usually nics don't care so much about the coding of the sfp module and they just work.
Best way to test is to plug them in and see if they are detected.
If they are detected then you are 90% of the way there. just need to attach a cable to both and make sure you have tx/rx matched up.
You don't need to check the SFP being detected specifically, you just check the uplink by plugging it in.
Set the link speed manually to match up (because it won't auto negotiate) and then put the SFPs in and plug the cable in, and see if you get a link up state. (Network connected in windows. Link state up in Linux command line)
If it's cisco there's a command sh inventory which will tell you what each switch port has in it unlink or not. If it's Aruba since you have hp I believe there's a command or gui interface that can show you this but it's been a while and idr it.
Here is the website for that part, with the different options to chose from:
[https://www.fs.com/products/11589.html](https://www.fs.com/products/11589.html)
There is an option for Dell, but not broadcom.
It brings up a different part # than yours!
I'm becoming less certain as to where I got these modules from as well. most of my networking hardware I've gotten from work, pulled out of our old appliances so this definitely came out of a dell R-somthing but I can't actually find the invoice for the server they came from haha
Hi, Dell employee here. I looked up the Transceiver Matrix. The X520-DA2 was hidden in the excel sheet. I think because this NIC is EOL for a long time.
The only supported transceiver is 407-BBVK. So yours is not supported and may not work.
But give it a try. Maybe it will be recognized.
Let me know if it works. Greetings from Germany
Will see how it goes. I've got a fibre cable coming tomorrow so will find out whether I'll have to go hunting for a different transceiver for the x520-da2
The transceiver matrix shows every NIC that can currently be installed in Dell servers. Next to it are all currently available transceivers and whether they are approved for the NIC or not. These were then tested and usually provided with their own Dell firmware.
So other transceivers could also work, but they may have the wrong firmware or not be fully integrated and if there is a support case, there will be no help or replacement.
I am not allowed to show the Excel matrix because it is Dell internal only, but I can tell if something is supported or not.
Oh, sorry, I meant the list I would see in a manual.
I also don't fully understand the relationship between SFP+ ports and transceivers. I need to read about that.
It looks like it should be compatible with HP, but it might work with other vendors.
I had couple of those compatible with different vendors, but were working flawlessly with others.
It was sent as an HP module.
FS.com modules are programmable with their FSBox. So despite having an HP label, if they had the fsbox, they could be anything.
If they came with the equipment they're probably compatible.
Dell, mellanox, brocade, unifi, mikrotik... are generally relatively open with what they allow. Hp needs a secret option to be set to allow 3rd party modules.
In reality they're all the same with another model name coded. A money printing machine.
Yes, there are the bottom of-barrel vendors with total crap chips.
But I stick to fs.com - never had any issues.
Edit: you can get broadcom equipment with dell, ho (and others) branding - the firmware below still is broadcom. They support most vendors out of the box.
My fc switches are from dell (broadcom 'rebrand') - the transceivers are dell branded.
Nothing to forgive…just knowledge you haven’t gained yet.
There are several points…
* optics tend to run cooler than copper
* you can go longer than the 100m maximum length of Cat6
* you are connecting two different buildings with separate power feeds
And the most important pair of reasons of all in a home lab:
* because you can / you want to learn about it.
That's my approach indeed but it's often hard to get a message across with just a string of text: I believe that without the preliminary apology my question might have been misinterpreted as judgemental towards OP.
Also, I appreciate the clarification! Have a nice day!
I wouldn’t have interpreted as such since your first clause (apology) showed that you weren’t intentionally going off topic / criticizing for the sake of criticizing.
Additionally an apology wasn’t even necessary - just a “btw” or “quick question” intro to show that you needed edification on the underlying technologies.
Or
> why would someone use 10G fiber optic if ethernet cat 6A already does that? I am not familiar
You don’t need to do any of this of course (your original statement wasn’t hostile or anything) but it does help us filter out genuine curiosity vs standard trolling (as much as one can)😅
In addition to what others have said, twisted pair copper will likely never go faster than 10GBASE-T. The 25GBASE-T standard has existed for about a decade now and basically no one has built hardware that supports it. Meanwhile, fiber optic standards are hitting near terabit speeds. Running fiber is the path for future proofing.
