Hi,
Looking for how everyone else would set this up as I initially thought the UniFi Switch Aggregation has RJ45 ports, but it has SFP+, so it has slightly altered my original plan. I was attracted bt the price as I did not want to spend as much as the UniFi Switch 6 XG or 16 XG as Layer 3 or PoE is not required.
I was originally looking at the Synology E10G18-T1 1-Port PCIe Network Interface Card with one RJ45 port, but by the time you add in the cost of a UniFi RJ45 10G Module for the switch, I’m thinking I would be better buying Synology’s 2 port SFP+ card and using cheaper DAC cables. It would also be nice to have my home network and my lab network (a couple of Dell R220’s) on different VLANS and the iSCSI connections on different, physical ports. My servers don’t have 10G PCIe cards but this will be a future upgrade. I already have a Switch 24 PoE and my router is a pfSense SG-3100. I have a Synology DS1621+ which I use for CCTV, Storage for my XCP-ng Pool and backup and storage of my computers at home. I run a small business which I also use Synology Drive to sync files.
My first goal is to edit 4K videos of the Synology and then secondly, to increase the speed of moving VM’s around in XCP-ng.
Can anyone recommend a SFP+ RJ45 10G Module that works with UniFi that has a transmission distance over 30M on CAT6A? This is for the link between the switch and my MacBook Pro which will be using a CalDigit Connect 10G Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE Ethernet Adapter. I am just on the edge of the cable run being 30M but it would be nice to have the extra distance if I want to use a longer cable route in the future.
So…
Am I missing something buying the SFP+ interface card instead of the RJ45 equivalent as I am going to be using switch to connect to it?
What is the best SFP+ module for the switch to connect to my laptop?
Have I missed anything and would anyone do anything differently? (want to stick with UniFi as I like being able to manage the AP’s and switches from one controller)
Watched your latest video on the FS SFP, also bought one and it works great.
Next questions, I have a great connection between my laptop and NAS, however, seem to be getting slow speeds between my two Dell R220’s and the NAS. I have a management network which is on eth0 which is on a 1Gbps nic and a storage network on eth2 which is a 10Gbps NIC. XO has picked up that the connection on eth2 is 10GbE but when I look at speeds on the port analysis on UniFi, data only transfers at about 200Mbps? The NAS has two 10GbE NICs with one on the home VLAN and the second on the storage VLAN, I have the iSCSI target set to be exclusively on the storage NIC.
Should I just put the storage network and management network on the one 10GbE NIC and get rid of the 1Gbps connection. I only have 4 disks in RAID10 on the NAS so will not saturate the single NIC, just thought it was best practice to split them up?
If you’re using VLANs why not LAGG the pair of 10 GigE interfaces into a 20 GigE link and tag the link for both VLANs?
Have you considered populating the m.2 cache slots in the DS1621+?
Can you mention your results with the “CalDigit Connect 10G Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE Ethernet Adapter”? I’m thinking about connecting a laptop that has a Thunderbolt 3 port to the 10 GigE network.
CalDigit Connect 10G works really well. I have had a couple of cases where I get a message on my Mac saying it does not get enough power but just unplug and plug it back in and that seems to sort the issue.
I now use a thunderbolt 4 hub (CalDigit) and have never had an issue with that.
I cannot saturate the 10gbps on the NAS so prefer having them on different NIC’s.
I have put in 2 x 128GB M.2 sticks and have not seen a huge difference in speed as I am the only one who accesses the files but as I have a few VM’s that use the NAS as a storage repository, I hope they are reducing the wear on the mechanical disks.
Hi Tom,
In the video you linked, you say (at 1:35) that sometimes special firmware is required to make them compatible. Can you clarify this statement? Did you mean firmware for the NIC the module is plugged into, or the SFP+ module itself?
Does this only matter for the modules mated with the switch/NIC? What about the other end?
That might be a good tutorial video. I have no idea how to do that currently. I plan to look into it, but it would be nice to learn from a professional.
I know you are planning on testing some of the FS 80 meter SFP+ RJ45 modules. When you do, can you also test at all the speeds supported by the module. I ask because of a recent issue I came across with a specific module. See this post I made about it: Asymmetric Speeds with SFP+ modules