Yeah, I didn't see it on Samsung's press release either. The press release promised "double the throughput capabilities of current Gen 3 SSDs", so it will interesting if that also applies to write performance versus just read.
The read specs are great, but the write speed doesn't really take full advantage of PCIe 4, even at x4. Would like to see a comparison to the Micron 9300. On a tangent, I still haven't seen anyone offering a 10G ethernet interface on a PCIe 4 x1 card.
There isn't much demand for 10Gb in the home environment, 2.5Gb and 5Gb speeds are an attempt to bridge the gap. Most professional workstations and servers I've seen generally have several x4/x8/x16 slots rather than x1/x2 so the demand for a PCIe 4.0 x1 10Gb card is probably quite small but I'm sure there will be some good choice eventually.
Until you can get a dual port 10GbE card on an x1 card it doesn't matter very much. That and 10GbE is being quickly replaced by 25GbE. However, PCIe 4.0 will allow for dual port 25GbE cards on an x4 slot which is nice.
5gb also works with normal ethernet cables. But still even 2.5gb is useless right now. I can't even find a consumer switch with 2.5 or 5gb and all the other ones even with just 4-5 ports are huge and expensive while 1gb switches cost like $20 and are tiny.
There are a few options, but you do have to resolve yourself to ~$80 / port pricing. Multi-Gig / NBASE-T makes the most sense by far for home / SOHO setups.
Netgear has the GS110MX (unmanaged) and GS110EMX ("Smart Managed Plus") with 2x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 8x 1G for $200 if you just want to dip your toes. Then there's the unmanaged XS508M with 7x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 1x 1G/10G SFP combo port for $500. And the smart managed plus XS512EM with 12x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 2x SFP ports for $940.
Ubiquiti also has the UniFi Switch 6 XG PoE with 4x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 2x SFP ports along with 60 W / port 802.3bt PoE for $599.
I don't buy that (lack of demand). What there isn't is a reasonable home support structure. I'm not even talking cost, just home-sized devices! Look for a HOME-appropriate router at anything faster than 1G -- I don't care if it's 2.5, 5, or 10G. Just doesn't exist at ANY price...
You can see what a clusterfsck this space is by the fact that the prices make ZERO sense. You pay more (a LOT more) for 5 ports rather than 10? For unmanaged rather than managed?
If you can point me to a home-appropriate switch (unmanaged, 5 ports, the size of a standard home 1G switch rather than some rack-mount behemoth) go right ahead. It's not an issue of 2.5G vs 10G -- these things DO NOT EXIST.
Why? I have no idea, except the usual issue that as a sector consolidates and loses its original engineering mindset, it also loses interest in ever doing anything innovative.
Apple has (kinda sorta) locked into 10G as the standard on its high-end kit. (iMac Pro, optional but not that expensive on mac mini). You can get USB-C to 2.5G ethernet at $55 from TRENDnet; not a great price but not terrible. The newest high end wifi boxes (like NetGear's high end ax routers) have one 2.5G port.
The SOURCES for faster than 1G are present in volume. But what's very obviously missing is home-appropriate switches at ANY PRICE. Until that changes...
Based on the picture of the Dream Machine Pro box (which isn't available yet for easy purchase by everyone), it looks like it only has at best, 2 x 10GB (the two on the right w/the "10G" text on the bottom). The other 8 ports are probably just 1GB.
I DO buy "lack of demand". 10g copper is perfectly doable as PCIe 3 addin boards. The main problem is that few people need it.
What are you doing in the home that needs that kind of bandwidth? Video streaming? No. WiFi can't even handle those speeds even in aggregate. Outside the home? Who has 10gig Internet access? If you did, your local node would be faster than most any server.
The benefits are slim at this time, so there's little demand, so the prices are really high.
This is like complaining about the expense of add-in board RAMdrives ten years ago. Yes, they were too expensive, but hardly anyone in the SOHO realm needed them for anything.
If you copy & edit video (esp 4k), you can have some really large source files. So if you want to keep those files on a NAS or even just backup a large amount of files, it's nice to have faster connections.
Yes, 10GbE is not critical, but if time is money to you, then large, required file transfers (for whatever reason) that can go faster is a savings for you. I can remember having to copy several TB one time; only after it finished, could I then restart a necessary service. So 10GbE would definitely have given me back some time there.
