If your WAN is gigabit then your LAN interface only needs to be gigabit too. There's no advantage of having 10gbe on pfsense unless you want to route between two networks at 10gb speed. Even for that you wouldn't need anything too serious. I have an avoton C2750 which can handle 10gb fine.
The gigabit WAN is going to be the biggest factor, and the VPN assuming you can find a provider who will give you gigabit speed over a VPN connection. You're probably looking at something like a 3GHz quad core, but I'm not really sure.
As for a 10GB switch, if you only need a couple of 10GB ports have a look at the mikrotik switches, they're pretty cheap and have two SFP+ slots.
Thanks for the input! I should have given more information, but it seems with every post I've made recently I always need to leave several moments later. @K4KFH@Dexter_Kane the 10Gb/s networking would only be for the file server, all my other gear is 1Gb/s and I don't intend on dipping into college savings to do upgrades. So any switch with 1-2 10Gb/s ports would be perfect.
The reason for the sudden desire for more "beef" to my setup is that streaming some very large file size content from my FreeNAS server via Plex has resulted in choking and stuttering in playback. It's usually high-res movies (~20GB sometimes ) that will saturate the 1Gb/s connection my server has with my network, so if someone else goes to access something on the server they either flat out can't or the content will continuously lock up.
This is going to be very important, as very soon I will be living with a bunch of other people for university, and they will all have access to the server for their own personal use and for group content via Plex as well. I am trying to get this ironed out before this starts so that way they don't have to put up with it crapping out on them, and they can see how awesome doing this kind of stuff yourself really is. Didn't want to name drop any of the Tek crew because I feel like they get carried into a ton of peoples threads already as it is, but if they have time I definitely won't stop them from helping out.
At this point, the CPU is the tricky part, as I want this setup to be able to be a bit future proofed, or at least able to handle the possibility of up to 1Gbs/s VPN use. Private Internet access has consistently given me 300Mb/s through most of their servers across the globe, so I am hoping it will scale up to 1Gb/s... maybe that's asking a bit much but I have had no troubles so far. Once I have more ideas on what hardware I will need to make this possible I will get in contact with them and ask them if that would work, or what I would have to do to at least get as close to the 1Gb/s as possible
Okay, I'm no enterprise expert, so y'all correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you could just get one of these cards for your file server:
And then a switch with a couple of SFP+ ports on it. Then you could run a direct SFP cable like this:
To the file server from the switch. Unless your server or switch already has a 10g Ethernet port, in which case just go for normal Ethernet instead of SFP+.
Yeah using a sfp+ card and a DAC cable should work, just check the comparability as some things are vendor locked. Have a look on ebay for second hand stuff, sometimes you can get lucky and find sfp+ (or xfp) cards with transceivers for dirt cheap, then all you need is a fiber cable (which are also dirt cheap) and you're good to go. But you can run in to issues with really old cards on modern systems.
But for the situation you're describing you would be fine with using link aggregation with 2 or 4 gigabit ports. Might be a cheaper option and isn't as much of a headache to get working as 10gb can be.
Streaming a 20gb movie shouldn't saturate a gigabit connection. Even blurays which are 50gb work fine, I think they are only 50mb/s or something like that, I've had success streaming blurays over WiFi before. The problem is probably elsewhere. Although if you are doing a file transfer and someone else is trying to stream then you will have issues, but using link aggregation will solve that problem.