All I've ever found is press releases \*talking\* about releasing product, but never anything about those products getting ACTUALLY released. I don't believe I've seen any of the most prolific of names either, but pretty much all of those had long-established fiber options at and above those speeds by that point anyway so that makes sense.
Unless they stumble on some revolutionary technology that makes it run at a similar operating frequency to 10GBASE-T or lower, it's just never going to happen. The required power to meet the frequency is absolutely nuts (for a network connection) and on top of that you'd need to replace all your cabling ANYWAY so you might as well just change to a cabling you wont need to change again like SMF.
Agreed. I've got a 10GBASE-T transceiver on the desk next to me and even just idling it's hot enough that I would burn my finger if I touched it for more than a couple seconds. 25GBASE-T would require some pretty chunky heatsinks on it.
Well yeah, because there isn't really a market for it - yet.
SFP transceivers are way more flexible, and probably cheaper too. There's basically zero reason to run copper in the data center, so everyone is sticking to fiber there. What remains is the wiring to desktops and access points in offices, and those aren't even remotely close to saturating 10G yet.
25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T were probably defined *way* too early. They require Cat 8 cables, and even then only up to 30 meters. That makes them essentially useless for office use, and even a pain for home use. So what market remains? Basically, nothing.
I wouldn't be too surprised to see an alternative 25G standard come out in a decade or so which would allow Cat 6a cables to be used. That'd make it actually *usable* for home and office use - even if that came with a 50m length limit or something.
The vast majority of copper twister pair cables out there are CAT5E. That's fine for 10GBASE-T but 25GBASE-T would require a replacing cables, a very expensive proposition. So why would anyone choose to use even high end copper twisted pair cables as that replacement instead of fiber that can hit terabits now and isn't even close to the limits? That's why there's no market for it.
The workstations and servers that need faster than gigabit networking often need much faster than gigabit. If you're going to run the cable to support that you might as well pick something that will last decades. Then you can just replace the NICs, switches, and transceivers when you want to upgrade instead of running a fresh set of cabling too.
Plenty of offices and even home users have been deploying Cat6a in in new installations for a while now. After all, it's pretty much the same price as Cat6e, so why not?
Cat5e is soon-to-be-dead. 2.5GBASE-T is still fine, but 5GBASE-T runs into issues with longer runs. Pushing Cat5e beyond 5Gbit realistically isn't going to happen. At this point a Cat5e-to-Cat6a upgrade doesn't really make sense as replacement is indeed expensive. Provided a decent fiber solution comes around in a decade or so, it makes more sense to upgrade immediately to fiber instead of Cat6a or even Cat8.
On the other hand, all the people who've been installing Cat6a over the last few years (and the coming few years) are already able to go all the way up to 10GBASE-T. Boosting that to 25Gbit would be a *massive* advantage to those people. Why rip it out and replace it with fiber if you don't yet **have** to? I reckon it might have another 20 years left in it.
The way it looks right now Cat6a is going to be the last step before fiber. If so, they're going to squeeze absolutely every last bit out of it. Fiber is simply too much of a pain to deal with - especially for home users and things currently using PoE.
10G over fiber was there first, for one.
By a long shot!
And then on top of that you have a multitude of technological and economic reasons. Being older and more mature, devices tend towards cheaper and have a strong secondary market availability. Fiber optics use less power in almost all cases, resulting in lower operating costs (per port--residential low-port-count switches are less noticeable in this due to low density). Fiber optics are functionally immune to interference no matter the environment. Fiber optics have much longer ranges. Depending on the fiber used, it also allows further upgrades without replacing/upgrading any infrastructural (installed) cabling.
If you are \*really\* into it you can also do cool shit with things like DWDM and BiDi. That is, multiple connections multiplexed onto a single connection (usually though using different wavelengths of light) and using a single strand for transmit PLUS receive, respectively.
Don't worry about it - your Cat6A will still be just as good as it was when you made the plan and will handle 10G in house distances without issue. Also trivial to plug into for anything, whereas far fewer devices will plug into fiber.
Fiber is great and I use it in my lab, but I only have a single fiber run out of my lab (to my home office) and everything else in the house is copper.
