retransmit packets that are corrupt because of the issues you injected by trying to drive 10Gig over wiring that wasn't meant for it. This means your switch will be dealing with all those retransmits as well. So while it may look like it works just fine, check the stats on your ethernet NICs, or if your switch is managed, look a the interface statistics to understand how much harder the network is actually working because of the cabling. Second, distance. The ethernet spec says that 10GigE can run up to 100 meters, but if you were to plug a 100 meter Cat5e cable into that same switch and your laptop, I'm guessing it won't work at all. Without knowing the distance of every behind the wall run of Cat 5e, you can't say it'll work. Just because it looks like it'll work with two devices connected 40' apart doesn't mean a whole house will be able to run on it. Also, to get full 10GigE, you need Cat 6A. Cat 6 will only run 5GigE at wire speeds up to 100 meters.
Double your net speed ?? Triple??? QUAD??? Yet we are blessed with another one 😍
1. You don't need to upgrade your router for better speed in your local network, if you already bought a switch. When you communicate with your NAS from the PC, the router will not even be involved. In your specific setup the router is just your gateway to the internet, and is only worth upgrading if it was limiting the speed your ISP gives you.
2. Also you should have made some speed tests where the hdd speed is not involved to really find out the speed your cat5e cables are capable of. Should take a look at iPerf for that.
3. Changing your cables is not actually that hard, even if they are going through walls. You have to make a knot between your old cable and new cable, or concatenate them in any way, and pull the old cable from the other end. This way your old cable will be replaced by your new one on the same route through the walls.
Use netcat on a couple of linux boxes. Sender takes input from /dev/zero and transmits it to the receiver pc that writes it to dev/null. this way everything is done in memory on both the transmitting and receiving pc's.. Use snmp to measure IfInOctets and IfOutOctets on both pc's. This will give you a better view on the actual line speed. AND.. use UDP as protocol to get the overhead that TCP/IP has out of the equation. Better still, IPv6 using jumbo-frames is an option. More data in less packets.
I like cats too.
Why didn't you do an iPerf3 test?
I don’t generally comment on videos but here we go..... I upgraded my 75ft Cat5e to Cat7 and I am now getting my money’s worth with the gigabit internet. 80mbps went to 750mbps with a $35 cable. My 2 cents. Just buy the cable and run it if ur able to. Probably don’t need cat 7... but the price was similar to cat6 so I went with it.
I agree with you that you can probably get higher speeds than rated at shorter runs. However, there IS more difference from CAT5 to CAT6 than shielding. The CAT6 copper conductors are larger than the CAT5. If I remember correctly, CAT5 is AWG24 and CAT6 is AWG22. This means better conductivity properties.
HI, did you repeat this test using Nvme? Thanks for this and all your videos!!
You should've used two computers and ran iperf, if possible. But I'm pretty sure 5e does 10gbe just fine over short distances
Ok, now try running iperf and check out all of your frame errors. Yeah, it "works" but its far from ideal. Also SFP+ Ethernet ports are cheaper than rj45 Ethernet ports. The SPF+ modules can be about the same to WAY more expensive for sr optics.
Good job Joe. This is absolutely correct, CAT 5e is a common practice in enterprise data centers using short runs with 10GbE. I know of thousands of servers across the globe running 10gig on 5e. Now there are several other reasons why you wouldn't want to use 10gig copper (like cost when to look at the entire stack including power consumption and latency) but Joe is correct 10gig on 5e is a viable option for short runs.
