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I will also add a Network card for a faster network to connect to the NAS, as the typical 1Gb Ethernet is just to slow. Any ideas which to use ? 10Gb vs SPF+?
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While SFP+ is currently the standard for data centres, it would IMO look a bit out of place in a SOHO environment. 10GBase-T (over copper Cat6a cables) is considered to be more future proof, even if it is currently more expensive to deploy than SFP+ and will consume a bit more energy per port than the older standard using optical fibre. That being said, newer NICs based on the Intel x550 chip and newer switches should address this part of the problem.
Speaking of 10GBase-T switches, if you only need two ports (one for the client and one for the NAS), there are now bargain switches for about $250, such as the Asus XG-U2008 announced
here.
If you are not in a hurry, an even cheaper option would be to wait for 5GBase-T equipment which has recently been adopted as the IEEE Standard 802.3bz. It should start to be available any time soon and would be considerably cheaper than 10GBase-T. Also, 5 Gbps ought to be plenty fast for a single client.
Thinking about the NAS, even if some of the Synology NASes feature an optional 10GBase-T NIC, I would assume those to be heavily CPU limited for SMB connections using SAMBA, which is still unable to use more than one processor core. You might get better sequential reads and writes than an average 1 Gbps link would allow for large files but do not expect to get more than about 1.5 Gbps, unless you go for the high performance XS series.
If you need faster throughput and want to make good use of a faster network, you will need a custom NAS solution with a high 3+ GHz server CPU (Xeon E3 or Core i3), for instance based on FreeNAS. Use RAID 60 (in the FreeNAS world, this would be RAIDZ2 with at least two vdevs) and you should be able to transfer files at 3 to 4 Gbps, provided both client and server can sustain such speeds.
Cheers,
Fabien
