To my surprise and pleasure, the Dell workstation came with a 10 GbE motherboard port. I’ve been using 10 GbE for about 5 years now in the server room, using mostly fiber connections, but, in recent years, some copper ones. I’ve bought workstations with it, but never used that capability. I decided to network the new workstation with the Lenovo P16 laptop. I thought that 2.5 Gb/s would probably be fast enough, so I 0ordered a D-Link 2.5 GbE 5-port switch and some Cat 7 cables. Everything appeared to go fine. I made some large transfers with apparent success. But when I ran Ookla SpeedTest, the uploads failed.
I swapped the port on the workstation to the 1 GbE port, and things went swimmingly. I swapped ports on the D-Link switch and it made no difference. I swapped Ethernet cables, and that made no difference, either.
Then I remembered that I’d had some difficulty a few years back in the server room mixing and matching 10 GbE and 2.5 GbE devices.
There was no problem with 10 MbE, 100 Mb,E and 1 GbE devices, probably because the faster ones came after the slower ones. But we jumped from 1 GbE to 10 GbE, then we went back and filled in the 2.5 Gb/s and 5 Gb/s connections, so there are proobably devices out there that don[‘t know how to negotiate down from 10 Gb/s to 2.5 or 5.
So I bought a QNAP switch, with two 10 GbE ports and four 2.5 GbE ones. I hooked the 10 GbE port on the workstation to one of the 10 GbE ports on the switch, and I hooked the laptop up to one of the 2.5 GbE ports on the switch.
Success:
Leave a Reply