Another advantage of fiber is it helps prevent lightning and other power surges from spreading. If your equipment is protected on the power edge, fiber isolates it on the network side.
I'm more talking about SFP+ ports, because most of your connections within the rack will probably be DAC (copper cables pretending to be fiber) for lower costs. Fiber is really for longer runs. If you only have a few feet worth of cable, I'm not sure if fiber per se is worth it over DAC.
But learning to work with SFP+ hardware is a skill, just like learning to strip CAT6 cable or run it around. Working with DAC cables, or SFP+ modules and finding what works is the "dumb part" of IT, but the kind of stuff you need to practice a few times to understand.
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Grabbing a few SFP+ ConnectX-2 cards from Ebay (for $30 or so), a few DAC cables, and a $250 switch... you can be well on your way to a 10Gbit network.
Also one can learn to use a Raspberry Pi or similar with GPIO as 'programmer' for the EEPROM in 'white label' optics, to make them work in equipment from established brands, which wouldn't work otherwise, because not whitelisted ;-)
> DAC cables are usually vastly more expensive then SFP+ optics and some multimode cable.
FS.com suggests 17€ for 10GBASE-SR, and 4€ for 1m of OM3, or ~40€ total, with three different components that could be a point of failure, in many weird and wonderful ways, vs ~10€ for a 1m 10G DAC, which is sold as a single unit and is replaced entirely in the event of a failure.
DAC is also lower latency at these short distances too, as you don’t need to convert electrical to optical and back again. It’s just end to end electrical.
If only because most of us probably already know how to use Cat5/Cat6 Ethernet, but how many of us have experimented with fiber optics?
10Gb Ethernet over Cat6 exists too. But that may be boring for some! Home labs are about experimenting with new things.