9 ms·

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

621 points by calcifer 6mo ago

userbinator 6mo ago
The PCIe version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967
GeertJohan 6mo ago
A Framework expansion card was also announced this week. https://frame.work/nl/en/products/wisdpi-10g-ethernet-expansion-card https://frame.work/nl/en/products/wisdpi-10g-ethernet-expans...
- topspin 6mo ago
  That link notes: "Card supports 10Gbit/s and 10/100/1000/2500/5000/10000Mbit/s Ethernet" Nice to see; some NICs are shedding 10/100 support. Apparently, it's not necessary to do this, even in a low cost device.
  - userbinator 6mo ago
    Low-cost devices are exactly where 10/100 is still widely used. On PCs, it's a common power-saving mode.
    - lostlogin 6mo ago
      TVs too.
      - geerlingguy 6mo ago
        And PoE security cams.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
      For those of us who don’t know, how does it save power vs a 1gbe running at low throughput?
      - adastra22 6mo ago
        I assume it is for wake-on-LAN. This of course requires the NIC being powered on while the system is sleeping. Lower bandwidth mode = less power draw.
      - jech 6mo ago
        > how does [100BASE-TX] save power vs [1000BASE-T] running at low throughput? 100BASE-TX uses just two pairs (lanes), one for sending and one for receiving. 1000BASE-T uses all four pairs, for both sending and receiving. Therefore, a 100BASE-TX interface that's only receiving needs to power up one pair. A 1000BASE-T interface needs to power all four pairs all the time. I recall reading about some extensions that allow switching off some of the pairs some of the time ("Green Ethernet"), but I think that they require support on both sides of the link, and I'm not sure if they are widely deployed.
        userbinator 6mo ago
        100M also needs much less signal processing, and at lower speed, than 1G. 10M is even simpler, to the point that even a fast MCU can bit-bang it.
        rincebrain 6mo ago
        My only annoyance with "Green Ethernet" things is that often they seem to work poorly. The dedicated machine I still keep around for Windows things has two onboard 2.5GbE ports. It will apparently sometimes, even with all power saving features turned off, randomly negotiate down to 100 mbit if I leave the machine alone for a bit, and then stay at that speed forever unless I manually reset the link after wondering why transferring large amounts of data is bottlenecking severely.
  - Tade0 6mo ago
    100 mode saved me once when I really really really needed to have a connection in that moment, but the ethernet cable glued to the wall that I was using had only three out of eight wires even functioning.
    - winter_blue 6mo ago
      Don’t we need at least four for 100 Mbps?
      - Tade0 6mo ago
        According to the technician I spoke with, he could only detect three on their end. The cable was chewed through by cats, so perhaps it was three just in that moment. The connection was overall unreliable, so I guess it must have been four, just not all of the time.
        reaperducer 6mo ago
        According to the technician I spoke with, he could only detect three on their end. The cable was chewed through by cats, so perhaps it was three just in that moment. Ah, the old Cat-3 cable. Been there.
      - bluGill 6mo ago
        There is two wire ethernet that supports 100. It isn't common, but automotive is starting to use it.
      - gsich 6mo ago
        3 pairs probably. But then again you only need 2.
  - t312227 6mo ago
    -
    - oliwarner 6mo ago
      Is that really true? If so, is there a saner way to handle this than upgrade all the things to 10GBE? Like a POE ethernet condom that interfaces with both network and devices at native max speeds without the core network having to degrade?
      - eqvinox 6mo ago
        > Is that really true? It's not, cf. sibling posts. The GP probably learned networking in the 80ies~90ies when it was true, but those times are long gone. (unless you're talking wifi.)
    - HHad3 6mo ago
      That is complete nonsense and not how switched networks work.
    - the_mitsuhiko 6mo ago
      That hasn't been true on switched networks in probably 20 years or so.
    - vardump 6mo ago
      We have switches now, hubs just don't exist anymore. Switches are not affected by some devices having a lower speed.
    - hnlmorg 6mo ago
      Isn’t that only relevant for network topologies that rely heavily on broadcasting to multiple nodes. Eg token ring, WiFi and powerline adapters? For regular Ethernet, the switch will have a table of which IPs are on which NIC and thus can dynamically send packets at the right transmission protocols supported by those NICs without degrading the service of other NICs.
