 10 gigabit networking. I mean, think about it. Transferring files around to remote PCs at speeds upwards of 1 gigabyte per second. That's a thousand megabytes per second. Well, today we're not only going to do it, we're going to give you some tips and tricks that will hopefully help you out when the time comes to move to 10 gigabit yourself, whether it's at work or at home. And on the subject of work, I thought to myself, hey, how about clearing some space on my desk at work by building a PC under the desk? Wah! Drop a like on the video if you're amped to see my upcoming desk PC build blog. The Master Case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower PC case your own, with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Click on the link in the video description to learn more. You know, I still remember how mind-blowing it was, like the first time that I saw something transfer over my network at 60 to 70 megabytes per second with the onboard gigabit LAN port on some M-Force board that I had. Then shortly afterward, my mind was blown again when the PCI bus bottleneck was removed. And thanks to onboard PCI Express gigabit networking, I could transfer files, thanks to my trusty Diamond Max 9 120 gig RAID 0 boot drive, at over 100 megabytes per second. Wow. Then, for the last 10 years, well, it's as though time has pretty much been standing still. I mean, sure, the enterprise space is getting 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit links, but it really feels like about a decade ago, the entire industry had a meeting and decided that, yeah, gigabit is good enough for consumers and small businesses, and let's just leave it at that. Well, I say no more! We are using, and I'm using this term fairly loosely here, affordable hardware to go 10 gig at the office today. It begins with the NICs, that is to say, network interface cards. We'll be using Intel X540T2s, with the only difference between it and the T1 being that it has two ports instead of, well, one. And while any 10 gigabit card will knock the socks off of a gigabit one, we chose these for two reasons. One, they're Intel, which is basically the industry standard for prosumer network cards, not to mention our testing with them has gone very well, and two, because they're both somewhat affordable at 300 bucks a pop on eBay, although I got some of mine for cheaper, and available in an RJ45 equipped variant. This is important because we wanted to use ethernet cables rather than the expensive SFP Plus connectors and direct-attach copper cables that we were using in our previous 10 gigabit setup. The reason for that is that while that configuration worked well for us before, starting out with PCs attached daisy-chaining to each other, actually, then moving up to using the backbone links on a 48-port Netgear GS752TXS switch, it doesn't play nicely with running cabling through the walls, definitely desirable for an office space, and it's not scalable. And if we want to run more PCs on 10 gig at a time, we need a 10 gig switch with more ports. And pretty much the switch right now, if you don't want to spend an absolute fortune, and, you know, then you might as well get SFP Plus gear, is the XS712T12 port or its 8-port little brother from Netgear, and those use RJ45 connectors. Alright, so it's simple, right? Plug in some ethernet cables and bippity boppity, boom, you're transferring files at a thousand megabytes per second, right? Actually, not quite. First, you'll need to make sure that you're using CAT6A cables if you want reliable data transfer over a reasonable distance. And second, and you may not have considered this, but 10 gigabit is so fast that it exceeds the 6 gigabit per second limit of third generation SATA. So even if you have a wicked fast SSD drive, you'll be limited to speeds in the neighborhood of 500 to 550 megabytes per second. And while PCI Express SSDs that overcome this bottleneck do exist, I stole our Intel 750 series and put it in my personal rig, so I ended up using another solution. I've got our 24 SSD storage server on one end, the one that we built in this video here, and I've got a test bench with that 128 gigabyte kit of Dominator Platinum DDR4 from Corsair on the other end with a free and easy to use utility called SoftPerfect RAM Disk used to treat that RAM like a hard drive. So with such fast storage on either end, it's much easier to evaluate the performance of the actual network link, which frankly didn't go so hot on the first kick at the can. I mean, I don't know who these people getting perfect 10 gig performance out of the box are or how many horseshoes they had to put up their butts to make them so damn lucky, but I was seeing this weird cap at around 300 to 350 megabytes per second. Now to be clear, that is still a significant improvement and already well worth the upgrade for our purposes, but I wanted more. Damn it, I paid for more! And thanks to an amazing series of posts on the Cinevate blog, which you should definitely check out, we can link them below the video, I was able to do much better than that, mostly. So the first tip from them was this great tool called NTTTCP that has a command line interface, so not the friendliest thing, but that they simplify by basically showing you where to plug in the program, install path and machine IP addresses and boom, it's off to the races. So this tool revealed that my two machines were capable of more than one gigabyte per second performance between them, so what gives? Well, time to dig into the advanced settings to see if there's anything that we can tweak. I started by enabling jumbo packets on all clients involved in the transfer and on my network switch. Side note here, it doesn't seem to matter if the values don't match up exactly, as long as your switch is set to something higher than your NICs. So this means that now effectively the data packets sent back and forth are bigger, which is better for a high-speed transfer of large files. Next, I tweaked receive side scaling, a feature that leverages more CPU cores for network transfers, and I set it to match the settings with my number of logical processors on my PC, so 16 on my 5960X test bench, 8 on my 6700K test bench, and 16 on my Xeon server. And finally, I increased the size of both the send and receive buffers to their maximum. This increases memory usage but can yield extra performance. So then what did I get? Well, performance-wise, over the original numbers in NTTTCP, not much. But my real-world transfers were much higher, in fact, more higher than they should have been, but I'm not going to complain, and I was seeing sustained speeds of over double my original transfer rates. With that said, not all is necessarily rosy, and for whatever reason, maybe some of you sharp people out there can go ahead and contribute your comments below, some transfers are faster or slower than others. So I ended up actually putting together two test benches with brand-spanking new installations of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2 just for the sake of trying to eliminate as many variables as possible, and I was still running into weirdness where one machine with a particular OS would saturate the connection writing to the WANUC SSD server, but then be capable of half or 60% of that speed when reading from it, and then another would saturate on reads and then limp along on writes. I mean, that's the one you're looking at here, by the way. But as snake-bitten as I seem to be when it comes to networking stuff, limping along in this case is still 500-plus megabytes per second, so I guess I'll just have to deal with my 34-gigabyte file transferring a little slower than it otherwise would. Overall, very happy with the results. And speaking of being happy with the results, Squarespace. If you were thinking to yourself, gee, I'd like to build myself a website, but I sure don't want to be unhappy with the results. Bam! Pick out a template on Squarespace, customize that template to build yourself. Whatever it is you're trying to build yourself, you want to build a store, a company website, a menu, a blog, a portfolio. Use their simple templates and their powerful creation tools and their 24-7 tech support, and it starts at only $8 a month, so it's affordable and you won't break the bank, and I'm sure I have more talking points, but I think you guys pretty much get the point. You want to build an easy-to-use, reliable website, squarespace.com. They've got a free trial which you can sign up for today, and then if you end up liking the site that you create, you can look into their affordable plans. Pretty freaking awesome. There's no credit card required, by the way, to try out the trial, so pretty cool. When and if you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure though to use offer code LINUS and get 10% off your first purchase. Mmm. Yeah. So that's it, guys. Thanks for watching the video. If you disliked it, I think you know where that button is. If you liked it though, hit that like button. Hit that subscribe button, unless you're already subscribed, in which case, please don't hit the subscribe button, and maybe also consider supporting us by shopping at Amazon with our affiliate link instructions up there, or by, what are the other things? I'm sure there's other things. Right, t-shirts and, oh right, monthly contributions to the forum. You get a cool little contributor badge, good stuff like that. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so go check out that little button in the top right corner for video X where I, something, I don't know, we'll put something in there. I forgot to fill it in on the script.