My personal best so far is 7TB in a month 😂
This is just my past month... I have no idea what my record is... but would likely be significantly higher as I slowed down on some stuff recently. I need more harddrive bays/harddrives... Stupid ebay doesn't have what I want.
Edit: here's past 90 days as well
I have basically a full rack of equipment. Here's the network side of it all. My desktop is 2 SPF+ fiber connections back to the core switch. Tons of stuff in my rack is all 10gbps or 40gbps.
Dual opnsense firewalls (top 2 slots, dual 40gbps connecting to core switches), though one is inactive until they let me buy static addresses. I run some business stuff on this. Boatloads of homelabbing and self-learning.
If you want to do full IPS/IDS, then yes you need some horsepower. But just connection with basic rules there's plenty out there that's not super expensive. Ubiquiti has their dream machine line which even the "cheap" $400 one can do 10gbps (2gbps with ips, or something like that. I dunno, I don't keep tabs on them).
I didn't stop any active connections/downloads happening on the network. I very likely had a gig of other stuff going elsewhere on the network.
Their "smart-nid" is also a router... so that works too, but I don't trust it and in my setup it's in transparent mode.
Edit: Formatting sucked