 Tom here from Orange Systems, and let's talk about some challenges with 10 gig. So the simple solution is I take a DAC cable, plug it into my micro-tick, which happens to be the CR305 1G. I've reviewed this one before. And then I plug it over into my device that hopefully isn't further away than the distance. Well, then you can get a bigger one of these. They go a little further. But then you're like, okay, but I have RG45 on my computer, but I also have this micro-tick here. So I go ahead and pop one of these devices in, and now I can go the full spec. Or did you not realize that these don't go the full spec? And that's what I wanted to talk about was using CAT6 and CAT6A seems like a great solution in terms of you'll be able to go the distance, but then when you throw these in the mix, they don't necessarily work. Now this Unify XG6 PoE has standard 10 gig RG45 ports. No problem. Does the distance. But when you start getting into using the adapters, the SFP plus RG45 adapters, that isn't the case. And I want to talk about the comparison between the three different models I have here and the distances we're able to get with them before we dive into the details. Let's first. If you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to laurancesystem.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor-free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out. Well, randomly, so check back frequently. And finally, our forums. Forums.LauranceSystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now, back to our content. Now, the first thing we need to be very clear on is where the cabling standard is. It's going to be different than where these devices are. And the cabling standard is, despite what many commenters on YouTube say otherwise, CAT 6 cable should not exceed 55 meters. And the CAT 6A cable should not exceed 100 meters. These are just the certified specs. And if you want to deep dive into how those specs are made, this is an interview I did with Dan Barrera, which I'll leave a link to, which is great. It's all about cabling standards. And why talk to Dan? Well, he sits on the board that helps certify cabling standards. So I learned a lot during this interview. So I'll leave a link to this if you're interested. I'll also leave a link to the article over on FS.com talking about 10 gig over CAT 6, CAT 6A, and CAT 7. So you guys can then debate and argue and leave comments. Now let's get to the fun part. And that's this. So when we're looking at these devices, we're going to start here with this one. And the fact that it says 30 meters right here, this is the thing that people often overlook where it says up to 30 meters. And let's look at the meager tick one. Now the meager tick one, it says right here, 30 meters in the description. It doesn't say it over here. And over on their website, it says distance of up to 200 meters, which has to be certainly a typo. And that's where some of the confusion come in. Now the FS.com one that we ordered goes up to 80 meters. And they have models that do 30, and they have models that do this 80 meters. And that's where we wanted to start with the testing as I ordered one of these. And I wanted to compare it to the other devices that we have. Now we take a close look at the FS.com ones. They look pretty much the same. Maybe there's a little bit more metal on this end of it. But for the most part, other than being ever so slightly longer, they all look the same here. So we have the QSFP tech, we have the FS.com and we have the meager tick RJ10. Now it was pointed out to me by Serve the Home, and I'll leave a link. They have some articles and they reviewed these as well, that there may be different revisions because I bought these a little while ago. So these are the ones I'm testing with that I bought early on this year. So mileage may vary. I don't know if there's different stock if you bought one today. But what I did find was both the QSFP tech and the meager tick one performed identically. They both only go 30 meters, and I mean 30 meters. Whether you use cat 6, whether you use cat 6a, it didn't seem to matter. Once you exceed that 30 meters, they have a hard time connecting. They just pause and wait. And when you go quite a bit over the 30 meters, if they connect at all, they claim to be connected at 10 gig, but won't even transfer at 1 gig and with a ton of retries and errors doing eye perf tests. So these pretty much are very limited to exactly the spec they set. And that was pretty clear. We tried them in both this meager tick right here, which is a pretty great little device. I'm really happy with it. It's really popular, I know, for among people putting together home labs, but putting them in here or putting them in this Unify made absolutely no difference. The distance and the link up times were still, well, slow and painful once you exceeded the distance listed of 30 meters. Then we move over to the FS.com that claims 80 meters. And that was interesting. We had no problems with 80 meters. 