Nothing you said contradicts @Great_Scott's comment. The amount of people editing 4k at home, and over a network, is vanishingly small. Hence the high prices. Even for small businesses, the primary use case is faster backups/deployments, and those are already using $1,000+ switches for server infrastructure. But even those have mostly gone cloud.
"10g copper is perfectly doable as PCIe 3 addin boards. " It would not fit in x1, which means it is available as x4, since there is no such thing as x2. In mainstream desktops, multi-lane ports are hard to come by.
If you don’t care about waiting, them why do you care about super fast SSDs? A good old HD does everything an SSD does... And why are WiFi or Internet speeds relevant? Honestly, as soon as you mention that, you disqualify yourself as not understanding anything about what people like me are trying to achieve.
You seem to live in a bubble of “everyone is just like me”. Not true. - I have multiple computers - They are connected by ethernet - Transferring large files (say 1GB or larger) imposes a noticeable wait. Is it unbearable? No. But why wait if I can avoid it?
Once again that misses the point of HOME! (And that point-to-point becomes ever less practical once you have 3+ machines...) Yes, many things are possible --- and if I wanted to do crazy stunts I could just buy an industrial switch.
The point of HOME kit is that it is small, it is unobtrusive, it is low-hassle!
Uncompressed or lightly compressed, low latency video transport do like 10 Gbit bandwidth. Think of the networking switch becoming a video matrix router. The entire professional AV space is awaiting this to happen but right now it is suffering from market fragmentation due to too many vendors attempting to lock users in. For one example, see this link for reference: https://news.zeevee.com/blog/zyper4k-hdmi-module
The one good thing is that if the previous installation has been wired up correctly for 4K HDbaseT, then the cabling can be reused for 10 Gbit networking. These types of installs are common enough in areas like California where spending several grand on a setup can increase the resale of the home by a factor of 5x from the initial investment (ie spend $10K on this type of gear and it can add $50K to the resale value).
Also 802.11ax is going to enable greater than 1 Gbit speeds in the real world. The company I work for has already transitioned over to CAT6A STP or CAT7 for new construction in anticipation of movingly directly to 802.11ax. Still looking at retrofitting existing installations with 2.5 Gbit or 5 Gbit links over existing cabling with new switches.
The other big driver for new cabling isn't 10 Gbit but being able to fully support the 802.3bt standard for up to 100W of power. Professional audio over a network has been a thing for well over a decade now and 802.3bt enables one last thing for this market: network based speakers. I've seen an inquiry about new corporate construction if it was possible to only use CAT6A STP everything. Outside of a few fiber drops for the network backbone, the answer is actually yes as data, video, audio, and even lighting can be consolidated to a common IP system.
I think WiFi 6 is likely to change this. TP-Link's pre-standard WiFi 6 come with a 2.5 Gbps port. I'm sure they see the market for selling switches which connect to that, but the chip vendors need a reasonably prices option before the switch vendors can sell it. Then, the home networking providers (Cable/DSL/5G) need to provide something better than 1G without depending on link aggregation.
The prices on the 2 router's you're linking to do make sense once you look at the more detailed features.
The $399 4+1 port one is 10Gb on all 5 ports. The $249 8+2 port one has 4x1gb, 2x1/2.5, and 2x1/2.5/5gb ports; 2x10gb (one SFP). It's cheaper because it only has a single 10gb RJ-45 port.
10gb is much harder (read needs more expensive electronics) on RJ-45 than on SFP; 2.5/5gb are as much about being easier on the router/card makers as they are about reusing 100m runs of older cable.
The larger point is not the exact details of the switches, it’s that these are about the best available. And they SUCK for home use. I’m not demanding 10G everywhere; i’d be happy with a nice little 5 port 2.5G box. This is home; I don’t need gimmicks like a single 10G port connecting upstairs with downstairs. But there is NOTHING available like that.
Trendnet is not only one with 2.5gbps, Club 3D was the first to market. Trendnet is easier to get in the USA, Club 3D in the EU. QNAP has an 5GbE product and that's about it. Switches are hard to get indeed -- the cheapest transciever is the Mikrotik S+RJ10 which is 51 USD so even if you get a cheap used SFP+ heavy enterprise switch from eBay, you will pay at least 51 USD per port. Netgear has a few switches with 2.5 and 5 GbE ports but they are 200 USD+. All in all the NBASE-T premise of cheap sub-10GbE Ethernet have not been delivered (yet?).
