This kinda falls somewhere in between home network and homelab territory, so I figured I would ask here. I tried searching and have some ideas but I’m wondering if there is something I’m missing.

The short explanation of things is that sometime in the next 6 months or so, I’ll be going through and wiring my entire old farmhouse for data. I plan on running Cat6a to every room, with a couple rooms having more than one wall jack. I also will end up running fiber in a few places to feed between my primary computer, a dual xeon workstation and a couple of servers (one hard drive based one for bulk storage and working as a jellyfin server that should just be able to saturate a 10gb connection, and one SSD based one that I probably dont really need the speed of…but I want it.)

Essentially, I need to find a switching solution that gets me at least 14 copper connections, with preference for at least some of them being faster than gigabit. At least 4 10gb copper connections, and on the want list, at least 2, preferably 4 faster fiber ports. I dont really care if the faster connections are 25 or 40gb, both are fine for my use case.

The real hard part for me is getting this all in a configuration that is reasonably quiet and power efficient when sitting at near idle. I have no problem with fans spinning up when under heavy load, but it can’t sound like a jet engine when all that’s happening is my girlfriend is streaming something and I’m playing a game.

Right now I’m looking at maybe a Brocade ICX6610, but that’s not quite ideal as I’d be stuck with most of my copper running Gigabit.

Is there anything else out there I should be looking at that can realistically be put together for say $500 or less that will do the job? If I have to sacrifice anything it would be the faster fiber connection. That is definitely a want not a need, and I’d give it up if that meant having the rest of the house wired for 10gbe across the board. I’d still like the option for fiber, but 10gbe would be satisfactory.

  • redezumpB
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    10 months ago

    I’d probably go used enterprise, but the problem is that copper SFP+ are generally pretty expensive. You’d probably have to go all 10GE Base-T with a couple of SFP ports.
    Is POE in your requirements also?

    • quietprepperOPB
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      10 months ago

      No need for POE. Realistically anywhere this is coming out I should have access to power if needed.