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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What’s your WAN speed? Is your pfSense box going to have enough CPU power to run the firewall rules/IPS/DPI you want at current and planned WAN speeds?
I’d lean towards getting a 10Gb switch and configuring your pfSense box with at least 1x 10Gb port to handle uplink from the switch. The rest largely depends on how you want to configure your network topology/VLAN/subnet setup.