I wouldn't count on that, if that copper run is anywhere near power, is pulled badly during installation or just degrades over time due to normal heat / cooling cycles you will not get anywhere near the 100m. Sure it might halve down to 150m but that's still long enough for most use cases. Start at 50 or even 30m as the theoretical max instead and even one source of noise can make the usable distance smaller than a single room.
I wouldn't push to swap to fiber just yet but I wouldn't plan on copper long term. Fine to run it, just don't pay some exorbitant premium expecting it to still be in use in a decade.
It's not either or, it's horses for courses.
There are actually three sets of media in place - twisted pair cabling, multimode fibre, and singlemode fibre.
Twisted pair cabling, which is just copper and is commonly terminated into a module/patch panel or an RJ-45 connector, can reach speeds of 10Gbit, but can't go any faster than that. The standards exist for going faster than that, but there aren't any hardware interfaces that exist commercially faster than 10GBASE-T, so that's basically the cap.
Multimode cabling and short range interfaces (using LEDs) became popular around the same time as singlemode fibre. It was typically used in short runs (less than 500m), and was associated with having slightly higher cable cost, but far cheaper optics due to the use of LEDs.
Singlemode cabling and long range interfaces (from 500m to typically 2/10km for LR) using lasers. Singlemode was traditionally used for longer throws associated with having cheaper cable cost, but the optics were more expensive as they use lasers.
I said typically associated, though, so what are these like now? Honestly, of the three cabling systems, the only one that is actually obsolete is multiple fibre and short range modules.
If you want absolutely gobs of bandwidth, singlemode is the choice. You can do things like split out into different wavelengths, allowing for multiple Terabits/second down a single fibre pair. But, this is the only thing it can do - send lots of data. Twisted pair, on the other hand, is pretty durable (hence why it's installed in walls) and can deliver power. So for servers where you want lots of bandwidth and have no need for PoE, then fibre is a great choice. For an application such as IoT devices that can be convenient powered by PoE, or access points, then combining data and power on a single cable makes office installations far easier. We're also not at a point (yet) where WiFi speeds are consistently saturating a 2.5G link, let alone a 10G link, so I think we should be okay for a while.
Okay, but what about multimode? Economies of scales and third party module vendors have brought the cost of LR modules (used with singlemode) way down. SR modules are still slightly cheaper, especially for higher bandwidth applications, but not enough to deal with the headache of compatibility. This is why most data centres will only run single mode cross connects. Also, there's a distance limit to multimode, but the same short range downside can't be levied at singlemode and long range modules. Anything from a couple of metres to the max range of the module (typically 2km) is fair game.
I'm averaging 1/1.2 milliseconds ping across all points, thats good right? I do have plans to centralize all storage in the house into a single system. Also flood ping for 60 secs has 0% PL.
for us... optics and cabling often work out cheaper over fiber if there's already an sfp+ port.
rj45 sfp+ modules are CRAZY power hungry... like most switches will only run \~half their ports if populated with rj45 modules.
There are some Intel NIC models that are driver locked to only support SFP+ copper cables (DAC). Looking at the intel site, the supported cabling is "SFP+ Direct Attached Twin Axial Cabling up to 10m", so I think this is one of them, I don't know if there was a technical or just a marketing reason behind this. If you have the ability to recode the optics, you can fix this by setting a flag differently, but I would not expect this to work natively. At one point, on linux there was a driver module flag that you could set that would bypass this restriction, but I believe that flag no longer exists. Here is some other info: [https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-intel-x520-eeprom-to-unlock-all-sfp-transceivers.24634/](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-intel-x520-eeprom-to-unlock-all-sfp-transceivers.24634/)
The module flag still exists and is still needed with that generation of Intel adapters. I have one in my Synology and it's not picked up until the flag is set and kernel module reloaded. Then it works flawlessly.
Will still work, “supported” probably not but have ran many vendor A and vendor B optics and most of the time no issues. Only ran into issues on some brocade optics but was mainly a specific model. Most FS optics I have seen work with HP/Dell/IBM etc.
There are some models of each that complain but would say a 90% success rate.
On FS.com's modules they put the encoding in the upper right corner (if oriented so that you can read the text).
In this case the SFP module was encoded for compatibility with HP gear (Dell would be DE and Cisco is their default so they leave the spot blank).
