Maybe once gigabit internet service becomes more widely available, but even for something like a consumer NAS you’re probably bottlenecked by something else no?
My hunch is that for most consumers, there's just no point in getting anything above 1 GbE today, even for their central switch. 1 Gbit/s is more than enough for 5x 4K video streams from their NAS, plus a very fast Internet connection at burst speed. What more do most people need on a regular basis?
Working with files on a network share? Though, I do all my photo editing that way and it feels local over 1gbe. I could see video editing benefiting from it. Pretty niche though.
Spinning HDDs are faster than this as well, 250-300 MB/s sequential read seems common per drive, and in a home setup you might have a couple of those in a RAID-1 giving 500-600 MB/s read BW.
Right, for 2x single stream sequential read throughput + redundancy I guess you need somehing like Linux f2 RAID10 mode. Otherwise reading every other stripe per disk would kill you due to seeks or 50% wasted readahead.
Well, seeing how large SSDs are still very expensive (in my mind it's €100 / TB), my hunch would be that if it makes sense for you to spend that much money on the drives, you probably won't really notice the price of a couple of 10 Gb network cards. They seem quite cheap on eBay if you're OK with used.
The Mikrotiks are pretty reasonably priced (though you need adapters to go to RJ45, and you can only populate every other port due to heat). But you're right, the low end of switches are generally 10-20x more expensive IME.
NAS with HDD and a boat load of RAM can easily saturate 10GbE NIC if you're using it as a media server. Most content on my NAS is cached and rarely touches the disk.
I checked performance on my server locally vs accessing the server as a NAS.
The simple spinning hard-drive was already faster than gigabit ethernet, and the NAS access speed was 90-95% of ethernet. So I am prerty sure that NAS is the bottleneck here. And this is on a WD-red 5400RPM harddrive, nothing special.
