Home Networking

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If my mainboard only has 2.5gb Ethernet, how would I turn it into a NAS? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This might sound stupid, but I really have no clue how this works because 90% of server related videos I watched either talked about prebuilt NAS options or skip the actual connection part.

So I’m currently getting into homeservers and I have put together a few build for a gameserver. Later down the line I want to include a NAS into that which I already planned for by having enough sata ports and space in the casing.

But looking for drives I noticed a lot of them come at 6gb/s read/write. But the mATX boards I looked at all come with 2.5gbs at best. I know network cards exist. Another issue would be that the boards don’t support pcie 8x, they either have 1-2 pcie 16x and 1-3 pcie 1x. Most network cards I have found were really expensive or 8x.

2.5gb/s is already plenty in most normal use cases.but I don’t feel comfortable deciding on a mainboard before understanding how to go about this bottleneck. Is adding 2-3 2.5gb/s network cards and option? Switches are a thing. So could you add 3-4 Ethernet cables from NAS to switch to router?

I’m really sorry if this is sounding like a joke, I hope someone give me the missing links of information to understand this

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You are confusing yourself with hardware and different standards. SATA 3 can max out at 6Gb/s. Generic HDD works around 220mb/s, 1G network is 110mb/s, 2.5G network is around 300mb/s.

So to give you a perspective, if you have 1G as a local network, you can't max out a HDD capability, with 2.5G you double the performance, saturating the HDD, if you want more you need a generic 2.5" SSD, if you want to saturate the SSD you need 10G, in that case M2 SSD start to make sense.

Remember that if you want to go 2.5G, you need all the infrastructure of your home to work around that speed, not only the Nas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

First of all, do your PC and your switches support connections faster than 2,5G? If no, it doesn't matter, you will be limited by that.

You can have the fastest drives and the fastest network card in your NAS, if you have a gigabit connection on your PC, that will be the bottleneck.

Secondly, if you're using hard drives, it also doesn't matter. No hard drive can sustain speeds anywhere near the 6GB/s that the SATA standard could do. SSDs might.

PCIe is downward compatible, you can plug a x8 card into a x16 slot and it will just work. But again, unless you have a 10G network through your home and are using SSDs for storage, don't bother.