 Every time we do a video talking about faster network speeds, we end up buried under a mountain of comments about how pointless it is to go any faster than gigabit for your home network because internet speeds are still in the realm of hundreds or even in some cases, dozens of megabits per second. And honestly, I don't expect today's video about two and a half gig ethernet to be any different. But there is a point to it, and I'm gonna show you guys not just what we can do with two and a half gig that we can't do with gigabit, but also how easy and crazy affordable it has gotten to finally get faster local network speeds. Speaking of making things affordable, Honey has got you taken care of there. Honey is the free browser extension that finds you the best deals on popular websites like Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and more. Get it at joinhoney.com slash LTT down below. (*upbeat music*) Before we go any further, let's talk about why you would upgrade your network speeds if it's not going to alleviate the bottleneck that already exists because of your ISP service plan. So here I've got a network resource that is a whole bunch of games from goodoldgames.com. These are DRM free games, this is my collection, and it's so big that I can't have them all installed at once. And I don't necessarily wanna download them off the internet every time I wanna install one because that's pretty slow. So I'm going to go ahead and copy Anno 1701 AD to my desktop. Can see right here with the onboard connection on this motherboard that is a one gigabit connection, no matter how fast my network attached storage device is, this is gonna take me somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 seconds to just copy all the files over to my desktop. That's not an eternity and waiting half a minute for something never killed anyone. But here's the thing, this article from InfoWorld is from almost 20 years ago discussing the benefits of gigabit networking on the desktop. That's right, my friends, in the time that CPUs and graphics cards have improved by multiple orders of magnitude, networking has stayed flat. And okay, maybe that's a bit of a contrived scenario. Here's a more realistic one. I've got a folder full of spicy nudes from my latest Racy photo shoot. It's about, let's see, 477 items and each of these is 14 megabytes. Do you think that's a pretty realistic photo shoot for you, Brandon? Yeah, nudes, 500 nudes, definitely all nudes. Are these nudes? Oh, look at that, spicy. All right, so let's go ahead and copy those. I want them on my local device so that I can manipulate them in Lightroom or whatever the case may be. Why do I store these images on a network attached storage device? Well, obviously because I care about not losing them. You know, that's where I've got my redundant hard drive array so if one fails, I'm not gonna lose them. And whether I'm a pro or just an enthusiast, nobody likes losing data, so it's a safe way to take care of these things. And I'm still waiting for these things to copy. All right. ["Dumpster Diving"] But why wait if you don't have to? Now, faster network solutions have existed for quite some time on the cheap, especially if you're willing to go dumpster diving on eBay or whatever the case may be. Emulex cards like this can be had for next to nothing and you can even get SFP plus switches that will allow you to connect a whole bunch of computers in a very traditional conventional network other than that they use different connectors. The only problem is the cabling is where you get killed. This is a direct attach copper SFP plus cable. And what makes this so expensive is that unlike ethernet, some of the signaling hardware is actually built into the ends of the cables themselves. So they cost much more than your standard ethernet cable that your ISP includes in the box with your modem. Well, that's got an obvious solution you might think. Why don't you just get 10 gig network cards like this one that use RJ45 connectors like this? Well, the problem is what you save in the cables, you end up spending on the adapters because 10 gig adapters are much more expensive. Bringing us finally to the subject of today's video, two and a half gig network adapters are getting cheap, cheap, cheap. This one from Trendnet is 50 bucks. You can find ones with a similar chipset for as low as 30 and Intel's I225V. So that's the kind of chip that you would see pre-integrated on the motherboard that you buy is said to be available for as little as a buck 50 or $2. 