      - 6mo ago
  - moffkalast 6mo ago
    Lots of industrial sensors and devices only do 4 wire 100BASE-TX so if there's no fallback to that it would be a paperweight in those situations.
  - junon 6mo ago
    100 is needed for embedded stuff, it'd render a lot of devices unusable (wiznet chips are popular and are 100 only). That'd suck.
    - Gigachad 6mo ago
      IKEA smart home hub is also 100mbit.
  - rleigh 6mo ago
    There are plenty of embedded chips which only provide RMII. No RGMII or alternatives.
  - lucb1e 6mo ago
    Low cost? The link mentions no price, only a "notify me" button as far as I can see. Does it show a(n estimated) price point for you somewhere?
    - topspin 6mo ago
      Low cost, as in not data center/server grade hardware.
    - zamadatix 6mo ago
      $99 when I look at the entry in https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards
  - jcalvinowens 6mo ago
    I also appreciate the 10/100 support. I recently needed it for some old voip equipment, and it was shockingly difficult to find an SFP+ module that worked in my 10G switch and supported 100mbps.
- sschueller 6mo ago
  A Framework SFP+ or SFP28 expansion would be sweet.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- retired 6mo ago
  The author only got 7Gbps with a Framework 13 and a 10G adapter from the same brand (WisdPi). If this is the same adapter in a different housing, will it also be limited to 7Gbps?
  - geerlingguy 6mo ago
    I'm guessing different mainboards could offer better USB port support for Gen 2 2x2, but right now the Ryzen AI 13" chips at least top out at USB4 / 3.2 Gen 2x1
sva_ 6mo ago
It seems like a lot of laptop manufacturers skipped the USB 3.2 Gen2x2 in favor of USB4/TB4.
- TMWNN 6mo ago
  Conversely, the last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find any USB4 external SSDs on Amazon; only USB 3.2.
  - whilenot-dev 6mo ago
    Wouldn't it be better to just buy an M.2 NVMe adapter, eg. ICY DOCK ICYNano MB861U31-1M2B[0]? [0]: https://global.icydock.com/product_247.html https://global.icydock.com/product_247.html
    - justinclift 6mo ago
      That doesn't seem to be USB 4?
      - whilenot-dev 6mo ago
        Is there an SSD that saturates USB3.2 Gen2 speeds and requires USB4?
        muro 6mo ago
        Many PCIe4 or 5 drives
        bestham 6mo ago
        Oh yes. Samsung 9100 Pro does 14800/13400 MiB/s over PCIe 5x4.
        alfanick 6mo ago
        I bought this one when upgrading my desktop, it indeed delivers what it promises. 14.5GB/s on my tiny random desktop, it's impressive. Everything feels so instantaneous, my Linux desktop finally feels like a Mac :)
user34283 6mo ago
I have a RTL8157 5 Gbps adapter from CableMatters. Interestingly it seems to get burning hot on the MacBook M1 Pro while it remains cool on the M5 Pro model. Maybe the workload is different, but I would not rule out some sort of hardware or driver difference. I only use a 1G port on my router at the moment.
- baybal2 6mo ago
  [dead]
- red369 6mo ago
  Huh! That's very interesting. I am definitely not the person to shed any light on what is going on, but you've added to my feeling that these adapters are all incomprehensible, so I'll try and do the same for you. I have a USB C ethernet adapter (a Belkin USB-C to Ethernet + Charge Adapter which I recommend if you need it). I ran out of USB C ports one day, and plugged it through a USB C to USB A adapter instead. I must have done an fast.com speed-test to make sure it wasn't going to slow things down drastically, and found that the latency was lower! Not a huge amount, and I think the max speed was quicker without the adapter. But still, lower latency through a $1.50 Essager USB C to USB A adapter, bought from Shein or Shopee or somewhere silly! I tried tons of times, back and forward, with the adapter a few times, then without the adapter a few times. Even on multiple laptops. As much as I don't want to, I keep seeing lower latency through this cheap adapter. Next step, I'll try USB C to USB A, then back through a USB A to USB C adapter. Who knows how fast my internet could be!
deepsun 6mo ago
Is it also possible to power a laptop through those adapters? PoE++ can deliver up to 100W of power, more than enough for most laptops.
