I’m am currently putting together my first pfSense router and was wondering if it would be better to add 10gb cards to it for several of my 10gb devices or by a switch just for them all to connect to. I have no special need to have them on their own network. Is there a befit of one over the other.
A 10gb switch will perform better but if you can get the cards cheap enough it may be worthwhile. I’d go with a switch.
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What is your approximate WAN speed?
Do you plan to use VLANs or multiple subnets that will need to pass traffic between at speeds above 1 gigabit?
If it were me, I would use a 10 gigabit switch and 1 gigabit interfaces on my firewall/router. My primary use case for 10 gigabit is storage transfer which does not require routing the traffic across networks, thus a switch is fully sufficient.
A switch-chip will generate much less heat compared to having a NIC (and CPU) do the same.
That said, some L3+ Switches are quite the space heaters too.
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