In a recent pursuit to have the fastest speeds possible at home, I have started to upgrade and replace a large section of my home network.

Ensuring That My Network Runs Fast at its Core

Barring the routing technologies at home the most crucial part of my network is my server, an old Dell Optiplex 780 salvaged from an office clear-out it now spends its days hosting my media, files and applications. One of the first things I did was replace all of the cabling around my network. Most being CAT5 the fastest speeds possible were only 100Mbps, this was a noticeable bottleneck when I checked iPerf3 as the switch its connected to, the router and my PC were all gigabit connected and clearly an oversight on my part. Replacing the cable from it to the switch instantly jumped the speed to gigabit. Yay!

Getting Rid of Old Hardware

Another decision I made was to remove some of my old hardware that was no longer up to the task of Gigabit+ speed. That for me meant swapping out a dumb switch capable of 100Mbps max for a new 8 port gigabit one, oddly I bought the 100Mbps one for £10 and sold it for £14 on Ebay so I guess theres money in old switches.

I then replaced its cables too and viola, 1 Gbps throughput on the whole wired network!

What does the future hold?

After looking at transfer speeds between my server and PC, I think the next step is to replace the Optiplex and my PC, as they are now at the point where their age is starting to be a performance problem, although they remain somewhat performant at their daily duties they are both starting to age poorly with the increasing demand from myself for hosting my projects.

I also want to try SFTP+ but I don’t yet have the SSDs or Hard-drives to necessitate it.