alt Hacker NewsTo transfer files? Like large virtual machines, huge video files. Backup their files quickly. To support a homelab to learn new skills. To stream uncompressed video. To download 300 GB monster games.
Some people can manage with slow network speeds at home, even though 100 Gbps single mode fiber is perfectly doable nowadays. And it's reasonable, because new SSDs do almost 120 Gbps.
1 Gbps made sense 20 years ago when single hard disks had similar performance. For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the same rate as the disks did.
But then again, I guess many could also still manage with 100 Mbps connectivity at home. Still enough for 4k video, web browsing and most other "ordinary" use cases.
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> For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the same rate as the disks did.
When it comes to wired, sending data 15cm is a very different problem than sending it 100M reliably - that and consumer demand for >1Gbps wasn't there which made the consumer equipment expensive because no mass market to drive it down, M.2 entirely removes the cable.
I figured 10Gbps would be the standard by now (and was way off) and yet its not even the default on high end motherboards - 2.5Gbps is becoming a lot more common though.
100Gbps over the LAN is unlikely to do you much good because not only is it expensive to get that kind of bandwidth end-to-end over the internet but most OS’ network stacks and protocols (HTTPS/etc) are not efficient enough to take advantage of it (you will be bottlenecked by the CPU). So there is very little consumer and even business (outside of datacenters) demand for it because even just sticking a 100Gbps NIC and pipe in a consumer machine is unlikely to give you any more than 10Gbps anyway.