There's lots of inexpensive 10G gear if don't mind going to fiber. Miktorik has the CRS305( https://amzn.to/31s9RCS ) and CRS309( https://amzn.to/2KqtYvD ) which are 4 and 8 10gig ports which with a cheap connectx 3 card(about 40 on ebay) and a direct attach cable give you 10gig cheap and easy. Mikrotik even has the RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN ( https://amzn.to/2KCyPZA ) which is a wireless router with a single 10gig port, a great option if you have a nas or something you want to link to the rest of the network.
I would disagree with that. 10 Gbit off of 1x PCIe 4.0 is ideal of the embedded market which is sensitive to thinks like board cost etc. Even outside of the embedded market, it would enable on board LAN to easily move to PCIe 4.0 and replace the 1 Gbit links currently on a 1x PCIe 1.0/2.0/3.0 connection.
Also of note is that with AMD's Rome launch, they increased the number of PCIe lanes per socket. There is an extra 1x lane which OEMs are now using for BMC management which could now be on a 10 Gbit LAN connection. This has utility when using VNC to get into a system running a GUI.
Usually companies think about targeting more users with same product by doing backward compatibility. If they only offered PCIe x1 4.0 then most peoples with PCIe 3.0 will suffer from bottleneck as x1 PCIe 3.0 will not be enough.
The only solution is to make the card x2 physically and works at x2 PCIe 3.0 when no PCIe 4 is available and when it's available it will use x1 lanes.
I have a PCIe x2 cards, they can only be used as follows, with caveats.
An open ended PCIe x1 slot (uncommon on law/mid tier boards). A PCIe x2 slot, (they exist in theory but not practice, never seen one, and never been mentioned since PCIe 1.0 was the new thing). A PCIe x4 slot, these are very uncommon on standard desktop boards, but common on (expensive) Workstation and Server boards. A PCIe x8 slot, these are very uncommon on standard desktop boards, but common on (expensive) Workstation and Server boards. A PCIe x16 slot, Common as much on mid tier and up boards, however...
Caveats, not all motherboards allow PCIe x4, x8 and 16x slots to function at x2, other, you have to manually set them up. e.g. one motherboard of mine spit the video output in half (onboard video, HDMI or DP) making it unusable in either of the x16 slots, a different motherboard worked straight out of the box, no settings required, both used the same chipset (I will not name the boards or manufacturers).
As for PCIe 4.0 1x slots being used for 10G Ethernet, this is by foar the best option as it will provide max bandwidth and PCIe 1x slots are on virtually all boards, and I have never encountered an issue running any PCIe x1 device in any 16x slot (I have a PCIe 1x WIFI card in a 16x slot on the PC I am writing this on)...
Now PCIe x2 is quite common for NVMe (PCIe) drives and is widely supported, but as PCIe x2 slots do not exist and support for x2 cards is scatty x2 cards will never become common even in the era of PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 and beyond.
Even more of a tangent, why can't I get 10GB as standard LOM ports for servers at this point? I'd appreciate not having to get add-in cards sucking up my limited slots (and space).
Actually with Intel cascade lake you can. Starting from chipset c624 Intel provides 2 ports 10 gb. Unfortunately most big vendors tend to use just c621. Still even with LOMs on servers with c621 you can have NICs like 4*10 gb or 2*25 gb
Because most installations use multiple cards for redundancy, fiber, or need rdma. There's no reason to include something that most won't use. But if you need more PCIe slots in your server, and can't afford to use one of those slots for networking, then you are a rare case.
The main problem with PCIe 4.0 / NVMe drivers is that the only review I have read had the PCIe drive perform at almost exactly the same "real world" level as a PCIe 3.0 (NVMe) drive, this was simply because the IOPS on the the PCIe 4.0 drive were no higher, and unless you are pushing around large files you will never see the "headline" performance figures.
An analogy would be like driving a Ferrari around a busy, congested city in rush hour.
Once drives with higher IOPs, specifically at low que depths arrive they might be worth looking at, but for now they are priced at insane levels for the same "real world" performance.
