 You know, it feels a little ironic that so many years into this whole tech youtuber thing after having upgraded my house to 10 gig networking seven years ago so that we could edit our video off of a centralized storage server I still haven't upgraded my house to 10 gigabit networking and the reason is that up until now, it's simply been too expensive to justify the cost not because the network cards are expensive, not because the switches are expensive or even because the cabling is expensive the problem is that in the past, if you wanted a cheap switch, you had to buy super expensive cables and if you wanted to use cheap cabling that you can get for... what did we pay for this stuff? I think it was like 160 for the outdoor and 180 Canadian, so... that's like a thousand feet you want cheap cabling? Oh, well now you need a really expensive switch this changes the game this Microtik CR-S312-4C plus 8X G-RM wow, terrible name is just 500 US dollars for a 12 port 10 gigabit switch and Jake and I are 10 gig in this house it's RJ45 yeah yeah the like, compatible kind yeah and the video is brought to you by Glasswire with Glasswire, you can see what's going in and out of your PC when you're connected to the internet that way you can find out if there's any suspicious apps that are behaving badly use offer code LINUS to get 25% off Glasswire at the link in the video description so in front of me is pretty much everything we're gonna need we got our switch, we got our connectors, we got our crimper because we might have to do some custom length cables here um, ethernet cards $10,000 fluke tester what? yeah so I asked the fluke guy I didn't pay for that, did I? no you didn't um, they sent it to us just to borrow I wanted to be able to actually certify the runs that we do so we can make sure that 100% they're ready to go and they will be capable of 10 gigs certify the runs? yeah so just a pretty simple 1 gig switch a PoE switch so that handles my access point and soon to be my ring doorbell then we've got the two gaming desktops, NAS and then a couple UPS's so do any of these have 10 gig already? uh, this one does, this one doesn't okay, what about your NAS? no actually now that I think about it, it does not so I brought two cards so that's good now one small challenge is I don't actually remember where we ran the cable for the media center like how it gets out of this room um, so we're probably gonna have to retrace our steps there because that is not a 10 gig rated cable, it was Cat 5e we couldn't get Cat 6a that was outdoor rated easily or cheaply at the time so because I didn't want to hardwire in a bunch of direct attach copper SFP plus cables this switches release was really the magic bullet that it took for me to finally go 10 gigs so it's a 12 port switch, you can see four of them are actually shared with these SFP plus ports but we don't have to use those what's cool about this for like a budget home upgrade though is that if you did have something resembling like a home server room like this where you've got a couple of machines that are in close proximity you can get SFP plus network cards for super cheap and the short run direct attach copper cables are actually not that bad so if you already have some existing stuff built in then you can decide, okay I'll use you know these eight as ethernet only and then these ones, well hey if I have some SFP plus gear I can go ahead and plug this in now we have never actually booted up this switch and I'm not super familiar with Microtech's equipment but my understanding is this is a smart switch isn't it? smart switch? yeah like managed? yeah managed switch, yeah nanananananana my camera operator and Jake asked for some water and maybe next time they'll bring a Linus Tech Tips water bottle lttstore.com this one's also insulated though and yes in fact gigabit is gigabit and no amount of having a 10 gig nick in your machine is going to make that any faster than gigabit unless you also have a 10 gig switch so we need to go ahead and get that installed so let's rip that thing out and it's gone rip so what's funny about this is this is actually not that dissimilar to what we did for the water-cooled network switch project one big plate with a heat pipe kind of carrying heat over to some kind of cooling element here so in this case we've got two 40 millimeter fans and just kind of like a that's a really weird heat sink isn't it? that's not too loud I give her a second it's audible with that said I think he also did clarify that it gets particularly loud under load and we're not doing anything with it right now to be clear we're talking about Patrick from Serve the Home great guy great site check him out that stuff yeah we've got one 10 gig link here so we can tell because the color is green on this one instead of orange it should be the one to my desktop what the hell do I have on my network that's Huawei? maybe this thing? oh that's why it's so cheap the Chinese government's spying