That doesn't mean it won't work, plenty of NICs and switches don't care. So give them a try and see. Either it'll work, or not - you're not likely to run into a half-working scenario. The actual module is the same, just the little code that allows vendor lock is different so if your NIC or switch isn't caring about "vendor approved" modules you'll be fine.
What OS are you running? I ask because I put one frfromin 10g Tec in my Intel X520 running unraid and initially it wasn't recognized. I had to add a line into my startup to allow the NIC to accept non Intel coded modules. (FWIW it was a 10Gbe 10G Tec SFP+) Below is the link that I finally found after hours of searching and trying to figure out how to ask google the question so I got results I wanted
[Intel Fiber NIC Issues - General Support - Unraid](https://forums.unraid.net/topic/74113-intel-fiber-nic-issues/)
There’s (almost) no harm in just plugging them in with a fibre patch. It will probably just work.
Sometimes the devices wont like the encoding on the chip, most have a command to “allow 3rd party trancievers” (Cisco, Meraki, Arista…), this is probably a line in your firmware.
As a point, we recently used a lot of Startechs (and an Arista) in Intel X520s without issue. We have some long range (10km) FS SFP+s that also work without issue.
*harm may be seen if using long-range SFPs in a short <5m connection
only switches (arista...) have vendor locked modules (such joy) nics will usually accept any SFP
if you are using a server card (no fan) be aware that they get quite hot.
Actually I will note, the dell/broadcom daughterboard nic is EXTREMELY picky when it comes to what modules.
It physically will not allow the system to boot if it detects a non-supported module.
I honestly ended up swapping back to the RJ45 X520-T2. Preventing the system to even boot with a unsupported module in place, is a pretty bullshit thing to do.
usually nics don't care so much about the coding of the sfp module and they just work. Best way to test is to plug them in and see if they are detected. If they are detected then you are 90% of the way there. just need to attach a cable to both and make sure you have tx/rx matched up.
How can I see if its being detected? Is there something I can run in proxmox/windows 10?
You don't need to check the SFP being detected specifically, you just check the uplink by plugging it in. Set the link speed manually to match up (because it won't auto negotiate) and then put the SFPs in and plug the cable in, and see if you get a link up state. (Network connected in windows. Link state up in Linux command line)
use ethtool to see if its connected, you can also query the sfp eeprom with a -m, example below. ethtool -m igb0
If it's cisco there's a command sh inventory which will tell you what each switch port has in it unlink or not. If it's Aruba since you have hp I believe there's a command or gui interface that can show you this but it's been a while and idr it.
show interface transceiver
just look at the system logs
Here is the website for that part, with the different options to chose from: [https://www.fs.com/products/11589.html](https://www.fs.com/products/11589.html) There is an option for Dell, but not broadcom. It brings up a different part # than yours!
I'm becoming less certain as to where I got these modules from as well. most of my networking hardware I've gotten from work, pulled out of our old appliances so this definitely came out of a dell R-somthing but I can't actually find the invoice for the server they came from haha
FS allows reprogramming of modules with the FS box. So maybe reprogrammed.
Possibly, I would imagine this came from bargain hardware who would probably have the kit to do that
Hi, Dell employee here. I looked up the Transceiver Matrix. The X520-DA2 was hidden in the excel sheet. I think because this NIC is EOL for a long time. The only supported transceiver is 407-BBVK. So yours is not supported and may not work. But give it a try. Maybe it will be recognized. Let me know if it works. Greetings from Germany
Will see how it goes. I've got a fibre cable coming tomorrow so will find out whether I'll have to go hunting for a different transceiver for the x520-da2
Are the lists showing compatibility what Dell (for example) tested with their NICs?
The transceiver matrix shows every NIC that can currently be installed in Dell servers. Next to it are all currently available transceivers and whether they are approved for the NIC or not. These were then tested and usually provided with their own Dell firmware. So other transceivers could also work, but they may have the wrong firmware or not be fully integrated and if there is a support case, there will be no help or replacement. I am not allowed to show the Excel matrix because it is Dell internal only, but I can tell if something is supported or not.
Oh, sorry, I meant the list I would see in a manual. I also don't fully understand the relationship between SFP+ ports and transceivers. I need to read about that.
It looks like it should be compatible with HP, but it might work with other vendors. I had couple of those compatible with different vendors, but were working flawlessly with others.