An Intel (and upcoming Micron) Optane drive on PCIe 4.0 x4 could be stunning, however, Intel will not go there until Intel has PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 boards on the market (Intel might skip PCIe 4.0 and go straight for PCIe 5.0 (already ratified).
I wonder how the performance of these compares with Intel's Optane? Samsung targeting these to EPYC systems makes a lot of sense. Might be interesting for setups that require very frequent snapshots, like high-availability databases such as HANA.
Also a minor edit: the alf-length half-height needs it's "h" back, although an " alien life form length half-height" drive might be a lot more newsworthy. Hmm, where did Samsung get those numbers for an alien's length from? I smell a massive conspiracy!
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romrunning - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
"Overall, Samsung's focus on the drive in terms of specifications is on the drive's read performance rather than its write performance."Why do you say that it's focused on read perf rather than write perf? I can't find any specs or tests that would show it's primarily focused on read.
Ryan Smith - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Right now the only published figures are for read performance. They don't even publish write figures.romrunning - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Yeah, I didn't see it on Samsung's press release either. The press release promised "double the throughput capabilities of current Gen 3 SSDs", so it will interesting if that also applies to write performance versus just read.CrystalCowboy - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
"The SSD leverages an upgraded dual-port PCIe Gen4 interface to push up to 8/3.8GB/s of sequential read/write throughput"Tom's Oct 18, 2018
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-qlc-z-na...
CrystalCowboy - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
The read specs are great, but the write speed doesn't really take full advantage of PCIe 4, even at x4. Would like to see a comparison to the Micron 9300.On a tangent, I still haven't seen anyone offering a 10G ethernet interface on a PCIe 4 x1 card.
kingpotnoodle - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
There isn't much demand for 10Gb in the home environment, 2.5Gb and 5Gb speeds are an attempt to bridge the gap. Most professional workstations and servers I've seen generally have several x4/x8/x16 slots rather than x1/x2 so the demand for a PCIe 4.0 x1 10Gb card is probably quite small but I'm sure there will be some good choice eventually.schujj07 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Until you can get a dual port 10GbE card on an x1 card it doesn't matter very much. That and 10GbE is being quickly replaced by 25GbE. However, PCIe 4.0 will allow for dual port 25GbE cards on an x4 slot which is nice.beginner99 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
5gb also works with normal ethernet cables. But still even 2.5gb is useless right now. I can't even find a consumer switch with 2.5 or 5gb and all the other ones even with just 4-5 ports are huge and expensive while 1gb switches cost like $20 and are tiny.Zibi - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
There is netgear gaming switch with 2 * 10 gb ports and 8 * 1 gb. It's called sx 10. It even supports link aggregation.repoman27 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
There are a few options, but you do have to resolve yourself to ~$80 / port pricing. Multi-Gig / NBASE-T makes the most sense by far for home / SOHO setups.Netgear has the GS110MX (unmanaged) and GS110EMX ("Smart Managed Plus") with 2x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 8x 1G for $200 if you just want to dip your toes. Then there's the unmanaged XS508M with 7x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 1x 1G/10G SFP combo port for $500. And the smart managed plus XS512EM with 12x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 2x SFP ports for $940.
Ubiquiti also has the UniFi Switch 6 XG PoE with 4x 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G ports and 2x SFP ports along with 60 W / port 802.3bt PoE for $599.
SunLord - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
The Netgear MS510TX at $239.99 is a good switch it gives you 4 Gigabit ports and 2 1G/2.5G ports and 2 1G/2.5G/5G ports and 1 10G portigavus - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
Don't forget mikrotik - there's https://mikrotik.com/product/crs309_1g_8s_in - in a reasonable price/perf packagename99 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
I don't buy that (lack of demand). What there isn't is a reasonable home support structure.I'm not even talking cost, just home-sized devices! Look for a HOME-appropriate router at anything faster than 1G -- I don't care if it's 2.5, 5, or 10G. Just doesn't exist at ANY price...
The best you can get are low-end enterprise routers that are not just expensive (OK, we can live with that) but too large and inappropriately sized for a house, things like:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075Q6NPM2/
or
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075Q5C3Z4/
You can see what a clusterfsck this space is by the fact that the prices make ZERO sense. You pay more (a LOT more) for 5 ports rather than 10? For unmanaged rather than managed?
