All my stuff is running on a 6-year-old Synology D918+ that has a Celeron J3455 (4-core 1.5 GHz) but upgraded to 16 GB RAM.

Funny enough my router is far more powerful, it’s a Core i3-8100T, but I was picking out of the ThinkCentre Tiny options and was paranoid about the performance needed on a 10 Gbit internet connection

Same here in a Synology DS918+. It seems like the official Intel support numbers can be a bit pessimistic (maybe the higher density sticks/chips just didn’t exist back when the chip was certified?)

Most 720p TVs (“HD Ready”) used to be that resolution since they re-used production lines from 1024x768 displays

It would be to replace my 4-bay Synology DS918 NAS with something with more drive bays and 10 Gbit connectivity

I recently got upgraded to 10 Gbit fiber at home so I’ve been through researching this stuff.

With a 3G WAN, I’d go with a 2.5 Gbit LAN - 2.5G equipment is quite affordable now. The next step is 5G but that equipment is rare, and 10G starts getting expensive.

Do you know what router they’re giving you? What LAN ports does it have? Does it even have a 2.5 or 10G LAN port or only 1G ports?

USB 2.5G adapters are available new for cheap and I’ve had good luck with them, even using one on a Synology NAS with an open source driver.

The wiring is probably fine as long as you don’t have any very long runs. I’d keep it and only replace it if the links randomly drop down in speed to 1G.

2.5G switches also aren’t too expensive. You can get one with only a few ports for the devices that can make use a lot of bandwidth (PC/NAS/Server) and plug your current switch into it for all the 1G devices like TVs, game consoles etc. The PiHole definitely doesn’t need a fast connection.

There isn’t a standard that is broadly-adopted, but NUT (https://networkupstools.org/) has reverse-engineered drivers for nearly every UPS out there, usually each brand has their standard so as long as the brand is supported it will work. (NUT is also what TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, etc use internally for their UPS support)

I’ve had good luck with using NUT with APC UPSes (both consumer models and buying used enterprise rack-mount models).

One cool thing you can do with NUT is share the UPS state over the network, so that multiple machines can respond to the power state instead of just the machine that is plugged in via USB directly.

When I was following Synology communities closer, the common wisdom was that the expansion units weren’t great in either performance, stability or cost, and you were better off buying a new, bigger unit and then selling your old one used to recoup the cost difference.

I’m also in the same position, I have a DS918+ that is full. It’s also 6 years old and probably on the tail end of getting software updates so I’m weighing my choices…

It’s 6 years old now so I can’t really complain but even new ones don’t come with 2.5Gbe by standard, it seems that should be cheap enough to throw in there by now. At least a lot of the new ones can be upgraded internally to 10 Gbe.

It’s from a japanese Gacha machine! https://bitbang.social/@kalleboo/112755170852099746

Precisely, the rear ethernet is 1 Gbit, the USB adapter is 2.5 Gbit!

I just got 10 Gbit internet last week so I had a chance to tidy everything up. The ThinkCentre is the 10 Gbit router, the Synology actually hosts everything.

Also finally labeled all the mystery cables. Also replaced the proprietary 20V/12V bricks for the ThinkCentre and 10G Fiber ONU with USB-C adapter cables to keep things tidier.

Here are some results if anyone comes across this thread in the future.

The baseline result I need to achieve is a speedtest result of 7.5 Gbit that the ISP’s rental router gives me.

I ended up picking up:

• Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M720q, Core i3 8100T, 8 GB RAM ($70)
• Huawei SP310 (Intel X520-DA2/82599) dual 10 Gbit NIC ($20)
• 16x PCIe riser + Network Card Bracket ($20)

Initially I installed pfSense. I ran iperf3 to just get an initial sanity check that the PCIe card/wiring was working right but was getting results between 3-7 Gbit with the CPU pegging at 50%. Some quick googling returned results like “you can’t run iperf on pfSense!” and “pfSense isn’t a router, why do people keep using it as a router, it’s a firewall!”, so I decided to switch to OpenWRT since the Linux side of things always seems to make more sense.

On OpenWRT, iperf easily hit 9 Gbit with like the CPU at 95% idle.

It took like 2 hours to configure the weird IPIP6 tunnel my ISP uses for IPv4, but once it was set up, the machine has no trouble routing the same 7.5 Gbit speedtest the ISP router managed, with the CPU usage at 78% idle (the remainder in “sirq”)

Power consumption:

• ISP router draws a solid 16W both when it’s idle and when there is 7.5 Gbit of traffic
• The M720q draws 16W when idle and up to 29W when there is 7.5Gbit of traffic. This is with two copper SFP+
• This is without tweaking any power saving options in BIOS etc

I can only look at Mikrotik gear in jealousy since they don’t have a reseller here, so all that’s available are overpriced, un-warrantied gray imports…

Each one has been getting more efficient, not less

M4 Mac mini’s efficiency is incredible

Very interesting, thanks for the links

The low power consumption is one of the reasons I was attracted to the ThinkCenter M720q devices. It definitely wouldn’t be worth it if I had to build some tower PC or run a Xeon server!

The ISP router I’m getting is 10 Gbit (on WAN and one LAN port, the rest are 1 Gbit), but the configuration seems limited and it’s a $5/mo rental tacked onto the bill.

I think I can live without IDS/IPS, in all the time I used it on UniFi, it never gave me any actionable info, so hopefully that helps me with performance.

That’s interesting about the 10Gbit ethernet cards. Is that with something like a Mellanox or some other card? My NAS is going to be stuck on 2.5 Gbit since it’s just a Synology.

Thanks for the Intel x520 recommendation, those are looking like a much better deal right now than the Mellanox cards I was looking at.

Glad to hear it about the BSD networking!

I’m still trying to avoid the Xeons for power consumption reasons, hehe, although it would be a lot more fun for sure!

Yeah I’m not ordering anything until I have the connection up and running, which is why I opted to rent the ISP router to begin with, but looking at results online that others on the same ISP have posted, I can probably expect up to around 7 Gbit real-world so I’ve been thinking that I will at least want something better than the standard 1 Gbit or even 2.5 Gbit stuff out there, hence why I’m trying to research what the hardware requirements actually are!

These ThinkCenter M720q machines I’m looking at all seem to have a single PCIe 3.0 8x card slot, regardless of the CPU, and that seems to be all that the Mellanox ConnectX cards need according to their spec sheets, so hopefully that is good.

We also need to consider the practical aspects. Who mucks after the horses? Who feeds them? Do we need a stall? Does it need to be air conditioned in the summer/winter?