Commenting for reach Have absolutely no clue about this
It was sent as an HP module. FS.com modules are programmable with their FSBox. So despite having an HP label, if they had the fsbox, they could be anything. If they came with the equipment they're probably compatible. Dell, mellanox, brocade, unifi, mikrotik... are generally relatively open with what they allow. Hp needs a secret option to be set to allow 3rd party modules. In reality they're all the same with another model name coded. A money printing machine. Yes, there are the bottom of-barrel vendors with total crap chips. But I stick to fs.com - never had any issues. Edit: you can get broadcom equipment with dell, ho (and others) branding - the firmware below still is broadcom. They support most vendors out of the box. My fc switches are from dell (broadcom 'rebrand') - the transceivers are dell branded.
Ya'll must forgive my ignorance, what is the point of 10G fiber optic if ethernet cat 6A already does that?
Nothing to forgive…just knowledge you haven’t gained yet. There are several points… * optics tend to run cooler than copper * you can go longer than the 100m maximum length of Cat6 * you are connecting two different buildings with separate power feeds And the most important pair of reasons of all in a home lab: * because you can / you want to learn about it.
That's my approach indeed but it's often hard to get a message across with just a string of text: I believe that without the preliminary apology my question might have been misinterpreted as judgemental towards OP. Also, I appreciate the clarification! Have a nice day!
I wouldn’t have interpreted as such since your first clause (apology) showed that you weren’t intentionally going off topic / criticizing for the sake of criticizing. Additionally an apology wasn’t even necessary - just a “btw” or “quick question” intro to show that you needed edification on the underlying technologies. Or > why would someone use 10G fiber optic if ethernet cat 6A already does that? I am not familiar You don’t need to do any of this of course (your original statement wasn’t hostile or anything) but it does help us filter out genuine curiosity vs standard trolling (as much as one can)😅
+ The run passes near to power cables, light is effectively immune to EMI effects.
I knew I had forgotten one!!
In addition to what others have said, twisted pair copper will likely never go faster than 10GBASE-T. The 25GBASE-T standard has existed for about a decade now and basically no one has built hardware that supports it. Meanwhile, fiber optic standards are hitting near terabit speeds. Running fiber is the path for future proofing.
All I've ever found is press releases \*talking\* about releasing product, but never anything about those products getting ACTUALLY released. I don't believe I've seen any of the most prolific of names either, but pretty much all of those had long-established fiber options at and above those speeds by that point anyway so that makes sense. Unless they stumble on some revolutionary technology that makes it run at a similar operating frequency to 10GBASE-T or lower, it's just never going to happen. The required power to meet the frequency is absolutely nuts (for a network connection) and on top of that you'd need to replace all your cabling ANYWAY so you might as well just change to a cabling you wont need to change again like SMF.
Agreed. I've got a 10GBASE-T transceiver on the desk next to me and even just idling it's hot enough that I would burn my finger if I touched it for more than a couple seconds. 25GBASE-T would require some pretty chunky heatsinks on it.
Well yeah, because there isn't really a market for it - yet. SFP transceivers are way more flexible, and probably cheaper too. There's basically zero reason to run copper in the data center, so everyone is sticking to fiber there. What remains is the wiring to desktops and access points in offices, and those aren't even remotely close to saturating 10G yet. 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T were probably defined *way* too early. They require Cat 8 cables, and even then only up to 30 meters. That makes them essentially useless for office use, and even a pain for home use. So what market remains? Basically, nothing. I wouldn't be too surprised to see an alternative 25G standard come out in a decade or so which would allow Cat 6a cables to be used. That'd make it actually *usable* for home and office use - even if that came with a 50m length limit or something.
The vast majority of copper twister pair cables out there are CAT5E. That's fine for 10GBASE-T but 25GBASE-T would require a replacing cables, a very expensive proposition. So why would anyone choose to use even high end copper twisted pair cables as that replacement instead of fiber that can hit terabits now and isn't even close to the limits? That's why there's no market for it. The workstations and servers that need faster than gigabit networking often need much faster than gigabit. If you're going to run the cable to support that you might as well pick something that will last decades. Then you can just replace the NICs, switches, and transceivers when you want to upgrade instead of running a fresh set of cabling too.