If you can point me to a home-appropriate switch (unmanaged, 5 ports, the size of a standard home 1G switch rather than some rack-mount behemoth) go right ahead. It's not an issue of 2.5G vs 10G -- these things DO NOT EXIST.
Why? I have no idea, except the usual issue that as a sector consolidates and loses its original engineering mindset, it also loses interest in ever doing anything innovative.
Apple has (kinda sorta) locked into 10G as the standard on its high-end kit. (iMac Pro, optional but not that expensive on mac mini). You can get USB-C to 2.5G ethernet at $55 from TRENDnet; not a great price but not terrible. The newest high end wifi boxes (like NetGear's high end ax routers) have one 2.5G port.
The SOURCES for faster than 1G are present in volume. But what's very obviously missing is home-appropriate switches at ANY PRICE. Until that changes...
Jorgp2 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
You can literally just get a Unifi Dream Machine Pro for $349.Does 5gb/s with IPS turned on.
romrunning - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Based on the picture of the Dream Machine Pro box (which isn't available yet for easy purchase by everyone), it looks like it only has at best, 2 x 10GB (the two on the right w/the "10G" text on the bottom). The other 8 ports are probably just 1GB.Great_Scott - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
I DO buy "lack of demand". 10g copper is perfectly doable as PCIe 3 addin boards. The main problem is that few people need it.What are you doing in the home that needs that kind of bandwidth? Video streaming? No. WiFi can't even handle those speeds even in aggregate. Outside the home? Who has 10gig Internet access? If you did, your local node would be faster than most any server.
The benefits are slim at this time, so there's little demand, so the prices are really high.
This is like complaining about the expense of add-in board RAMdrives ten years ago. Yes, they were too expensive, but hardly anyone in the SOHO realm needed them for anything.
romrunning - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
If you copy & edit video (esp 4k), you can have some really large source files. So if you want to keep those files on a NAS or even just backup a large amount of files, it's nice to have faster connections.Yes, 10GbE is not critical, but if time is money to you, then large, required file transfers (for whatever reason) that can go faster is a savings for you. I can remember having to copy several TB one time; only after it finished, could I then restart a necessary service. So 10GbE would definitely have given me back some time there.
mckirkus - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Nothing you said contradicts @Great_Scott's comment. The amount of people editing 4k at home, and over a network, is vanishingly small. Hence the high prices. Even for small businesses, the primary use case is faster backups/deployments, and those are already using $1,000+ switches for server infrastructure. But even those have mostly gone cloud.romrunning - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Well, then, good thing I wasn't trying to contradict his comment, then! :)I was only pointing how it can be useful at times to have a much faster connection.
CrystalCowboy - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
"10g copper is perfectly doable as PCIe 3 addin boards. "It would not fit in x1, which means it is available as x4, since there is no such thing as x2.
In mainstream desktops, multi-lane ports are hard to come by.
name99 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
If you don’t care about waiting, them why do you care about super fast SSDs? A good old HD does everything an SSD does...And why are WiFi or Internet speeds relevant? Honestly, as soon as you mention that, you disqualify yourself as not understanding anything about what people like me are trying to achieve.
You seem to live in a bubble of “everyone is just like me”. Not true.
- I have multiple computers
- They are connected by ethernet
- Transferring large files (say 1GB or larger) imposes a noticeable wait. Is it unbearable? No. But why wait if I can avoid it?
GreenReaper - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
Could get pairs of cards to link them together over a private subnet. Not ideal, but might be faster than waiting for a switch to come.name99 - Sunday, August 11, 2019 - link
Once again that misses the point of HOME! (And that point-to-point becomes ever less practical once you have 3+ machines...)Yes, many things are possible --- and if I wanted to do crazy stunts I could just buy an industrial switch.
The point of HOME kit is that it is small, it is unobtrusive, it is low-hassle!
Kevin G - Sunday, August 11, 2019 - link
Uncompressed or lightly compressed, low latency video transport do like 10 Gbit bandwidth. Think of the networking switch becoming a video matrix router. The entire professional AV space is awaiting this to happen but right now it is suffering from market fragmentation due to too many vendors attempting to lock users in. For one example, see this link for reference: https://news.zeevee.com/blog/zyper4k-hdmi-moduleThe one good thing is that if the previous installation has been wired up correctly for 4K HDbaseT, then the cabling can be reused for 10 Gbit networking. These types of installs are common enough in areas like California where spending several grand on a setup can increase the resale of the home by a factor of 5x from the initial investment (ie spend $10K on this type of gear and it can add $50K to the resale value).