- eqvinox 6mo ago
  Theoretically yes, practically that hasn't been built yet. I've only seen it for 2.5Gbase-T, and only for 802.3bt Type 3 (51W). If anyone's aware of something better, I'd be interested too :) (Then again I wouldn't voluntarily use 5Gb-T or 10Gb-T anyway, and ≈50W is enough for most use cases.) [ed.: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807960919319.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807960919319.html ("2.5GPD2CBT-20V" variant) - actually 2.5G not 1G as I wrote initially]
  - Iulioh 6mo ago
    Eh. A lot of laptops won't accept less than 60w My work laptop won't accept less than 90w (A modern HP, i7 155h with a random low end GPU) At first everyone at the office just assumed that the USB C wasn't able to charge the pc
    - lostlogin 6mo ago
      A Mac mini at home used 4.64w averaged over the last 30 days. Even under load it just sips power.
      - sva_ 6mo ago
        It can draw a lot more under load? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103253 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103253
        lostlogin 6mo ago
        I’m sure it can, but even that could be supplied by POE++ I think? Mine under very rarely exceeds 10w.
    - 6mo ago
eqvinox 6mo ago
Too bad this is 10Gbase-T, that energy-wasting hot-running garbage needs to die sooner rather than later. Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use. (Fibre is nowhere near as "sensitive" as some people believe.)
- zrm 6mo ago
  The problem with fibre isn't the sensitivity. It's that most endpoints have a 1Gbps copper port on them and then Cat6A ports can be used with the common devices but also allow you to add or relocate 10Gbps devices without rewiring the building again.
  - HappMacDonald 6mo ago
    However — unlike copper twisted pair — the bandwidth current fiber media can carry is nearly limited by nothing but the optics at each end.
    - zrm 6mo ago
      That doesn't solve the chicken and egg problem. What probably would is something like having PCIe and USB to 1Gbps fiber adapters that cost $5.
      - simoncion 6mo ago
        You've been able to get Intel X520 NICs [0], with transceivers included for ~40USD on Newegg for a long time. This is a little more than double the price of Newegg's cheapest single-port 10/100/1000 copper card, but even the cheapest available such card is three times your "chicken and egg"-solving price point. I suspect the combination of the absence of cheap-o all-in-one AP/router combo boxes with any SFP+ cages and fiber cabling's reputation of being extremely fragile have much more to do with its scarcity at the extremely low end of networking gear than anything else. [0] This is a two-port SFP+ PCI Express card
        6mo ago
shevy-java 6mo ago
Will they be cheaper? I look at the RAM prices. Granted, RAM is in a different category than USB adapters, but I no longer trust anyone writing "will be cheaper" - the reality may be different to the projection made.
jordand 6mo ago
For Thunderbolt 4/5 docks, I've held off from buying a high-end Thunderbolt 5 dock as many still have 2.5GbE Ethernet and other limitations with displays. The CalDigit TS5 Plus is one of the only options with 10GbE and its $500 (and usually OoS). I managed to buy an ex-corporate refurb HP Thunderbolt 4 G4 dock for only ~$64 and would recommend others do the same (this has an Intel 2.5GbE and good display outputs)
fmajid 6mo ago
FWIW I got a Xikestor 10G adapter with the Realtek chipset from AliExpress and it underperforms my much cheaper 5G one.
- dijit 6mo ago
  Yeah. Just because it negotiates, doesn’t mean it can utilise.
superjan 6mo ago
My favorite USB ethernet adapter is a lowly 100 MBit one that works everywhere without requiring driver downloads.
woohin 6mo ago
[dead]
mort96 6mo ago
All these USB version names. I used to know what they all meant, but then the USB IF went ahead and renamed them all and made a bunch of versions have the same name and renamed some versions to have the same name as the old name of other versions. I have absolutely no idea what anyone means when they say USB 3.2 gen 2x2. I used to know what USB 3.2 meant but it's certainly not that.
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  Oh, it's fine. The lack of clarity is in keeping with the USB C connector itself, which may supply or accept power at various rates or not at all, may be fast or slow, may provide or accept video or not, and may even provide an interpretation of PCI Express but probably doesn't. It probably looks the same no matter what, and the cable selected to use probably also won't be very forthcoming with its capabilities either. (Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.)
  - theandrewbailey 6mo ago
    This quagmire (along with the version names) is why I call it the Unintuitive Serial Bus.
