Does 10G nics for home servers actually do anything? I have a gigabit router and the motherboard on my server is 2.5G. Wouldn’t the 10G be throttled once it hits the 1G router and then only send out that speed to all other devices? Would I actually be getting better speeds than what I pay for also?
From the sounds of it, you are using an AIO networking device, which combines routing, switching, and modem functions all in one. So yes, you are correct. Internet speeds AND local speeds between devices would be throttled to 1G.
If you want to make the switch to a full 10G network, which is really nice for up to 10Gbps internet and large local transfers, it’d be best to build a custom pfsense or opnsense router with 10G SFP+ NICs. Also, to “send out that speed” to all other devices locally, it’d be best to get a 10G SFP+ switch so that the router doesn’t do all the work. Personally, I have an 8 port Mikrotik SFP+ switch which works great for me.
Main point is, with a 10G network setup, you can get SSD speeds over the network for large file transfers like 4k movies if you want to upload to a media server. 10Gb/s (gigabits per second), or 1.25GB/s (gigabytes per second) is more than double 2x what most SATA SSDs get around 500MB/s. So you can even get PCIE 3.0 NVME speeds over the network, which is pretty cool.