2x 10GBE actually. Plus four 40Gbps Thunderbolt ports.

I find that link aggregation is pretty much useless and/or unstable. Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. But seeing 10gbe becoming part of the standard spec is a really welcomed improvement. Not the least because it will drive prices down.

I'm not mad that it's 10GBASE-T, but I'd personally rather 10G over SFP+. The sorts of shops that can afford these probably already have some pretty burly networking infrastructure, and 10GBASE-T is both expensive and (IME) less reliable.

The encoding/decoding capacity of Ethernet-over-twisted-pair seems to be reaching a point of sharply diminishing returns and the hardware for 10GBASE-T is really expensive for what's been, in my experience, a less reliable experience than SFP+. I'd rather tell somebody who needs 10GBASE-T to use an RJ-45 adapter than to have to go grab yet another Mellanox card to stick in a computer this expensive.

But isn't SFP+ not compatible with 1G (i.e. can only be used with a 10G network equipment)? If you are selling a machine that people will plug into either a 1gbe or 10gbe network, you'd rather have some interface that can downgrade.

You can use SFP in an SFP+ socket, but not the other way around. The downgrade to 1GB would work fine. Since this is still a desk focused machine vs. datacenter, I'd expect most offices to be wired to cat6 ethernet which can do 10GB if needed vs. SFP+ cables or SFP+ to Fiber.

That, and I'd still expect an RJ-45 port somewhere.

Not always true, it needs explicit support for SFP as it's not backwards compatible.

You can find SFP+ modules that support both 10G and 1G.

>but I'd personally rather 10G over SFP+.

Is that the wrong way around? I'm struggling to parse otherwise.

Another way to say 10G via an SFP+ transceiver, as opposed to 10G via twisted pair.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_tr...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair

Read as s/over/on/

> Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do.

1 x 10 GbE for your regular Ethernet/IP traffic and 1 x 10 GbE for your storage traffic. You do run your network storage over a physically separate network, right?

I don't know. Intuitively I would have thought that a NAS that updates itself automatically, with SMB1 disabled, is less dangerous that a NAS that is in theory insulated from the internet but not patched for security vulnerabilities (since not connected) and connected to machines that are on the internet and could be infected.

I am not sure what “a physically separate network” means when it is used by the same computer. (Also, what about accessing your storage over WiFi? Or, you have to have cables strewn all over the place?)

For a lot of "pro" usage scenarios, the local environment will have one "LAN" that has Internet gateway, and various local services on it, plus a dedicated storage network using a separate switching infrastructure (and thus, separate NIC port on your machine).

WiFi is not really an option, for performance but also often for security reasons.

So yes, you'll have two cables from wall-jacks to the machine for networking.

> you have to have cables strewn all over the place?

Of course. WiFi isn't going to work in shared user environments that chew bandwidth for breakfast.

Not having to worry about the security issues of WiFi too can be helpful (depending on your security requirements).

I'm curious what your experiences are here. With enterprise-level networking equipment and LACP (802.3ad), I've never run into any weird issues.

I tried between two enterprise dlink switches, and also between a synology NAS and a dlink switch.

Link aggregation in general only provides performance with multiple connections to multiple machines, so using link aggregation between one client (Mac) and one NAS will like result in zero performance improvement (the packets will only use one of the cables). It only makes sense if you have two or more NAS that you want to access simulatenously (or two or more clients accessing the same NAS, but that wouldn't be a use case for 2x 10gbe port on a client).

Synology also supports balance slb bonding, which in theory goes around this single connection restriction. However I ran into some connection problems with some Windows clients. Never went to the bottom of them but they went away when I disabled the bonding.

In any case, it is hard to saturate a 10gbe connection with a single NAS, unless it is packed with SSDs, which I wouldn't assume for mass storage. So I am not sure there is much value in aggregating the links in the first place.

D-Link gear isn’t exactly what I’d judge networking standards on, they work I suppose but they’re hardly what I would install in even a small business office.

I have multiple LACP bonds on my Juniper EX2200 at home working without issue, though the single stream limits you mentioned are the one thing LACP can’t fix.

> enterprise dlink switches

"enterprise" DLink switches aren't really a thing yet, regardless of what their marketing team wants to brand them as. :(

Cisco, HPE, etc have "enterprise" switches. DLink might be in a decade.

> it is hard to saturate a 10gbe connection with a single NAS, unless it is packed with SSDs

No, it's just a matter of having enough spindles behind it.

As a rough guide, with a (say) average spinning rust HDD able to push out 100MB/s when reading, you'd only need 10 such drives to push out 1000MB/s (raw).

In the real world, you need extra spindles as some of the data being pushed out is just internal checksum/redundancy, and doesn't go over the network.

But for reading back large files in mostly sequential access, you'll hit 1GB/s from about 10 drives onwards pretty easily. More drives, more throughput.

I would defer to people with more enterprise hardware experience than me for serious NAS set ups, but my experience with various generations of 12 disks synology nas is that you loose a lot of performance to disk vibrations / inefficiencies of the raid implementation / sync between drives / tcp, etc. So I don't think it scales linearly. With a synology DS3615 and 12 HGST Helium drives in RAID5, I barely get over 1GB/s locally while each drive individually is capable of over 200MB/s sustained speed.

Yeah, no idea with Synology. When I was originally looking at NAS solutions, they (and QNAP) just seemed expensive for not much product.

Went with FreeNAS instead, as I was already very familiar with building systems, it's based on FreeBSD (OSS), and it gives better tuning on the higher end.

Doesn't have as pretty a GUI though. ;)

LACP does generally “just work”, the problem is when you want one machine or session to be able to max multiple links. The solution here remains the same as it always has - multipath. I hope Apple has added support for SMB multi-channel support for these users since I last checked.

Even without link aggregation (which does generally work quite well), this would allow you to have a dedicated SAN + network solution, which is often very useful.

Would be second interface be for a storage network?