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    The USB A connector stayed the same between USB 1, 2 and 3. Yet most manufacturers voluntary distinguished them by giving USB 1 and 1.1 a white insert in plug and port, USB 2 a black insert and USB 3 a blue one This was neither standarized nor enforced, yet it worked remarkably well in the real world Then we decided to just have no markings at all on USB C cables. On the ports at least we occasionally get little thunderbolt or power symbols
    - mbreese 6mo ago
      The exterior of the USB A connector stayed the same. The number of pins increased when we went from USB 2 to 3. So, even in this case, it’s slightly more complicated. The colors helped because the capabilities were very different between the ports. But when the USB IF increased the number of options (and reduced the size of the connector), different colors became impossible to do. The problem is that there are too many uses for one connector. But this is wha we wanted - a reduced number of standardized connector/power options.
souravroy78 6mo ago
Can these support local LLM’s?
simonjgreen 6mo ago
From the source of the RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver in FreeBSD: (old, not directly relevant, just amusing) https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_rl.c https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_r... /* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on * the RealTek chipset. Datasheets can be obtained from * www.realtek.com.tw. * * Written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu> * Electrical Engineering Department * Columbia University, New York City / / * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers. * * For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor * registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned * on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to * do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely * case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet * is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only * four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four * packets queued for transmission at any one time. * * Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large * buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received * frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets * will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer * area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol * levels. * * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it. * * On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although * rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the * PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register * space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast * filter. * * The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY * chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where * the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need * to select which interface to use depending on the chip type. */
- eqvinox 6mo ago
  8159 != 8139 > /* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on […] Also, please, for the love of whatever entity, at least remove the *s on that paste. This is just atrocious and disrespectful of any reader.
realxrobau 6mo ago
Are there any that actually have a SFP+ port? That's all I want. No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7, and you can just change it up to a $7 multimode when you need longer runs.
- Galanwe 6mo ago
  10G DACs are no cheaper than cat6, which is perfectly fine for 10G at most practical distances. Considering the target audience of these cards it seems pretty obvious to me that letting users "just buy a cat 6 cable" is miles more reasonable than having them buy a transceiver or DAC. As for allowing to switch to fiber, that just seems orthogonal again to what these USB NICs are for, not to mention the SFP+ itself is probably more expensive than the NIC shown here...
  - Fnoord 6mo ago
    DACs are very cheap (second hand and AliExpress) and they never use much W. If both machines are near each other though (which a DAC cable implies) and both run Linux and both support Thunderbolt, you might be better off with a direct ethernet over TB connection. Whether macOS supports such, I don't know. The other side will then also need a low power NIC (of which fiber and DAC over SFP+ are less power hungry). What this article doesn't mention, is that there are also a lot of PCIe NICs on the market which aren't power hungry (RTL8127), as well as RTL8261C for switches/routers. I've seen low power RTL NICs with SFP+ on it, too (example: [1]). With SFP+, you'll have a lot more versatility. DAC and SFP+ fiber are very cheap, btw. Especially second hand they go for virtually nothing. I have 10 SFP+ fiber lying around here doing nothing which I got for a few EUR each. For me as European with high energy prices and solar energy gotten the beat next year (in NL), this is all very interesting. There's a couple of good reasons why to opt for fiber in the home. You keep the energy between the different groups separated which can help. I also find fiber very easy to get through walls, allowing me to have multiple fiber connections through walls (currently I use 1x fiber + 1x ethernet for PoE possibilities from fusebox). With all above being said, AQC100S is low power and does not get very hot. You can get these with SFP+ and PCIe/TB. They've been available for a while. [1] https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005011733192115.html https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005011733192115.html (no vouching for, just first hit on search)
nottorp 6mo ago
By the way, how are switches and cables for > 1Gbps these days?
- Galanwe 6mo ago
  You can find 2.5G switches with a reasonable amount of ports on the cheap. For 10G though the cost is still prohibitive IMHO unless you are fine with 2 ports. For cables, I think everything converged to cat6a a while ago, which is both reasonably cheap and perfecrly fine for 10G (up to 100m from what I remember)
  - geerlingguy 6mo ago
    Mikrotik has a couple 4-5 port 10 GbE switches (one has SFP+ ports, one has RJ45), and Ubiquiti has a couple small switches now that don't quite break the bank at least.
