I might have been lucky, but in the one home and one office were I've connected 10gbit switches and PCIe cards, it has just worked. Especially the office was a nice surprise, because it is at least 20 meters (probably more) of unknown cabling and at least one unknown patch panel between the utility closet where the NAS lives and the desk area. The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.

It is nice moving/streaming large files across the network at 10 gbit. It really is ten times less waiting than with plain old gigabit.

Of course, most of the time I'm working with lots of small files and then the spinning disk array in the NAS has no chance to saturated the this giant pipe, or even a normal gigabit connection...

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loeg 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5

FWIW, Cat 5e supplanted Cat 5 25 years ago.

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saltcured 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know when I was doing some custom wiring in a house around 2005-6, it was clear that cat-6e was the thing to use if you wanted any future-proofing.

So I bought a reel of that even though I was only going to be using 1000-BaseT. I don't remember there being too much premium on the wire itself.

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loeg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you mean Cat 6 or Cat 5e? Cat 6e isn't a thing and 6a didn't exist in 2006. 6 was certainly more future-proof at the time, although arguably 5e is still fine even today. (Super-gigabit consumer equipment didn't really exist until the last five years and it's till notably more expensive and less common than gigabit, which runs on 5e just fine.)

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saltcured 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Cat 6 for sure. I thought there was some extra tweak beyond that, but I probably misremembered after all this time. Perhaps it was just that it was plenum-rated..

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globular-toast 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You might be thinking of cat6a which officially supports 10G over long lengths, unlike cat6.

	▲	saltcured 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nah, it was definitely around 2006 which seems to be before cat 6a was ratified. So I couldn't have bought a reel marked that way...

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toast0 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.

Did you check the jackets? I've got Cat5 (no e) marked cable running 10gbaseT. A lot of cable exceeds the specs on its jacket and specified wire provides enough signal to noise for the provided length in dense conduit. When you have shorter runs, without dense wiring, lesser cable can work.

	▲	apelapan 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can't see the cable jackets. There's just outlets in the walls. I ask building management to make a link between outlet X and Y and then they make it happen via one or more patch panels that I don't know where they are. :-) People downthread has written, cat6 was already the goto thing 15+ years ago so perhaps that is what they put in when the office space was built. It is a well built office!

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kstrauser 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same. I ran CAT6 from one end of our house to the other, because my home office is in the opposite corner as the fiber coming in to the router. After running that, and manually crimping everything, it Just Worked from the first time I turned everything on. That felt pretty good.