[termie]

Curious as to which 10Gb Ethernet controller is being used, no mention in the teardown. Anyone know?

[jamesfmilne]

Aquantia, same as the iMac Pro.

[robin_reala]

Is there anyone else manufacturing 10G controllers at $100 end-user prices?

[jamesfmilne]

Yes, Tehuti Networks[1], which is used by some Thunderbolt 3 Ethernet adapters, like the Akitio Thunder3 10G [2].

(OK, not quite <$100, but <$200)

[1] http://www.tehutinetworks.net/?t=LV&L1=3&L2=0&L3=0&L7=156 [2] https://www.akitio.com/adapters/thunder3-10g-network-adapter

[walrus01]

Not for Mac Minis, but you can get two port, Intel X520 series 10GbE (optical) PCI-Express cards for $85 to $110 each on ebay these days. 1310nm/LX SFP+ are really cheap, like $25 a piece.

I am biased, working in network engineering, but I really don't see a huge use case for 10GBaseT. It's almost unheard of in an ISP environment. Anywhere we need more than 1000BaseT we do everything optically.

[PascLeRasc]

What about connecting to storage, either an SSD NAS or a local disk array? At work we have regular old HDDs in RAID 1 and it saturates a 1 gig connection, so I'd imagine SSDs in some faster RAID would get way above that, and you don't have to redo wiring everywhere if you already have Cat6 installed.