  - wpm 6mo ago
    Nicgiga and Trendnet have 8 and 5 port 10G switches for less than $250 respectively.
randusername 6mo ago
TFA doesn't compare the performance of the new adapters with the older ones. Does anyone know if the old bulky ones will hit 10G speeds on the same hardware? I assume I can get a few old TB2 models and adapters on the cheap and they'll run cool enough and stable enough for constant 1G internet and occasional 10G intranet
freedomben 6mo ago
I've had such terrible success with usb-ethernet adapters on linux, to the point where wifi is usually much more performant. The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. It's so frequent though that even scp-ing a medium-sized file is likely to fail or stall. Hardware is a Framework 13 3rd gen laptop. Is this just my hardware? It's hard to imagine these issues would be so prevalent with how many people use these on linux...
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  > The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. I never ever saw that and I'm literally using usb-to-ethernet adapters on Linux since forever. It's about the chipset you're using and how the kernel supports it no? For example for 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet if you go with anything with a Realtek RTL8156B (and not the older non 'B') or anything more recent it should work flawlessly. Before buying I look on the Internet for users' returns / kernel support what the latest chipset the cool kids on the block are using. As I've been perfectly happy with Realtek 8156B for 2.5 Gbit/s if I wanted to buy a 10 Gbit/s one, I'd look at cool kids, like that Jeff Geerling dude from TFA/Youtube, and see he's using a Realtek 8159 and I'd think: "Oh that's close to mine, I trust that to work very well". I literally still even have an old USB2.0-to-100Mbit/s that I use daily and that has never failed me neither (it's for an old laptop that I use as some kind of terminal over SSH). I don't recommend 100 Mbit/s: my point is that it's been many moons all this has flawless support under Linux. > Is this just my hardware? To me it's due to a poor chipset / poor chipset support in the USB-to-ethernet adapter you're using. These things, when they're a well supported chipset, are flawless.
yread 6mo ago
I have a 5G USB and getting it to work at 5G speeds in Linux was a challenge. The driver worked properly only with kernel 6.12 not 6.10 nor 6.14
nasretdinov 6mo ago
10 GbE sits in a really weird spot for me, maybe I'm just not understanding something though. It's at most 1.25 GB/sec of bandwidth, yet it's relatively quite expensive. It's not sufficient bandwidth for getting good performance out of most SSDs, yet it's really excessive for any hard drives (except for RAID10 setups I guess). For SSDs you want thunderbolt (or 40+ GbE) connection for best latency and performance, and for hard drives 2.5Gbit/sec is more than enough. As I said, I might be misunderstanding something, but 10 GbE sits between the two sensible options for me.
- whatevaa 6mo ago
  Are you gonna run thunderbolt more than a few meters? If you think 10 is expensive, check prices above 10. You may even need fiber for that.
  - nasretdinov 6mo ago
    No, of course I'm not going to if I choose thunderbolt :). But in many cases it's fine because SSDs aren't nearly as noisy as HDDs, so the NAS can just sit under your desk. For 40+ GbE or fibre I agree they are expensive, but at least you get full performance out of your system. SSDs aren't cheap these days either...
  - adrian_b 6mo ago
    Making a long distance complex network may be expensive, but to connect directly a few computers one can use 25 Gb/s Ethernet at a reasonable price. Last time when I checked, dual-port 25 Gb/s NICs were not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs. If you have a few computers with no more than a few meters distance between them, you can put a dual-port 25 Gb/s card in each and connect them directly with direct attach copper cables, in a daisy chain or in a ring, without an expensive switch.
  - butvacuum 6mo ago
    fiber vs DAC isn't really a cost concern st a home level. a 2m LC patch cable is $5 and used bidi cisco optics $5-10 each. not much more for new optics either.
p0w3n3d 6mo ago
What cat cable works with it?
oytis 6mo ago
Can any of them do TSN?