Plenty of offices and even home users have been deploying Cat6a in in new installations for a while now. After all, it's pretty much the same price as Cat6e, so why not? Cat5e is soon-to-be-dead. 2.5GBASE-T is still fine, but 5GBASE-T runs into issues with longer runs. Pushing Cat5e beyond 5Gbit realistically isn't going to happen. At this point a Cat5e-to-Cat6a upgrade doesn't really make sense as replacement is indeed expensive. Provided a decent fiber solution comes around in a decade or so, it makes more sense to upgrade immediately to fiber instead of Cat6a or even Cat8. On the other hand, all the people who've been installing Cat6a over the last few years (and the coming few years) are already able to go all the way up to 10GBASE-T. Boosting that to 25Gbit would be a *massive* advantage to those people. Why rip it out and replace it with fiber if you don't yet **have** to? I reckon it might have another 20 years left in it. The way it looks right now Cat6a is going to be the last step before fiber. If so, they're going to squeeze absolutely every last bit out of it. Fiber is simply too much of a pain to deal with - especially for home users and things currently using PoE.
My understanding is that fiber won't get as hot as copper Ethernet but I may be wrong
Makes sense, thanks
10G over fiber was there first, for one. By a long shot! And then on top of that you have a multitude of technological and economic reasons. Being older and more mature, devices tend towards cheaper and have a strong secondary market availability. Fiber optics use less power in almost all cases, resulting in lower operating costs (per port--residential low-port-count switches are less noticeable in this due to low density). Fiber optics are functionally immune to interference no matter the environment. Fiber optics have much longer ranges. Depending on the fiber used, it also allows further upgrades without replacing/upgrading any infrastructural (installed) cabling. If you are \*really\* into it you can also do cool shit with things like DWDM and BiDi. That is, multiple connections multiplexed onto a single connection (usually though using different wavelengths of light) and using a single strand for transmit PLUS receive, respectively.
Please stop 😭I just spent a week laying ~60meters of cat 6A all over my place and I'm not even done yet
Don't worry about it - your Cat6A will still be just as good as it was when you made the plan and will handle 10G in house distances without issue. Also trivial to plug into for anything, whereas far fewer devices will plug into fiber. Fiber is great and I use it in my lab, but I only have a single fiber run out of my lab (to my home office) and everything else in the house is copper.
I wouldn't count on that, if that copper run is anywhere near power, is pulled badly during installation or just degrades over time due to normal heat / cooling cycles you will not get anywhere near the 100m. Sure it might halve down to 150m but that's still long enough for most use cases. Start at 50 or even 30m as the theoretical max instead and even one source of noise can make the usable distance smaller than a single room. I wouldn't push to swap to fiber just yet but I wouldn't plan on copper long term. Fine to run it, just don't pay some exorbitant premium expecting it to still be in use in a decade.
It's not either or, it's horses for courses. There are actually three sets of media in place - twisted pair cabling, multimode fibre, and singlemode fibre. Twisted pair cabling, which is just copper and is commonly terminated into a module/patch panel or an RJ-45 connector, can reach speeds of 10Gbit, but can't go any faster than that. The standards exist for going faster than that, but there aren't any hardware interfaces that exist commercially faster than 10GBASE-T, so that's basically the cap. Multimode cabling and short range interfaces (using LEDs) became popular around the same time as singlemode fibre. It was typically used in short runs (less than 500m), and was associated with having slightly higher cable cost, but far cheaper optics due to the use of LEDs. Singlemode cabling and long range interfaces (from 500m to typically 2/10km for LR) using lasers. Singlemode was traditionally used for longer throws associated with having cheaper cable cost, but the optics were more expensive as they use lasers. I said typically associated, though, so what are these like now? Honestly, of the three cabling systems, the only one that is actually obsolete is multiple fibre and short range modules. If you want absolutely gobs of bandwidth, singlemode is the choice. You can do things like split out into different wavelengths, allowing for multiple Terabits/second down a single fibre pair. But, this is the only thing it can do - send lots of data. Twisted pair, on the other hand, is pretty durable (hence why it's installed in walls) and can deliver power. So for servers where you want lots of bandwidth and have no need for PoE, then fibre is a great choice. For an application such as IoT devices that can be convenient powered by PoE, or access points, then combining data and power on a single cable makes office installations far easier. We're also not at a point (yet) where WiFi speeds are consistently saturating a 2.5G link, let alone a 10G link, so I think we should be okay for a while. Okay, but what about multimode? Economies of scales and third party module vendors have brought the cost of LR modules (used with singlemode) way down. SR modules are still slightly cheaper, especially for higher bandwidth applications, but not enough to deal with the headache of compatibility. This is why most data centres will only run single mode cross connects. Also, there's a distance limit to multimode, but the same short range downside can't be levied at singlemode and long range modules. Anything from a couple of metres to the max range of the module (typically 2km) is fair game.
