Quick Links
Are you tired of data transfers taking forever on your local network? I was, so I set out to figure out what networking upgrade made the most sense for both me and most people. I started by thinking about 10 gigabit, but quickly realized that 2.5 gigabit networking is the true sweet spot in 2025.
Gigabit Networking Is Becoming Slow for Local Networks
Back in the mid-1990s, 100Mb/s networking, also known as Fast Ethernet, was the fastest networking available. However, it only stayed around for about three years before Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mb/s) took over as the standard.
Since 1999, Gigabit Ethernet has been the industry standard for home networking. Many internet service providers offer internet speeds of gigabit, too. It has become ubiquitous in our modern age.
Gigabit Ethernet is now 26 years old, as hard as that might be to believe.
If you think about how much data we had to move back in 1999 when Gigabit Ethernet was released compared to now, it’s honestly mind-blowing that we’re still using it as a standard. The average hard drive size in 1999 was somewhere between 4GB to 20GB. By 2005, the average hard drive size was between 160GB to 500GB.
Now? My desktop has 8TB of NVMe storage (which has transfer speeds many magnitudes greater than Gigabit Ethernet is capable of). My home server sitting next to me has 60TB of storage.
Wi-Fi 7 is capable of multi-gigabit transfer speeds. In fact, I have a Wi-Fi 7 router that’s plugged into my server over 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, and I was able to achieve faster than two gigabit transfer speeds to the server—all without a single wire.
Our storage (and storage moving) needs have grown exponentially, and wireless networking is advancing so fast, so why hasn’t our wired networking grown too? Well, it’s starting to, but it’s a slow transition—almost as slow as Gigabit Ethernet in 2025.
10 Gigabit Networking Is Quite Expensive to Dive Into (and Overkill)
Given my home networking setup, earlier this year, I was ready to make the move away from Gigabit Ethernet to something faster for my internal computers. For my home’s internet plan, I am still locked at gigabit, so there’s no need to worry about a faster outside connection just yet.
My search began when I picked up some servers that had 10-gigabit networking cards already installed. I thought to myself, “We jumped from 100Mb/s to 1000Mb/s so that the next natural jump would be to 10000Mb/s, another magnitude of 10.”
However, that’s just not feasible in standard home environments. Yes, there are 10-gigabit networking switches out there, but they’re justextremely expensive. Designed more for enterprise setups, most 10-gigabit switches are also fairly complicated to set up and configure for the home user.
Honestly, though, 10 gigabit networking is a bit overkill. While NVMe drives have reached insane speeds of over 14GB/s, a 10-gigabit network connection tops out at around 1.25GB/s. This might seem like even 10 gigabit wouldn’t be enough, but it’s rare to transfer from one NVMe drive to another over a network.
Unifi Pro XG 8 PoE
The Unifi Pro XG 8 PoE switch provides 155W of PoE++ power across its eight 10Gb/s Ethernet ports. There are also two 10Gb/s SFP+ ports for uplinking the switch to other networking gear.
More often than not, you’ll betransferring files from your computer to a network attached storage serverof some sort. Sometimes there’s aSSD cachethere for faster speeds, other times there’s not.
Either way, 10 gigabit is far too expensive for normal installations for little-to-no massive gain. Let’s say you’re moving 50GB of files from your desktop to a network storage server with an NVMe drive. On a Gigabit connection, with perfect transfer rates and no throttling, the file would move in six minutes and 40 seconds. At 10 gigabits, that file would move in just 40 seconds.
However, there’s a stepping stone that’s faster than gigabit, but not nearly as expensive as 10 gigabit: 2.5 gigabit, which would move that same 50GB file in just under three minutes.
2.5 Gigabit Networking Is Affordable, Easy to Do, and Provides 2.5x the Transfer Speeds
At first, I was a little leery of the benefits of 2.5 gigabit networking. It’s only 2.5x faster than gigabit, not 10x, so how good could it really be? I was actually quite surprised.
After finding out that 10 gigabit networking was simply out of reach for my setup, I turned to 2.5 gigabit and found it to be much more affordable.
I settled on theUnifi Switch Flex Mini 2.5G, which offers five total 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports (one of which can power the unit with Power over Ethernet).The 2.5-gigabit switch was actually affordable compared to the10-gigabit switchesI was looking at from Unifi, and it had just the right number of ports for me.
Unifi Flex Mini 2.5G Switch
The Unifi Flex Mini 2.5G Ethernet Switch is a fully-managed network switch delivering multi-gig speeds. It works both standalone or with a Unifi Network Controller, making it a versatile option for your network setup. You get an included USB-C power adapter, though the switch can be powered over PoE+ from the upstream switch.
Ethernet cards are also relatively affordable at 2.5 gigabit speeds, too.My desktop already had 2.5 gigabit Ethernet on it, as many motherboards come with that as a standard now, so I only had to outfit my servers themselves with 2.5 gigabit cards, which cost me about $20 each,buying them used on Amazon.
TP-Link 2.5G PCIe Network Card (TX201)
The TP-Link TX201 is a 2.5Gb/s network card that installs in a PCIe slot on your computer. Designed to deliver multi-gig networking, this add-in NIC is perfect for upgrading your desktop, server, or NAS for faster networking. The slim profile suits even 1U servers, and you’ll get both a normal and low-profile mounting bracket in the box. It supports networking speeds of 2500/1000/100, meaning it’s backward compatible with standard Gigabit and Fast Ethernet connections too.
After moving my servers and desktop to 2.5 gigabit networking, I was actually very impressed with the speed improvement. As I mentioned, a 50GB file moves in just under three minutes, compared to nearly seven minutes at gigabit speeds.
Recently, I migrated server hardware, and that caused me to have to move around 70GB of data from one machine to another. Since I have both systems linked over 2.5 gigabit, I was able to complete this data transfer in about five minutes or so. That’s shy of the “ideal” transfer speed of 2.5 gigabits, which would move that data in just under four minutes.
However, given the many variables there and the fact that it was virtual machine to virtual machine, I was very happy with five minutes. At standard gigabit, that data transfer would have taken around 10 minutes in a perfect scenario, meaning that realistically, it would have probably taken 12 to 15 minutes.
All in all, 2.5 gigabit networking is the upgrade that I think most people should make the jump to. 10 gigabit is nice and all, but it’s just unobtainable for the masses. Whether you have a homelab setup or are just wanting to make backups faster on your home network, it’s time to leave Gigabit Ethernet in the past and fully embrace multi-gigabit networking.
If you really want to get the most out of your network-attached storage system and 2.5 gigabit networking, then you’ll want tomake sure your NAS has a cacheset up.
I actually went a non-traditional way when I built my own NAS. Instead of buying a pre-configured system,I turned to eBay and Unraid to build my own storage server.My powerhouse of a system can house 12 3.5-inch drives alongside as much SSD storage as I can throw at it, fully taking advantage of 2.5 gigabit networking right now, and eventually 10 gigabit when I get to that point.