80 meters linked up right away. Then we went to 90 meters. And we were doing 90 meters instead of just 90 meters with your standard CAT 6A, which is spec we use this CAT 6. Now, I know this is 555 megahertz, I wanted to point that out, and there happened to be 90 meters in this box. And it worked great. I had no problem. The exact numbers 92 meters was in this. We snapped some ends on here. And this is just CAT 6 here, not CAT 6A. And it minimal, an absolute minimal amount of errors. And we moved quite a few terabytes of data. I had to re-sync some free NAS servers. So I stuck this cable in between them. I popped them in the maker tick switch. And wow, I'm impressed with how well these worked. These, not so much, just it constantly aired. It would eventually transfer using these when they're a little over spec, but eventually with really slow speeds, constant retries and errors, and, you know, drop packets and et cetera, et cetera. But the FS.com even using cable that is not specced for this, so out of spec was working shockingly well. So I gotta really say that these FS.com ones I'm really happy with. I only had them running for about a week, so this is not a long-term test review. We don't put a lot of these in production. Most of the time when a client is speccing something out, the servers are all connected either via DAC or fiber optic cable, and we don't use RJ45 for long 10 gig runs unless you're connecting them to PCs. Now, as far as that same 10 gig cable, I did do one other test. I got a few errors on the FS.com, but when I used this same box of cable and plugged it into the RJ45s on like this switch here, no errors at all and the transfers went perfectly fine. Now, a couple other notes though. Someone said that these will potentially cause problems because they pull them more wattage. The watts are limited by whatever the manufacturer designed and spec'd. So I don't think that'll be an issue, but as I said, this was not a long-term test. Also of note, if you pop in a handful of these adapters to convert this to be RJ45 with SFP pluses, there's even, I believe, a warning somewhere from Mikrotik or a forum post I'd seen. This will definitely get hot. If you put a few of these in here, set a small fan or something on there. The long-term effects of the heat, yeah, maybe a problem on here. Now, one other test we did do just to make sure it wasn't anything with the Mikrotik box. As I pop these in like the Unify here and the other Unify I have back there, the 30 meter limit is the 30 meter limit. Didn't seem to matter at all which device I used. There was absolutely no noticeable difference between them. And the same thing with this. This had no problem doing 80 meters or that little bit over spec with 90 meters using just Cat 6, which surprisingly worked very, very well. We did one more test with Cat 5. It won't go quite as far, but yeah, you can get out of spec even with Cat 5 and still have very few retries. Now, that was my test and my experiment. This is not something I'm recommending, but I realized people building a home lab, they may have more limited resources or already ran cable. And, you know, they want to make sure that they're able to do this before they run out and buy these. So if you are looking to get one of these adapters, do take a look at the distance that they support. I know more than just FS.com supports these, but that's the one I decided to go with test, because a lot of people recommended these. We've bought some other DAC cables and a few other random things from them. They've always seemed good. The reviews generally are good on the FS.com stuff. So I'll give a shout out to these adapters that are relatively new, I think, on their website. And they definitely work great. I didn't notice also any difference in heat between these or these. They all seem to get up to the same temperature, even running them over time and moving all the data. Once they reached a peak temperature, they didn't seem to exceed that, even running no data. Matter of fact, they seem to get to that temperature barely doing anything. They kind of just hover around that temperature, which they were reporting on the Mikrotik. I believe it was about 45C. So 45 centigrade on there is what they hover. Sometimes they go up a little bit higher, but not much. And of course, this is going to vary greatly with whether or not you have a fan in this and how you're dissipating the heat and whether or not you haven't actively or passively cooled the fights, et cetera, et cetera. But my overall, if you're looking for something to go that little bit of distance and maybe you overlooked and purchased one of these that then realized you couldn't figure out why you were having so many problems or you couldn't get the full 10 gig, it's probably because a lot of them you may have not noticed that despite Mikrotik, Mikrotik for having a 200 meter list on their website, they will only do 30 meters, much like the Amazon link says on there. But I'll leave a link to this particular one at FS.com if you're interested in it. But these ones also seem to work perfectly fine if you have the shorter distances. If you're doing your home lab all in the same room, well, you're probably not that far away and you should be able to get away with it perfectly fine. All right, and thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. 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