In reply to a post by jchamier:

Very true! Although things have changed over time. Lots of people seem to now keep gigs of photos and video.

Indeed very true. Plus as FTTP starts becoming the norm, I'm not sure people will be pleased in the very near future that either the internet speed or local network speed has a bottleneck because of a 1gig internet connection taking all the bandwidth.

I've already seen this take place with those that are having FTTP already

I would say a home NAS is the main reason for wanting more than 1Gbps today. Think 10 years from now when you have a home NAS with 20TB of SSD in it and you want to either back something up to it, or using it like a local disk. 1Gbps ethenet is not going to cut the mustard, and neither is 2.5Gbps. At that point you will be cursing and swearing you cheaped out on Cat5e.

I do admit I am rather scared by my father who constantly used to say that will do we will be moving in a couple of years. Some 40 years later my mother is still living in the same house.

Most people don't have a home NAS. Most don't store that level of content - this is an edge case required by a relatively small number of people. I no longer have local storage - my videos/photos are stored in the cloud (and yes, for me it is good enough and with fast Internet access I can upload and download fast enough for my needs).

In today's multimedia world, storage is key. This is either local or remote, most people these days have it.

This is where as internet speeds increase, so will the desire to be able to access media quicker and more of it.

There does seem to be this view that a person who is from a technical background is few and far between. This is not the case anymore. It's becoming the norm.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Most people don't have a home NAS. Most don't store that level of content - this is an edge case required by a relatively small number of people. I no longer have local storage - my videos/photos are stored in the cloud (and yes, for me it is good enough and with fast Internet access I can upload and download fast enough for my needs).

With GDPR and concerns over ownership of data in public cloud, many of my friends have moved from say (Google Photos) to a home NAS. Others are using MS OneDrive, but that gives 1TB (if you have Office 365) and then what.

I'd be interested in stats - those whom have good broadband with uplink (e.g. VM) are more likely to upload lots of content to cloud services than those on ADSL or very slow uplink FTTC/VDSL.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

I would say a home NAS is the main reason for wanting more than 1Gbps today. Think 10 years from now when you have a home NAS with 20TB of SSD in it and you want to either back something up to it, or using it like a local disk. 1Gbps ethenet is not going to cut the mustard, and neither is 2.5Gbps. At that point you will be cursing and swearing you cheaped out on Cat5e.

I do admit I am rather scared by my father who constantly used to say that will do we will be moving in a couple of years. Some 40 years later my mother is still living in the same house.

I know you're talking ten years from now, but if you want to make a home properly future proof, why bother with ethernet? Have fibre optic runs installed instead.

How many 'domestic' devices are likely to support 10Gb ethernet interfaces in ten years? What about NAS units? At the moment it's a vanishingly small number. Yes, that will change, but I'm not convinced that 10Gb is going to have any relevance for an average home user any time soon.

Most home user devices are connected wirelessly and you rather lose the advantage of having 10Gb ethernet if you have to move files across the airwaves.

Even if you have devices hardwired, it's not always the wire speed that limits the rate at which a backup completes but the rate at which the backup software process the files.

The average home user doesn't have any installed network wiring and has wi-fi from their ISP's supplied router. Even 100Mbps hard wired ethernet would be an improvement for many.

I agree

You may have a need for 1Gb to your wireless repeater if in a big house / teens / twenties in a granny flat but most devices for normal use are now WiFi and rarely get connected by wire. Also it is not uploading / backing up that is time dependant but downloading and how often do you download multi Gb of photos in a hurry. Video tends to only need play rate plus 20/50% so why cable 'normal' domestic houses for anything above 1gb. (Home workers are a different class entirely!)

I think future NAS are more likely to have a 5g interface for high bandwidth access over short distances.

In reply to a post by kitcat:

I agree

You may have a need for 1Gb to your wireless repeater if in a big house / teens / twenties in a granny flat but most devices for normal use are now WiFi and rarely get connected by wire. Also it is not uploading / backing up that is time dependant but downloading and how often do you download multi Gb of photos in a hurry. Video tends to only need play rate plus 20/50% so why cable 'normal' domestic houses for anything above 1gb. (Home workers are a different class entirely!)

I think future NAS are more likely to have a 5g interface for high bandwidth access over short distances.

Apart from phones and laptops, most other devices should be wired for the best experience (including game consoles)

Unless wireless can achieve high bandwidth over long distances and more solid objects (thick walls) then I doubt you will ever see wireless included on NAS devices. The point of having a NAS is usage over long distances, if you wanted short distances then a USB drive would be a sensible choice.

10 years ago very very few people had a home NAS, you had to roll your own. Now their are a plethora of companies Netgear, Western Digital, Qnap, Synology, selling the hardware at reasonable prices. It's only going to get cheaper and more widespread if you ask me.

And you will always have the once bitten, twice shy people who have lost something important in the past and who run NAS and Cloud in tandem just in case . . .