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 2 and 1/2 gig Ethernet to be any different but
there is a point to it and I'm going to show you guys not just what we can do
with 2 and 1/2 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 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's service plan so here I've got a network resource
that is a whole bunch of games from Good Old games.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 want to download them off the internet every
time I want to install one because that's pretty slow so I'm going to go
ahead and copy ano 1701 ad to my desktop
you can see right here with the onboard connection on this motherboard that is a
1 GB connection no matter how fast my network attached storage device is this
is going to 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 uh 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 n
definitely all nudes are 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 going to 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
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 ulex 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 C cost much more than your standard you know 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 2 and 1/2 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 i225 V 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
$2 10 gig is just nowhere near reaching
that level of affordability so having an interim standard is a pretty big deal
now let's go through the process of actually trying it out and seeing what
the tangible real world benefits look like shall we okay so if people want to
upgrade to this do they have to upgrade the network in their so that's a good
question some aspects of their existing networking will have to be upgraded like
for example their switch so this is a multi-gigabit switch at this time most
of the switches out there are 10 gig switches that are also capable of 2 and
1/2 or 5 gig but in the future I would
expect cost to come down on pure 2 and 1/2 gig switches the one thing that will
not need to be upgraded however is the cabling that's the beauty of 2 and 1/2
gig is that it can use even Cheapo cat 5e and doesn't require the same cat 6A
that you need for 10 gig over RJ45 hey
look at that wow that was simple I didn't even need any drivers or anything
so I'm going to delete those two folders from before and let's go ahead and see
what the real world difference feels like so here's my game copy coming in at
a smoking 279 megabytes a second well I could get
used to that so that's closer to 10 or 15 seconds which feels a lot different
and then now I'm going to go ahead and copy over my nudes so these are smaller
files which is why we're not able to see quite the same speeds but we're still
getting nearly double the transfer speeds that we could with a simple 1 GB
network card not bad for a$ 30 to $50
upgrade well they should do it but maybe not quite yet so the thing is this
multi-gigabit capable switch is going to cost you around 500 bucks that's the
cheapest price that I can find for it and there's 2 and 1/2 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 wo 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 1
GB connection at times so what would you say Brandon is this pretty sufficient
Lightroom performance even though we're working off of an AS yeah this 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 going to see spikes that are well in excess of
1 gab cool though right there's a use case doesn't make my internet faster but
it sure makes scrolling through pictures and Lightroom faster now let's really
punish it I'm pulling up a project that was shot at 8K 10 to1 on a red camera
and we're going to see if our 2 and 1/2 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 1 gbit 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 smoothing look at that so we
could easily get away without upgrading to full 10 gig networking but it's clear
that if we want to work with this kind of heavy footage we do need to go over 1
gig if we want to 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 2 and 1/2 gig chips they're super low powerered 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 2 and 1/2 gig one looks like so this is
also from trendnet we're going to go ahead and plug this in and see what the
2 and 1/ 12g 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 2 and2 Klan 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 new over
gorgeous 200 plus megabytes a second just like that and all of this is just
today moving into the future I could see inhome 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 1 gig at residential addresses
so as North America and the rest of the world catches up to that 2 and 1/2 gig
is going to be the way to take full advantage of that
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