Upgrading My Homelab to 10 Gbps

Table of Contents 1. Why 10 Gbps? 2. What I Was Running Before 3. The Hardware 3.1. Switch 3.2. NICs 3.3. Cabling 3.4. Cost 4. The Upgrade 5. Benchmarks 5.1. Before 5.2. After 6. Was It Worth It? 1. Why 10 Gbps? The short answer: fiber finally became available at my current residence, so I jumped on it immediately. The slightly longer answer is that I'd previously enjoyed proper 1 Gbps fiber, but for a while now I'd been stuck limping along on "1 Gbps" cable from Cox that, in reality, often crawled along at 100 Mbps regardless of what I did to fix it. New modem, new cables, different ports, calls to support - nothing mattered. It ran at whatever speed it felt like that day. So when Google Fiber showed up in my neighborhood, I ordered the 8 Gbps package immediately. I'll upgrade to their 10 Gbps package the moment it's released, but I'm not exactly suffering in the meantime. A quick note on the title before we go further: my internet is 8 Gbps for now, but this post is really about…