Also 802.11ax is going to enable greater than 1 Gbit speeds in the real world. The company I work for has already transitioned over to CAT6A STP or CAT7 for new construction in anticipation of movingly directly to 802.11ax. Still looking at retrofitting existing installations with 2.5 Gbit or 5 Gbit links over existing cabling with new switches.
The other big driver for new cabling isn't 10 Gbit but being able to fully support the 802.3bt standard for up to 100W of power. Professional audio over a network has been a thing for well over a decade now and 802.3bt enables one last thing for this market: network based speakers. I've seen an inquiry about new corporate construction if it was possible to only use CAT6A STP everything. Outside of a few fiber drops for the network backbone, the answer is actually yes as data, video, audio, and even lighting can be consolidated to a common IP system.
jhh - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
I think WiFi 6 is likely to change this. TP-Link's pre-standard WiFi 6 come with a 2.5 Gbps port. I'm sure they see the market for selling switches which connect to that, but the chip vendors need a reasonably prices option before the switch vendors can sell it. Then, the home networking providers (Cable/DSL/5G) need to provide something better than 1G without depending on link aggregation.DanNeely - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
The prices on the 2 router's you're linking to do make sense once you look at the more detailed features.The $399 4+1 port one is 10Gb on all 5 ports. The $249 8+2 port one has 4x1gb, 2x1/2.5, and 2x1/2.5/5gb ports; 2x10gb (one SFP). It's cheaper because it only has a single 10gb RJ-45 port.
10gb is much harder (read needs more expensive electronics) on RJ-45 than on SFP; 2.5/5gb are as much about being easier on the router/card makers as they are about reusing 100m runs of older cable.
name99 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
The larger point is not the exact details of the switches, it’s that these are about the best available. And they SUCK for home use.I’m not demanding 10G everywhere; i’d be happy with a nice little 5 port 2.5G box. This is home; I don’t need gimmicks like a single 10G port connecting upstairs with downstairs. But there is NOTHING available like that.
chx1975 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Trendnet is not only one with 2.5gbps, Club 3D was the first to market. Trendnet is easier to get in the USA, Club 3D in the EU. QNAP has an 5GbE product and that's about it. Switches are hard to get indeed -- the cheapest transciever is the Mikrotik S+RJ10 which is 51 USD so even if you get a cheap used SFP+ heavy enterprise switch from eBay, you will pay at least 51 USD per port. Netgear has a few switches with 2.5 and 5 GbE ports but they are 200 USD+. All in all the NBASE-T premise of cheap sub-10GbE Ethernet have not been delivered (yet?).EmperorDeslok - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
There's lots of inexpensive 10G gear if don't mind going to fiber.Miktorik has the CRS305( https://amzn.to/31s9RCS ) and CRS309( https://amzn.to/2KqtYvD ) which are 4 and 8 10gig ports which with a cheap connectx 3 card(about 40 on ebay) and a direct attach cable give you 10gig cheap and easy.
Mikrotik even has the RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN ( https://amzn.to/2KCyPZA ) which is a wireless router with a single 10gig port, a great option if you have a nas or something you want to link to the rest of the network.
Kevin G - Sunday, August 11, 2019 - link
I would disagree with that. 10 Gbit off of 1x PCIe 4.0 is ideal of the embedded market which is sensitive to thinks like board cost etc. Even outside of the embedded market, it would enable on board LAN to easily move to PCIe 4.0 and replace the 1 Gbit links currently on a 1x PCIe 1.0/2.0/3.0 connection.Also of note is that with AMD's Rome launch, they increased the number of PCIe lanes per socket. There is an extra 1x lane which OEMs are now using for BMC management which could now be on a 10 Gbit LAN connection. This has utility when using VNC to get into a system running a GUI.
Xajel - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Usually companies think about targeting more users with same product by doing backward compatibility. If they only offered PCIe x1 4.0 then most peoples with PCIe 3.0 will suffer from bottleneck as x1 PCIe 3.0 will not be enough.The only solution is to make the card x2 physically and works at x2 PCIe 3.0 when no PCIe 4 is available and when it's available it will use x1 lanes.
