is 2.5Gbe worh the cost?

I suppose that is not an easy question to answer.
I found out that my NAS can support 2.5Gbe USB dongle, Terramaster have launched one, just waiting for it to come to the U.K, cost around £70 if imported from the U.S,

I would need a card for the computer, around £25 i think and then a couple of 2.5Gbe switches the cheapest i found is a QNAP QSW-1105-5T, around £95 at the moment.

So i expect I am looking at £250 at least, depending on how much the USB adaptor is for the NAs. I suppose i could change the network around, so I only need one 2.5Gbe switch, but it would be a pain and mean bringing the NAs back up here.

While in theory the speed difference would be slightly more than twice the speed I have now, would I really notice? The NAS is normally used for backups and Archive, while some are large files, most of them are uploaded to the NAs at night.

How long do the backup and archives take at the moment?

If backups occur at night and only take an hour or two then I wouldn't bother. 2.5Gbps certainly won't provide any improvement in internet speeds or anything.

It would also be worth determining if the bottleneck is even your ethernet speeds. If you have an older PC and older NAS the bottleneck may be occurring in the CPU or something else meaning you aren't reaching 1Gbps anyway.

Probably not worth it.

Presumably the backup is just the changes from the previous backup, how much data do you change each day currently, and how long does that job take to run? Are you maxing out a 1Gbps link currently or is the bulk of the time spent calculating changes?

for all the files on the drive which is around 500Gb, it takes 2.45 minutes more or less, that is using the files back up on Macrium reflect, so I expect it would be a little faster if I just used software to sync the files. Also that is coming from a mechanical drive, not that it is going to make that much difference.
I do make differential backups, so that is a lot faster.
I don't know if it's maxing out the 1GBps link or not, I doubt it.

The main back up is the D drive as that is the one which changes as it hold files. The SSd which is the boot drive, don't change that much, so is only backed up by me when I change something on it.

I do access a couple of files directly off the Nas, but they are doc or spreadsheet files, so they don't take that long to access, in fact it takes longer for the NAS drives to spin up.

i think you are both right’ it is not really worth the money bothering to change it. Maybe if i relied on the extra speed for a job, then yes, it would be worth it.
Thanks peeps.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Also that is coming from a mechanical drive, not that it is going to make that much difference.

Unlikely to max out (saturate) a 1 Gbit/sec link with most mechanical drives.

I don't know if it's maxing out the 1GBps link or not, I doubt it.

You can use Task Manager on Windows 7 or later to watch the Ethernet card throughput when you are running your backup. If it doesn't get close to 940 Megabits/sec then you are not saturating the link.

I can get to 942 Mbps, from my 5.5 year old Win10 i7 desktop to my Synology NAS, using SyncBack or other file copy tools.

i forgot about task manager

using Macrium reflect it is around 500Mb/s, I downloaded syncback and to my surprise it is not that much faster, about 535Mb/s

Now this is strange, just for a test, I decided to try to copy some files from my games SSD drive using syncback and it did go up to around 700Mb/s for a second, but then it dropped back to around 5Mb/s, I don't know if is because there are a lot of small files.
do you use FTP with syncback?
Still looking at it now and it is jumping between 5 and 100.

Going to try Macrium reflect before I send this post.

ok, Macrium reflect is around 400Mb/s, so both software is slower copying from the SSD to nas than from the mechanical drive. Very strange. syncback copies the files as single files, so i expect that to be faster than macrium reflect as that uses a container.
it is all very confusing, but it has proved that spending money to make it faster will not do a thing.

This syncback thing looks ok, but a the UI looks a bit dated, I use Alway sync for file syncs.

With Syncback I use file shares (\\servername\sharename).

The slowest device in the chain is the cause of any limit in speed over the network. This could be the mechanical hard disk in your PC or how the NAS is set up. I have a RAID 1 mirror of two drives (small NAS); and it has a large amount of cache RAM. Most home user NASes are not designed for throughput, but for cheap storage.

I used fileshares in syncback, in alway sync i use FTP, it seems to be more reliable, macrium reflect is file shares only.
I forgot Synology normally have NVME cache, my NAS is a cheap terramaster f4-210, but it has four drives and is in raid 5, the CPU is only an ARM cpu, but I only got it for storage and so that I could access my files when away from home.

It does what I need to it for, so not bothered about faster speed, I just thought if I could get some out I would, but by the looks of it a faster network will do nothing.
I should have built my own NAS, but there you go.

I doubt i will get another NAs unless this one got full, but if I did i would go for one of the more expensive Terrmaster units., they offer a lot for the price.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

My Synology is quite old, its before NVMe, the cache I was talking about is just RAM. It also has a fast CPU as I went for the + model, but its probably 8 years old.

It also helps that I'm sending from an SSD, a Samsung SATA 3 unit, as the PC also pre-dates NVMe.

Mmmm, so my should be a little faster then, I will copy a large file to it tonight when I get home from work and note the speed.
I am not expecting it to be super speedy, after all the CPU is more or less something that is stuck in a mobile phone, and it only has 1GB of ram, it cost me £189, which for a four bay is good.

i tried to send from a SSD sata, my steam drive is a Maxtor Z1m but it still seemed to be slowish. I will have a muck around at some point to see why, it is not a huge problem as everything is backed up when I am in bed. It is just me trying to get more out of my devices

Pre-date NVMe? wow, it must be getting on and 8 years for a NAs is flipping good to be honest, that is what I like, stuff that lasts a long time.
I did look at Synology, but the prices put me off, i also looked at Qnap and the higher spec terramasters, but all I need it for is back up and storage. A mate has a synology, has 12 bays or something stupid like that and loads of disks space. he set aside a space for me, so anything really important i send there for extra backup.