Trying to write off the idea of building a switch again

Hello

So long story short, I’ve now again fumbled my way into scope creeping building my own high speed router/switch. Last I check I decided not too because I got told an Intel CPU feature I can’t recall the name off was pretty much a godsend but I couldn’t manage to find anything that would be available that would have been cheaper than a couple hundred bucks (CAD or US, I’m in Canada) which was the price of a 10G switch. (I did get a Netgear 12x10G switch, but it’s too noisy and hot for me to actually use as is)

Anyway, the goal would be to manage some 10Gbps and 25Gbps (2 to 4 of each essentially). I haven’t managed to found some good benchmark on the matter, likely because the people with budget or the sense to do that probably just manage to get switches in the first place. But anybody with feedback to give on the idea maybe? The goal would be something that can handle 25Gbps trafic, half a dozen PCs but not with them blasting all the time.

For context, currently I have 2 servers (Unraid and Proxmox) and 2 PCs. I’m getting some more NICs so I can have 25G on the servers and 10G on the PCs (2x10G on my main). I was thinking of putting my PCs on both the house LAN and their own mini LAN, each on their own subnetwork, but after thinking thinking about it and talking with someone else, I might run into issues if the homelab subnet is used by multiple interface as port A might send the ARP request and just wait because only the PC on the other side of port B could reply “that’s me”. Hence the scope creep because I’d really rather not keep a table with everything noted down of what IPs each computers can see by using different subnets on every interface.

Sorry to disappoint, but, since switching and routing is done in large part in specialized Silicon chips these days, a DIY solution is not really practical or desirable, you are just not going to do a better job than dedicated silicon no matter how fancy your algorithms.

On the used market you can get 25Gbps switches for below $450, so I would start to look there. Here is one example:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/205731589521

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Nah that’s fine, and geez, looks like the real disappointment is how much better the used market is for the US vs Canada. More choice because probably bunch of shops not enabling international orders.