on you Huawei is an Android phone? oh that's right my sister has an Honor phone do you think we have to go through the management port and turn on the managed interface? like it should still show as a device on the network like unless it's well it doesn't giving itself its own IP honestly it doesn't matter anyway does it? because I'm gonna use it as a dumb switch like what I just want to transfer files faster between my computer and my NAS like okay so then I need to shut off my NAS so that we can put a 10 gig card in it so Jake is still trying to get into the management interface on this thing meanwhile I'm gonna upgrade the server longtime viewers will probably recognize this as old Wannock oh yeah I'm coming out on my back it's a Z390 Pro Asus workstation board with a 9900k I forget how much RAM I put in it I'm pretty sure it's 32 gigs of I have more RAM in my NAS than yours rip jaws memory yeah but I have more cores I'm actually not running any VMs though or one VM one VM so I don't actually have any screws wait a moment please look we weren't using it I know for a fact we weren't using it completely blocks all the airflow so we've got two 10 gig clients now just need to you know oh unraid have it go yeah it might not like auto do it oh no you might want to plug it back in the regular one so we can reconfigure it oh balls or maybe plug them both in yeah our status thus far we have plugged in a network switch have plugged things into the network switch okay do you want to see if it's up put a PCIe card in and that's about it oh yeah there we go is that it right there yes so yeah we basically just need to kind of replace this run then so the spot where Jake is is basically just right on the other side of that wall we went the super lame-o way and we just went right into the back with like an RJ45 connector now this is a cat5e rated plate here so hopefully we're good without that at any rate I guess we're just gonna have to cut this off and pull it back through okay go ahead and pull oh there we go um do you know where where does this go uh that actually goes right up to that crawl space now seems like a good time to take a look at the differences though between cat5e and cat6a so we know cat6a is rated for higher frequencies and therefore higher data rates but what's the physical difference because the conductors themselves are both copper they're all eight conductor twisted pair um they're actually the same gauge so it comes down to the way that the cable itself is designed so aside from the sheathing there's this plastic insert here it's in like a cross pattern that keeps each twisted pair separate as it's running down the length of the cable so that's why these will do 10 gig over 100 meters whereas cat5e you're lucky if it does 10 gig over like I don't know what five meters 10 meters and even then I wouldn't recommend it so is there any spots that are not safe to walk on uh oh yeah so if you were to walk on uh oh yeah so if you want to go through my ceiling like a pro then you you step in here without prior prior training that's what Dennis did Dennis put his foot through my through my garage ceiling oh I don't think that's gonna hold dude that's I'm pulling pretty hard it's it's so close ah oh it disconnected no it just got through oh there we go it's through it's through through okay I was able to push it a bit oh holy crap there's a lot of mouse droppings in here but there's so many nails sticking through the the strapping for my roof I can't oh I hate this ah so much spider web ow just hit a nail on my head I'm pushing it up more I got it I got it hold on keep going ow whoever said being a nerd is easy look at this these were still taped together the original cat5e cable broke isn't that crazy now all we got to do is crimp an end on this thing and theoretically we have 10 gig down to the media center boom all three of our ethernet interfaces are working so all we're going to do is we're going to just add all of our interfaces to bond zero which is going to just use them all for failover now theoretically I can unblog the one gig connection and we'll have 10 gig to the server oh nice underwear by the way oh lttstore.com why do you why do you do this to me this is a second time all right so now it's time to actually terminate one of our cables here this cat6a is our outdoor specced uv resistant stuff so it's got a really thick insulation so you basically just put this on spin it around it's even got a hole for that I'm totally doing this from the wrong side there we go oh and you don't actually even really need to pull off this much this is like a lot of extra wire you could you could get away with about two inches so we're going to start by peeling back our individual pairs take off the separator on the inside I'm actually going to throw the boot on the end here the first sort of step is to untwist them we want to actually use the butt of a screwdriver to straighten them out a bit but we're going to use the 568b