10 gig is just nowhere near reaching that level of affordability. So having an interim standard is a pretty big deal. Now let's go through the process of actually trying it out and seeing what the tangible real world benefits look like, shall we? Okay, so if people want to upgrade to this, do they have to upgrade the network in their house? So that's a good question. Some aspects of their existing networking will have to be upgraded. Like for example, their switch. So this is a multi gigabit switch. At this time, most of the switches out there are 10 gig switches that are also capable of two and a half or five gig. But in the future, I would expect costs to come down on pure two and a half gig switches. The one thing that will not need to be upgraded however, is the cabling. That's the beauty of two and a half gig is that it can use even cheapo cat five E and doesn't require the same cat six A that you need for 10 gig over RJ 45. Hey, look at that. Wow, that was simple. I didn't even need any drivers or anything. So I'm gonna delete those two folders from before and let's go ahead and see what the real world difference feels like. So here's my game copy coming in at a smokin' 279 megabytes a second, boy, I could get used to that. So that's closer to 10 or 15 seconds, which feels a lot different. And then now I'm gonna go ahead and copy over my nudes. So these are smaller files, which is why we're not able to see quite the same speeds, but we're still getting nearly double the transfer speeds that we could with a simple one gigabit network card. Not bad for a 30 to $50 upgrade. Well, they should do it, but maybe not quite yet. So the thing is this multi gigabit capable switch is gonna cost you around 500 bucks. That's the cheapest price that I can find for it. And there's two and a half gig ones that are coming that honestly aren't much cheaper. So we're so close, but not quite there yet. Of course, one of the key benefits of fast networking is that you don't have to copy everything to your desktop before you work on it. So here's 190 raw files. So each of these are about 110 megs. These are photos. You can see this process actually is not that networking heavy. But as we load up the entire image each time, that's going to change. Whoa, look at that. We spiked it over a gigabit. There it is again. So mostly we're in pretty good shape here, but we are definitely exceeding our previous one gigabit connection at times. So what would you say, Brandon? Is this pretty sufficient Lightroom performance? Even though we're working off of an As? This was not my winning picture. So you can see here when I'm loading up an individual picture, actually, this is a great example of where just a little bit faster than gigabit would come in handy. I'm not spiking over a gig, but when I cycle through my pictures quickly, we're gonna see spikes that are well in excess of one gigabit. Cool though, right? So here's a use case. Doesn't make the internet faster, but it sure makes scrolling through pictures in Lightroom faster. Now let's really punish it. I'm pulling up a project that was shot at 8K 10 to one on a red camera. And we're gonna see if our two and a half gig network can take the heat. All right, project's loaded up. So you can see scrubbing around in the footage. I'm never exceeding one gigabit. So that looks pretty good as long as we're only pulling key frames, but what if we actually try and play this back at one quarter quality here? You can see playback is smooth and look at that. So we could easily get away without upgrading to full 10 gig networking, but it's clear that if we wanna work with this kind of heavy footage, we do need to go over one gig if we wanna experience smooth playback while we're moving around on the timeline. And I haven't even gotten to one of the best things about these inexpensive two and a half gig chips. They're super low powered. So check this out. This is what a 10 gig laptop ethernet adapter looks like. It uses Thunderbolt 3, it's super expensive, it's bulky and it has gigantic heat sinks on it to take care of all the heat that the thing outputs. This is what a two and a half gig one looks like. So this is also from Trendnet. We're gonna go ahead and plug this in and see what the two and a half G experience is like on a laptop. Now, technically this is a Thunderbolt port, but it doesn't need to be. This would work with any USB type C port, not USB 2. I mean, it might work, but USB 2 is slower than two and a half gig LAN anyway. Well, look at that. It seems like it picked up right away. So let's go ahead and see how quickly we can transfer some files over here. Copy my nudes over. Gorgeous, 200 plus megabytes a second, just like that. And all of this is just today. Moving into the future, I could see in-home media or game streaming being able to take advantage of this additional bandwidth for better image quality. And some parts of the world are already running internet speeds in excess of one gig at residential addresses. So as North America and the rest of the world catches up to that, two and a half gig is gonna be the way to take full advantage of that. What, I don't really have anything else for you, except this message from our sponsor. The iFixit Mahi Driver Kit comes loaded with a hefty quarter inch aluminum driver with the magnetic bit socket. It's got a knurled handle for a no-slip textured grip and a silky smooth swivel top. The driver pairs with 48 quarter inch steel bits that are built to handle the toughest and torqueiest fasteners in any home or shop project. And every bit is held in place by a laser cut foam case with a magnetized lid that doubles as a parts and sorting tray. It's perfect for those who are prone to dropping the... Visit iFixit.com slash Linus and pick up the Mahi Driver Kit today. We're gonna have that link below. If you got some time to kill, maybe check out the video where we built up this affordable 4K video editing mask. This would be a perfect pair for your new two and a half G network. This thing's got 20 hard drives in it. It's quiet too.