ADB1979 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
I have a PCIe x2 cards, they can only be used as follows, with caveats.An open ended PCIe x1 slot (uncommon on law/mid tier boards).
A PCIe x2 slot, (they exist in theory but not practice, never seen one, and never been mentioned since PCIe 1.0 was the new thing).
A PCIe x4 slot, these are very uncommon on standard desktop boards, but common on (expensive) Workstation and Server boards.
A PCIe x8 slot, these are very uncommon on standard desktop boards, but common on (expensive) Workstation and Server boards.
A PCIe x16 slot, Common as much on mid tier and up boards, however...
Caveats, not all motherboards allow PCIe x4, x8 and 16x slots to function at x2, other, you have to manually set them up. e.g. one motherboard of mine spit the video output in half (onboard video, HDMI or DP) making it unusable in either of the x16 slots, a different motherboard worked straight out of the box, no settings required, both used the same chipset (I will not name the boards or manufacturers).
As for PCIe 4.0 1x slots being used for 10G Ethernet, this is by foar the best option as it will provide max bandwidth and PCIe 1x slots are on virtually all boards, and I have never encountered an issue running any PCIe x1 device in any 16x slot (I have a PCIe 1x WIFI card in a 16x slot on the PC I am writing this on)...
CrystalCowboy - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
The PCI Express spec does not include x2 cards.ADB1979 - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
As I said, they WERE talked about when PCIe was brand new, however the slots never materialised, and clearly PCIe x2 was dropped quite early.The cards however did, and support is scatty.
List of examples below.
https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=sata+pcie+card
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pcie+%22x2+slot%22&t...
Now PCIe x2 is quite common for NVMe (PCIe) drives and is widely supported, but as PCIe x2 slots do not exist and support for x2 cards is scatty x2 cards will never become common even in the era of PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 and beyond.
ADB1979 - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
Here is a Motherboard with an actual PCIe x2 slot, or rather, an open ended PCIe x8 slot, that is electrically wired as an x2 slot.https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard...
romrunning - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Even more of a tangent, why can't I get 10GB as standard LOM ports for servers at this point? I'd appreciate not having to get add-in cards sucking up my limited slots (and space).CoreLogicCom - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
HP at least has been offering 10Gb ports in LOM since at least Gen 9. You get (2) per LOMZibi - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
Actually with Intel cascade lake you can. Starting from chipset c624 Intel provides 2 ports 10 gb. Unfortunately most big vendors tend to use just c621. Still even with LOMs on servers with c621 you can have NICs like 4*10 gb or 2*25 gbDug - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link
Because most installations use multiple cards for redundancy, fiber, or need rdma. There's no reason to include something that most won't use.But if you need more PCIe slots in your server, and can't afford to use one of those slots for networking, then you are a rare case.
BroderLund - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Interesting drive. What would be more interesting however would be a PCIe 4.0 version successor to the 970 Pro.ADB1979 - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
It will happen...The main problem with PCIe 4.0 / NVMe drivers is that the only review I have read had the PCIe drive perform at almost exactly the same "real world" level as a PCIe 3.0 (NVMe) drive, this was simply because the IOPS on the the PCIe 4.0 drive were no higher, and unless you are pushing around large files you will never see the "headline" performance figures.
An analogy would be like driving a Ferrari around a busy, congested city in rush hour.
Once drives with higher IOPs, specifically at low que depths arrive they might be worth looking at, but for now they are priced at insane levels for the same "real world" performance.
An Intel (and upcoming Micron) Optane drive on PCIe 4.0 x4 could be stunning, however, Intel will not go there until Intel has PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 boards on the market (Intel might skip PCIe 4.0 and go straight for PCIe 5.0 (already ratified).
eastcoast_pete - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
I wonder how the performance of these compares with Intel's Optane? Samsung targeting these to EPYC systems makes a lot of sense. Might be interesting for setups that require very frequent snapshots, like high-availability databases such as HANA.schujj07 - Thursday, August 15, 2019 - link
For HANA it will only matter if a vendor decides to certify a Rome based server for it. Right now every certified HANA appliance runs Intel.eastcoast_pete - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
Also a minor edit: the alf-length half-height needs it's "h" back, although an " alien life form length half-height" drive might be a lot more newsworthy. Hmm, where did Samsung get those numbers for an alien's length from? I smell a massive conspiracy!