Razengan 6mo ago
> USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 What the fuck
- Neywiny 6mo ago
  It's still not named well but the way to understand it is: gen 1 is 5gbps/lane, gen 2 is 10. x1 is 1 lane, x2 is 2. So really there are only 4 combinations, 5, 10, 10, 20. It just took them a really long and windy time to get there.
flyingsquirrel_ 6mo ago
wow. Maybe i should try it
LoganDark 6mo ago
I don't understand how a 10GbE adapter is possible without Thunderbolt, or why not being Thunderbolt makes it smaller. In my experience USB speeds faster than 3 don't happen in practice unless you have a Thunderbolt port and device. Maybe I just don't have devices that use the faster USB speeds, but Thunderbolt has always been the one and only way to exceed the speed of USB for me. I think USB 4 exists based on the Thunderbolt spec (or the other way around?), but doesn't require any Thunderbolt capabilities and therefore isn't very telling. I think Apple's approach of supporting Thunderbolt 4/5 on every USB port of the MacBook Pro is the only sustainable way forward.
- Neywiny 6mo ago
  Because USB can do 2 lanes of 10 gbps. So that's 20gbps. 10 < 20. Thunderbolt isn't part of the equation here because it's not a thunderbolt device or thunderbolt host (even if the port is thunderbolt capable). The reason it's smaller to go with USB is that AFAIK thunderbolt only bridges to other interfaces like USB or PCIe. So any thunderbolt NIC is actually thunderbolt -> PCIe, then PCIe -> Ethernet. USB is more often interfaced with directly. 2 big power hungry chips vs 1. 1 < 2 so it is smaller. Thunderbolt also carries overhead vs oculink. Thunderbolt tunnels PCIe. The PCIe tunnels the ethernet traffic. Oculink is just PCIe, which is why it's not as hot pluggable but gets significant performance increases for PCIe devices. USB in this case tunnels Ethernet traffic. So thunderbolt NICs have 2 layers, USB has 1. 1 < 2. Less overhead means lower power and less heat so smaller heatsinks, fewer chips means smaller board so smaller device. If more devices had oculink connectors, it's highly conceivable that an oculink adapter would also be smaller than a thunderbolt NIC, because again there's no such thing as a thunderbolt NIC just a thunderbolt -> PCIe -> Ethernet.
  - LoganDark 6mo ago
    > Thunderbolt isn't part of the equation here because it's not a thunderbolt device or thunderbolt host (even if the port is thunderbolt capable). The article directly states this device is smaller than a Thunderbolt adapter. I was not calling Thunderbolt part of the equation, just asking how it's possible to reach high speeds without it. The rest of your explanation makes sense, thanks.
rowanG077 6mo ago
I'm still curious why it can't reach full 10GbE in both directions. Afaik USB gen 3.2 2x2 the transmit and receive directions are independent. So it doesn't really make sense to reach full speed one way and not the other way, purely from a USB perspective.
jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not really a straightforward next place to go, no? 10Gbe is 4x2.5Gbit, right? Then 25Gbit is 1x25Gbit? Four of em for 100Gbit? That's right isn't it? It's unfortunate thinking that this is the end, this is as good as it's gonna be, for a while. Especially with usb4 going faster and faster still. Edit: ah! 25Gbase-t exists, is four pairs. Defined at the same time as 40Gbase-t, 802.3bq-2016. A PAM-16 encoding. Yes, 100Gbe was originally defined as 4x25Gbe for optical but there are base-t. Also! The 10Gb adapter here is $80. Worth noting for folks that 2.5Gbe adapters are ~$13 and 5Gbe adapters a hair over $20! Very affordable very nice boost. Make use of those USB ports!
ranon 6mo ago
Just got an rtl8127 pci e card to replace my aqc113. Runs cool, doesn't have as much contention on the chipset. Price was right. Good purchase and that $10 chip will allow cheaper more power efficient home 10gb equipment within the coming years.
- aggregator-ios 6mo ago
  Was the card $10 or are you saying that the chip is a $10 part?
movedx 6mo ago
The inaccessibility of 10GbE, and the even higher inaccessibility of anything faster, made me move away from NAS devices to DAS. Not everyone can do this, or needs move TBs of data on a frequent basis, but if you do then a USB4/Thunderbolt 5 DAS is the way to go (and it’s basically the only way to go in film and TV data management.)
- barnabask 6mo ago
  TIL that DAS stands for "Direct Attached Storage." In the olden times we called them external hard drives.
  - Telaneo 6mo ago
    A DAS device will typically hold more than one hard drive. But yes, it's a more fancy version of having four seperate external hard drives hooked up.
  - BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
    Well with the move to SSD's, it added two syllables. Maybe external solid state drive is just too long and it finally had to be sortened somehow.
cycloner 6mo ago
Price is the key factor. If it's too expensive, even if the performance is excellent, it won't be necessary.
bri3d 6mo ago
I'm disappointed that both the article and comments don't go into the actual differences between how these adapters work and the overhead incurred by USB. At a high level, I'm pretty sure Thunderbolt will be significantly better in all situations: Thunderbolt is PCIe; depending on the way the network card driver works, the PCIe controller will usually end up doing DMA straight into the buffers the SKB points to, and with io_uring or AF_XDP, these buffers can even be sent down into user space without ever being copied. Also, usually these drivers can take advantage of multiple txqueues and rxqueues (for example, per core or per stream) since they can allocate whatever memory they want for the NIC to write into. USB is USB; the controller can DMA USB packet data into URBs but they need to be set up for each transaction, and once the data arrives, it's encapsulated in NCM or some other USB format and the kernel usually has to copy or move the frames to get SKBs. The whole thing is sort of fundamentally pull based rather than push based. But, this is just scratching the surface; I'm sure there are neat tricks that some USB 3.2 NIC drivers can do to reduce overhead and I'd love to read an article where I learned more about that, or even saw some benchmarks that analyzed especially memory controller utilization, kernel CPU time, and performance counters (like cache utilization). Especially at 10G and beyond, a lot of processing becomes memory bandwidth limited and the difference can be extremely significant.
- eqvinox 6mo ago
  ACK. From some cursory experimentation, my laptop can roughly saturate 1G via USB, but on 2.5G things get wonky above roughly 1.9G unidirectional or 2.9G bidirectional. > Thunderbolt is PCIe Nit: Thunderbolt isn't PCIe, it tunnels PCIe. Depending on chips used, there's bandwidth limits; I vaguely remember 22.5G on older 40G TB Intel chips.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > Thunderbolt is PCIe Thunderbolt allows PCIe tunneling, but it has some overhead over raw PCIe. That's why Thunderbolt eGPU setups don't perform as well as plugging the GPU directly into a PCIe slot. > USB is USB Until you get to USB4, when USB 4 supports Thunderbolt 4.
  - bri3d 6mo ago
AntiUSAbah 6mo ago
Thats just a depressing situation for 10G networking. If its p2p, its easier to just use usb-c inbetween. Apparently someone doesn't understand my post so let me edit it for the downvote?!... 10G is old tech, its 2026 and the best thing we still have today is a 80$ Adapater while USB-C already can do 5, 10, 20 and 40gb I'm waiting for 10g network for home for ages now but infra is more expensive, consumes more energy and gets hotter.
- userbinator 6mo ago
  while USB-C already can do 5, 10, 20 and 40gb ...over a few meters at most. 10GBASE-T Ethernet goes dozens of meters, and the other variants using optic fiber reach into kilometers.
bitvvip 6mo ago
[dead]
exabrial 6mo ago
Jeff: I see a possible problem with your tests that bit me before! ipferf3 is not multithreaded by default. The more capable computers probably have an interrupt rate sufficient to handle 10gig over USB (which likely multiplies the interrupt rate needed), but it's completely possible you're pushing the interrupt rate limits on the Macbook Neo and other lower powered hardware. Any chance you could re-run with `-P 4` where 4 is the core count?
- geerlingguy 6mo ago
  I ran all the tests at P 2 and P 4 to verify cpu cores weren't hindering the speed, but got the same result (within 2%). Modern A/M cores and Zen 5 cores individually have enough grunt to handle at least 10 Gbps through USB without a hitch. On my Pi's and N100 mini PCs, I do have to use threads to hit more than about 5-6 Gbps. And testing a 25 Gbps adapter I'm testing separately, I had to use multiple threads to get my Ampere CPU to measure speeds greater than 10 Gbps.
  - exabrial 6mo ago
    Awesome! We had a Intel Atom board with 10g, and we could never get iperf3 to saturate the interface until we used `-P`!
- dd_xplore 6mo ago
  Or Better use only iperf (or known as version 2), it has multi threading support
- fulafel 6mo ago
  A single threaded benchmark better represents real performance, I'd argue. 10 Gbps is only 1.2 GB/s after all and few applications use parallel streams.
