What network cards and cables do I need cat 5,6,7 or 8

[jn77]

So I remember the days of token ring and Apple talk. Now all my pc's have 1Gigabit network cards and all my switches are gigabit and I am running cat 6 cables between everything.

The question is: If I have 5TB of data to transfer between 2 pc's on the network and I want the transfer start to complete, done in 5 seconds or less, what network cards and cables do I need?

Forget the router and internet connection which are slow anyway; but inside a private network if I am looking for those speeds with that volume of data, what am I looking for?

And what is the least amount of money to get 10Gbit in a private network these days......

 

[das_stig]

CAT6A X-over cable between two 10GbE cards using PCIE v2.0 x8 link speed, not just slot compatibility.

 

[Kewlx25]

5TB in 5 seconds = 1TB/s, which is 8tb/s. For a few million dollars, you could get a router that can do this, but no computer has these kinds of speeds to plug into. This is faster than L1 cache on a CPU by quite a bit.

A network card would need to be a PCIe 3.0 1,050x slot. They don't make more than a 16x slot, so you'd need a motherboard with 68 PCIe 16x slots.

edit: forgot to divide by 5, derp.

 

[bill001g]

The fastest nics I have ever seen for sale are 40g. They make 100g interfaces for high end switches. Still none use normal copper ethernet cable. Most time these are fiber. There are special copper patch called QSFP that look like a thick cable with larger than normal SFP one the ends. I have never seen these used outside of very large storage networks and the arrays and servers are still all connected via 10g only the switches are cross connected with these 40g cables. The storage guys tell me that the speed is actually being limited by the disk arrays themselves and you would have to have san arrays to exceed 10g.