Network Upgrade Journey

[Wade_Oram]

16 months ago, I started subscribing to Roon and added an ARCAM ST60 and a NUC11TNHi7 to my network in the lounge (connected to the same 8 port 1GBe switch as my TV, BluRayHDD recorder and 4Kplayer). At the time, ethernet was distributed around my house using a high performance homeplug (2400Mbps nominal). The router and all swithes (including those in the home plug devices) were limited to 1Gbps).

Subsequently, I added three Raspberry Pis for additional audio endpoints. At that time, my network looked like:

The use of the homeplug devices worked and Roon was pretty reliable. It should be noted, however, that I was careful to ensure that the commonly used Roon Endpoints were connected to the Roon Server using wired ethernet so that, at least when streaming to those local endpoints, the Ethernet over mains was only used to stream from Qobuz or Tidal to the Roon Server.

Early this year, I experimented by replacing the HomePlug in the lounge with a long (50m) cat 6 cable. As well as improving the general network connectivity when using my laptop in the lounge, giving me full 1gbps full duplex connectivity between my laptop in the lounge and my NAS. As a side effect of this minor upgrade, I found the Roon search experience to be improved.

Consequently, my ‘experiment’ became more permenant than I originally intended. But I really did not want the cable trailing around in my house so I have embarked upon a network upgrade.

Firstly, I upgraded my Router and the the network switches that I use and then, just this last week, I have completed running CAT6 ethernet cabling (no need for CAT 6A or higher because the cable runs are all less than 20-25m and so CAT6 will support 10Gbps ethernet). My network now has no HomePlug devices in sight ( ). It now looks like this:

It has to be said that this latest upgrade has made little additional advantage to Roon but, the performance accessing my NAS from the various computers around the house is now much better and when I now upgrade the network connectivity to my NAS to 10Gbps ethernet (as I intend to do shortly), I should see my NAS performance improve dramatically again.

[Graeme_Finlayson (The Mad Scientist)]

Ethernet over mains is never as good as a Cat6 cable. Neither is Wi-fi, no matter whether it’s the new 6 or even newer 7.

That’s why I’ve cabled my house to death in Cat6. Not an easy undertaking, but given the amount of work I’ve done in the house and the amount of rewiring I’ve had to do to fix a previous owner’s very sketchy DIY, adding Cat6 ethernet jacks all around the house was a no-brainer.

The spec for Cat6 is 55m at 10GBASE-T, so you shouldn’t have any problems at all over your runs.

I’ve been running my NAS over a 20Gbps 802.3ad dual fibre LAG for a few years now. Nothing I do can remotely begin to scratch the surface of that connection!

Even if you don’t REALLY NEED it, upgrading to 10GbE is worthwhile, especially when it’s cheap and easy. Think of it as future-proofing your network!

[anon82078429]

I did the same in my house, while renovating it, having CAT6 everywhere.
Like you said «no brainer».

[Wade_Oram]

As I suggested I would earlier, my synology DS1019+ has now been replaced with DS1522+ with 10Gbe mini pcie card.

Now my wired network looks like:

The NAS upgrade has proved well worth it. Before with the 1019+ and 2x1Gbe links aggregated with 802.3ad LACP I was able to get a sustained maximum network network throughput of about 1.5Gbps (nowhere near the 2 x 1Gbps because of the issue of out of order packet arrivals causing retransmission). This equated to practical read/write performance being limited to about 150-160MBytes/s.

Now with the 10Gbe link to the NAS, I can get reads/writes of up to 265MBytes/s (limited by the 2.5Gbe link to the individual PC’s) and I can still get ~200GByte/s to each PC when two 2.5GBe PC’s are reading from the NAS at the same time. This is a quite dramatic improvement in performance and I would considere the addition of the 10Gbe ethernet interface improvement over the bonded 2 x 1Gbe connection (or even 4 x 1 Gbe on the 1522+) to be well worth the moderate additional expenditure over the cost of the 1522+ alone.

Significantly, it means that no one PC is able to saturate the NAS. Although I have not done it, it now becomes practical to use the NAS to hold my local music library and still use Roon with no issues when I am conducting other NAS intensive activities (like batch RAW photo editing/processing and video editing directly off of NAS storage - which are themselves now quite feasable when previously they would have been bordering on painfully slow).

I now consider this to be a well balanced network with the network backplane and the connection to the shared storage being 10Gbps and every other wired device having a 2.5Gbe connection available. Whilst I have learnt better than to say ‘never’, I can’t see me needing to upgrade my network any time soon.

[Wade_Oram]

One final optimisation of my network. I have utilised a spare 8 port 1Gbps switch to allow my to extend my 10Gbps backplane to the switch to which my laptop and the Raspberry Pi that runs my headphone station are connected. The wired network now looks like:

Note: I should have said in my earlier post that the link between the switch serving my Roon Server and the switch serving my Laptop and RPi headphone station is quite long (I’m actually using a slightly too long 10M flat CAT6 cable running under the carpet around the edge of the room). All switches are fanless for completely silent operation.

I can now use the full bandwidth available to any of the devices (except the NAS) for local network connectivity without saturating links to the extent that other devices may be starved of bandwidth.

Whilst the NAS is still capable of sending/receiving the full 10Gbps that my network supports, in practise, since it is used primarily as a file server, it never will because it is limited by disk IO.