spec so while we're lining up the the colors how we want them to go into the connector it's good to keep in mind that you need to keep it as clean as possible because we want the connector to be as close to the insulation as possible and if it's all bunched up at the end there you're not going to be able to get a clean snug fit all right so our cat6a cables unlike cat5e you can see inside there that there's holes for the connectors and they're actually staggered rather than just being a straight line like this so as we put these conductors into this bar it's going to move some of them up so they can actually fit inside the end of the connector make sure it's right up to the end you should be able to see inside there the bar will meet up with the plastic inside the termination when you're ready crimp it shut and we're done this time i've got seven gigs of test files let's go ahead and copy that over hey not bad this is only on a couple of raid one uh sata ssds so that was higher than i was expecting but also okay i guess we good now so that's it now that we've tested and we've got a good 10 gig connection down to the media center here you might be wondering why do you need 10 gig down there well that's where our xgu 2008 switch comes in this has two 10 gig ports and eight one gig ports so the point of that is that you've got a 10 gig trunk and every one of the individual devices down here whether it's an nvidia shield or a smart tv or gaming pc or whatever the case may be each device down here gets its own one gigabit connection even if none of them are taking advantage of 10 gig and of course it's two 10 gig ports so if i did get a gaming pc that was 10 gig then i could always add that as well we've got these couplers instead of the more typical keystone at the back things looks like we got a 10 gig link so now we just need to test it like for reals with our fluke doodad jake do we know how to use that thing um somewhat it should be able to tell us whether or not this cable is ready for 10 gig base t a pass look at that so we check our wire map we can see that the wiring is all matching on both ends nobody messed that up and see our length of 46 feet all of our numbers look good and the resistance also good hey it's not money but it's a working cable so that's it then switch upgrade a couple network adapters needed upgrading and a couple of our cable runs needed upgrading and we're 10 gig up in this biz so goodbye cat 5e hello cat 6a and what was the total damage then so we've got 500 dollars for the new 10 gig switch assuming that you need an entire spool of cat 6a cabling that was about 150 bucks from infinity cables then there's a couple bucks here and there for your termination ends your wall jacks your wall plates and all that kind of stuff so all told depending on whether or not you need a 10 gig switch for you know a whole bunch of devices that are in one place you're looking at under 850 us dollars or a little over a thousand dollars for 10 gigging your house now that might seem like a lot of money but compared to what 10 gigging your place would have cost even just three to five years ago it is pretty darn affordable i mean back then even on ebay for second-hand hardware you were paying you know 300 plus dollars for a single 10 gig adapter speaking of stoked i'm stoked to tell you about our sponsor privacy.com with privacy.com you don't have to worry about your credit card falling into the wrong hands due to a data breach privacy.com hides your true credit card number by creating virtual cards that are actually tied to the individual merchants that you shop at privacy.com is a free easy to use service that prevents your credit card number from falling into the wrong hands so instead of giving a merchant that you're shopping with online your real credit card number you give them a virtual card that privacy.com creates for you that's actually locked to that individual merchant so if that merchant gets hacked not only do they not get your real credit card number you actually get a notification that that merchant's been hacked so you can shut off that virtual card cards are super easy to set up you just need to create an account link your virtual cards to your checking account or debit card set a limit et voila you're all set they've even got a browser extension that will auto fill your information while you're shopping privacy.com is pci dss compliant uses military grade encryption to secure your information and they offer two-factor authentication and because they make their money from the stores you shop at instead of from you privacy.com is free and if you go to privacy.com slash linus we're going to have that linked below they'll even give you five bucks in credit to spend on your next purchase that's privacy.com slash linus so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did maybe you can check out our previous network run install video we'll have that linked down below and I will see you next time.