Good to know. I have not purchased any 10Gig hardware yet and my older NAS equipment is powered off for several years now. I have been running my LAN since Cat5 was the new tech and before 1gig the norm. I built out LAN IN A STAR configuration and have added more managed and un-managed switches using them as hubs. Everything works great so I wonder if considering 10Gig is even worth the expense and effort. My only issue is with 5gig wireless occasional buffering of video (at outer edges of distance limits). Question: Is it possible to put a router behind a managed switch in a location about 100' from the cable modem and still let the router function properly? I ask this because my cable company installed a MOCA in front of my cable modem and ran a length of Cat5 to my router. He did this to get two TIVO Mini receivers to function better over my old Coax6. He disconnected the Cat5 connector from the control TIVO DVR after he had isolated all three TIVO devices and then installed a four set coax splitter and connected the fourth splitter port to the remaining (existing) coax runs. My network scanning software showed the three tivo devices assigned to the among the first twenty devices. I set the router to static ip addresses for the three tivo devices and had no more tivo problems for over two years now. The coax cable from the wall is attached to the input port of the MOCA and the MOCA output port is attached to the input port of the cable modem. The Cat5 wire from the MOCA is attached to the router and the Cat5 port of the cable modem is empty.??
Back in the early days of Cat 5/5e I use to push gigabit speeds over a 20 meter stretch of Cat 3
Yes, i also run Gigabit flawlessy in my apartment on short runs (15m) of stock PTT298 cabling (an old voice-grade french standard somewhat between Cat3 and Cat5, theoretically couldn't even do 100BASE-TX... the 'give it a try' option was worth it, i expected to still have 100Mb (at least better than WiFi g as temporary solution), but Gigabit showing up at the first try without replacing the cables was a definately satisfying surprise : )
I've long wondered about exactly what happens when you push cable beyond the spec limits. It's interesting you were able to get gigabit over cat 3, and can't say I'm entirely surprised.
People talk about cat 3/5/6/8 as if it as soon as you go beyond the length/speed/etc it'll suddenly all break and won't work at all. It's of course not black and white.
In reality, it's a specification designed for data centers that demand extremely low error rates. Nobody wants to blame the network when you get 1 bit out of a million transmitted that error out, so the engineers set extremely low error rates, and adjust length/cable limits appropriately.
Great practical video. A detail :Ethernet is not a cable , it’s a protocol. The SFP uses Ethernet and in your case , it seems to me, an RJ connection. .
nice video i like it
SFP+ is actually cheaper 10 Gbe if below 5 meters. For my case, my router has 2 SFP+ ports, 8Gbe ports (36 CPU cores) $1000 (capable of 10+Gb/s symmetrical internet with QoS, firewall, VPN, etc), managed SFP+ 16 port switch $400, Direct SFP+ cables $15 each, Used mellanox SFP+cards $25-$30
The problem with cables, some manufacturers have very good quality that cat5e can support 10Gb/s within a few meters, while many out there dont even conform to their said standards.
You probably just saved me a pretty penny- thank you!
CAT6 does NOT have any shielding at all. Just a 4 way divider (+) between the 4 prs
CAT6A has an outer metal shield
CAT7 has an outer metal shield WITH a shield on each individual pair
So, which equipment was used to test if a 10G cable can actually transfer 10G?
Can you do a QnA please?
Confused as to why the sfp module was needed?
One time I used old phone line in the wall for 100 Mbps. Just connect the yellow red black blue to Ethernet jack. Now I use care 6 with a 1 gig network.
20+ years ago I was able to make a solid ethernet connection (only 10Mbps at the time) at nearly 200m through a water-filled underground conduit. It kept us running until we got the fibre terminated.
This was really very good. You covered all the bases here. Well done.
You don't actually need a switch that does SFP+ just because you have another device with an SFP+ port. You can just get a 10Gbit ethernet SFP+ module.
Do you have a cable length meter? How long were your runs?
Great video Thio!
Useful info for the future...merci beaucoup Joe.
CAT5E and 6 are roughly the same thing. 5E has 24 gauge copper pairs. Some CAT 6 still has 24 gauge wires (waste of money here). The better CAT 6 cable has 23 gauge copper. Also you get the pair separators inside with the better wire slash cable. Look for CAT 6 and 23 gauge wire. The slightly heavier copper pairs gives you better signal to noise ratio on the line. Remember when you were seeing fluctuations on 5E? There is a speed difference between 5E and 23 gauge CAT 6 with the pair separators. Then you can get into CAT 6A and so on.
Sometimes I just ignore ThioJoe notifications because I need to prepare for the greatness!