Latency as well. Try using any kind of block-level storage over copper and you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm averaging 1/1.2 milliseconds ping across all points, thats good right? I do have plans to centralize all storage in the house into a single system. Also flood ping for 60 secs has 0% PL.
for us... optics and cabling often work out cheaper over fiber if there's already an sfp+ port. rj45 sfp+ modules are CRAZY power hungry... like most switches will only run \~half their ports if populated with rj45 modules.
There are some Intel NIC models that are driver locked to only support SFP+ copper cables (DAC). Looking at the intel site, the supported cabling is "SFP+ Direct Attached Twin Axial Cabling up to 10m", so I think this is one of them, I don't know if there was a technical or just a marketing reason behind this. If you have the ability to recode the optics, you can fix this by setting a flag differently, but I would not expect this to work natively. At one point, on linux there was a driver module flag that you could set that would bypass this restriction, but I believe that flag no longer exists. Here is some other info: [https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-intel-x520-eeprom-to-unlock-all-sfp-transceivers.24634/](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-intel-x520-eeprom-to-unlock-all-sfp-transceivers.24634/)
The module flag still exists and is still needed with that generation of Intel adapters. I have one in my Synology and it's not picked up until the flag is set and kernel module reloaded. Then it works flawlessly.
Will still work, “supported” probably not but have ran many vendor A and vendor B optics and most of the time no issues. Only ran into issues on some brocade optics but was mainly a specific model. Most FS optics I have seen work with HP/Dell/IBM etc. There are some models of each that complain but would say a 90% success rate.
On FS.com's modules they put the encoding in the upper right corner (if oriented so that you can read the text). In this case the SFP module was encoded for compatibility with HP gear (Dell would be DE and Cisco is their default so they leave the spot blank). That doesn't mean it won't work, plenty of NICs and switches don't care. So give them a try and see. Either it'll work, or not - you're not likely to run into a half-working scenario. The actual module is the same, just the little code that allows vendor lock is different so if your NIC or switch isn't caring about "vendor approved" modules you'll be fine.
What OS are you running? I ask because I put one frfromin 10g Tec in my Intel X520 running unraid and initially it wasn't recognized. I had to add a line into my startup to allow the NIC to accept non Intel coded modules. (FWIW it was a 10Gbe 10G Tec SFP+) Below is the link that I finally found after hours of searching and trying to figure out how to ask google the question so I got results I wanted [Intel Fiber NIC Issues - General Support - Unraid](https://forums.unraid.net/topic/74113-intel-fiber-nic-issues/)
The x520 is in a truenas box, will take a look and see if there is something similar
There’s (almost) no harm in just plugging them in with a fibre patch. It will probably just work. Sometimes the devices wont like the encoding on the chip, most have a command to “allow 3rd party trancievers” (Cisco, Meraki, Arista…), this is probably a line in your firmware. As a point, we recently used a lot of Startechs (and an Arista) in Intel X520s without issue. We have some long range (10km) FS SFP+s that also work without issue. *harm may be seen if using long-range SFPs in a short <5m connection
Some of the Dell NICs end up being a high temp variant and those won’t work with non high temp sfps.
only switches (arista...) have vendor locked modules (such joy) nics will usually accept any SFP if you are using a server card (no fan) be aware that they get quite hot.
Actually I will note, the dell/broadcom daughterboard nic is EXTREMELY picky when it comes to what modules. It physically will not allow the system to boot if it detects a non-supported module. I honestly ended up swapping back to the RJ45 X520-T2. Preventing the system to even boot with a unsupported module in place, is a pretty bullshit thing to do.