How long does it take to backup 10 TB over 10GbE? RAID and NVMe write speeds

A 10 TB transfer over 10 Gigabit Ethernet works out to 2 hours 13 minutes 20 seconds at the full 10 Gbps. That's the same figure as 1 TB over Gigabit, moving 10x the data at 10x the rate, and the transfer that defines what a 10 GbE home NAS upgrade actually buys you in practice.

Transfer time

2h 13m 20s

At peak link speed

File size

10 TB

10000 GB

Link speed

10,000 Mbps

10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gbps)

Configuration

File Size

Connection Speed

Mbps

Estimated Transfer Time

2h 13m 20s

Speed Comparison

USB 2.0

1d 22h 17m 46s

480 Mbps

USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4

33m 20s

40 Gbps

Gigabit Ethernet

22h 13m 20s

1 Gbps

10 Gigabit Ethernet

2h 13m 20s

10 Gbps

Selected

WiFi 5 (ac)

2d 7h 33m 20s

400 Mbps

WiFi 7 (be)

4h 26m 40s

5 Gbps

SATA SSD

5h 3m 1s

4.4 Gbps

NVMe Gen4 SSD

23m 48s

56 Gbps

How this is calculated

Hitting the full 10 Gbps requires disks that can sustain ~1.2 GB/s on both ends, which is a real constraint. A single NVMe drive manages it; a 4-drive RAID 5 of 7200 RPM disks typically maxes out around 600 MB/s sequential write, halving the effective transfer rate. Enterprise 25 GbE and 40 GbE Ethernet cut this to 53 and 33 minutes respectively, but cost an order of magnitude more and rarely make sense outside data centers.

Verdict

2h 13m for 10 TB over 10 GbE is the ceiling a well-specced home server can hit. In the real world, disk throughput pulls most transfers below this. Plan for 3-4 hours unless everything on the data path is NVMe.