The topic I connected my NAS directly to my PC with 10 gigabit Ethernet, and skipped upgrading… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
When it comes to enhancing your Network-Attached Server’s capabilities, you’ve got plenty of tweaks at your disposal. Copying essential datasets to offsite nodes (or even cloud platforms) is something I’d recommend all NAS owners to do regularly, as it ensures your precious files are retrievable in case of hardware failure.
But as far as increasing your NAS’ transfer speeds is concerned, upgrading your network stack is the fastest way to add some extra oomph to its read and write tasks, especially if you’ve armed your storage server with blazing-fast NVMe SSDs. Unfortunately, once you go past the 2.5GbE mark, the cost of networking equipment starts to become somewhat expensive. That said, if you don’t have the budget to grab ultra-fast switches and just need to share files at ultra-fast speeds between two devices, you can technically forgo the switch and just pair them together using a single Ethernet cable.
10GbE may be too overkill for normal setups, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything else
Unless you’ve got top-of-the-line hardware that already has 10-gigabit capabilities, you’ll need to grab a couple of products for your high-speed LAN setup. The NAS and the client device will require a 10G network card to avoid throttling the connection. Likewise, you’ll have to invest in Cat 6 (or Cat 6a, if you’ve got your devices scattered across a really large house) cables if you’ve got their slower predecessors.
If it were just the NICs and cables, a 10G setup wouldn’t be all that expensive. But what really makes 10G costly is the network switch, as the ones with enough 10GbE ports for your NAS server and clients can cost hundreds of dollars. For reference, I have a cheap LincStation N2 hybrid NAS with built-in 10GbE capabilities, so I only had to spend around $70 on a TX401 card for my PC and another $10 on the CAT6 cables.
The Zyxel network switch, on the other hand, cost me around $190 (with some extra bucks for shipping). I’d shortlisted another TP-Link model with only SFP+ ports, and had I chosen it instead, I’d have to spend even more money on the right adapters to pair it with my client machines. In such a situation, saving money by hooking a NAS directly to a PC makes sense, especially if most of your local storage, archival, and backup tasks involve a single rig.
Fortunately, the configuration process for a direct PC-to-NAS connection is fairly straightforward. Once I’d plugged one end of a Cat 6 cable into the 10GbE port on my PC and the other into my LincStation N2, I opened the TrueNAS web UI to modify the latter’s network settings. I assigned a static IP address and used the Test changes option to force TrueNAS to use these updated settings.
Then, I switched to my PC and headed to the Network settings within the Control Panel. Since I’ve got two network cards hooked to my PC, I chose the 10GbE NIC and modified its IP address to match the same subnet as my NAS, while leaving the 2.5G card built into my motherboard at the same subnet as the rest of my home network. And sure enough, I was able to access my SMB shares once I entered the new IP address of my NAS within File Explorer.
Let’s talk about why direct PC-to-NAS connections are frowned upon by the community. NAS units with a single NIC such as mine may remain connected to my PC, but they’ll be inaccessible to every other device in my LAN. My PC has two network interfaces, but if I were on a single port setup, I wouldn’t be able to access the Internet on my everyday rig, either. As such, I’d have to constantly swap the Ethernet cables and network settings.
Personally, I need my Xeon server to have the same 10G speeds, so I had no choice but to grab the network switch. But if you remove my home server from the equation, I’d only need the 10G capabilities to transfer TBs of files between my NAS and PC. Now, ditching the network switch isn’t something you’d want to do in a regular setup. But when you’ve got as many backups, videos, container data, and other bulky files as I do, it makes sense to save the uber-expensive switch for later and rely on a direct 10G connection between your PC and NAS in the meantime.