  - stonegray 6mo ago
    I think the intention is to measure the adapter itself independent from the CPU/overall system. Besides, I can’t think of a typical single threaded application that would use those data rates, can you?
flal_ 6mo ago
What would be actual use cases ? I mean, I get the nerdery of having the fastest possible network, but in practice ?
- CaliforniaKarl 6mo ago
  Recently, I had a researcher who had been delivered a blob of research data. It was multiple TB, and the data was delivered in a little RAID-1 drove enclosure, which had a USB-C connection. (I don’t remember the exact make or model.) The user originally wanted to do the transfer over WiFi. I helped them set up the transfer, and they eventually realized it would take multiple months to complete. I set them up with a Thunderbolt 10GBASE-T Ethernet adapter. The wiring was Cat-6, but the distance was low enough such that 10G would’ve been achievable. The switches in the network closet were only 1GbE, though the uplinks were 10GbE. Even so, switching the transfer from wireless to 1GbE wired brought our ETA down to just under one month. I wish we could’ve gotten a 10GBASE-T port for the researcher; that would’ve brought the ETA down from ~1 month to ~1 week.
  - mixmastamyk 6mo ago
    Why not connect it directly to the server/workstation?
deferredgrant 6mo ago
[flagged]
aggregator-ios 6mo ago
For those that read the article and are still confused (as I was) about what Apple hardware would give you the full 10GbE speeds: - 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo). - No Apple hardware supports the 3.2 v2x2 standard (20Gbps) and your connection will be downgraded to 10Gbps on these RTL8159 chips. Because of processing overhead, you will only get 5-7Gbps of total Ethernet throughput. - Upgraded Mac Mini or Apple Studio base models have builtin 10GbE ports For now, thunderbolt adapters are still the most reliable 10GbE for Apple laptops.
- wolvoleo 6mo ago
  > 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo). The neo doesn't have thunderbolt at all so no, that won't fly.
  - aggregator-ios 6mo ago
    Thank you, I was suspecting the same but was not sure.
  - bdavbdav 6mo ago
    Luckily I suspect the intersect on the Venn diagram isn’t huge for Neo buyers, and those wanting / needing 10gigE
    - aggregator-ios 6mo ago
      Yup.
      - AnthonBerg 6mo ago
        Thinking about it, it would be pretty magical. Neo with 10GbE to fast storage and CPU and GPU: Thin client that's pretty damn thick for how thin it is.
wolvoleo 6mo ago
I remember getting my first laptop with gigabit ethernet in 2005, more than 20 years ago! I'm surprised 10gbit is still so uncommon and eyewateringly expensive. And I don't just mean the adapters which are coming down in price finally but also the switches. For more than 10 years we've had semi managed gigabit switches for 25€ like the TP-SG108E. 10gbit is still crazy expensive. Even though it is quite needed these days for fast transfers from computer to computer, the old "your harddrive won't keep up anyway" excuse is no longer valid. I still have max 10 gbit here and I'd have to replace 3 switches at least so it won't be coming soon. The 2.5 and 5 options are too meh for me to be interesting. I hope the arrival of these new chips will increase the number of systems with 10g it and then hopefully the prices of switches will come down too.
- kd913 6mo ago
  How often do you have to do fast transfers from computer to computer? Would argue for those purposes 40gig thunderbolt makes a lot more sense.
  - wolvoleo 6mo ago
    It would but none of my systems have thunderbolt and besides that my NASes are on the other side of the flat where the noise doesn't bother me. Thunderbolt only reaches a metre or two. I assume thunderbolt PCI cards are a thing but the distance is a bigger problem. I need fast transfers pretty often. I do a weekly image of all my workstations as backup. Right now I do them overnight as it's limited to 110MB/s but this could be done within 15 minutes with 10gbit. Also, huge media files.
- sixdonuts 6mo ago
  10GB ethernet switches will never be cheap because of the power requirements. Just get a 25GB switch and skip 10GB all together.
  - wolvoleo 6mo ago
    Of course they will go down in power just like these USB controllers have done.
tobinfricke 6mo ago
How about 10 GbE switches/routers? I have 10 GbE fiber-to-the-home via Sonic, but so far just have it plugged into a Google Wifi router with gigabit ethernet. Would love to have 10 GbE wired to my desk.
- jburgess777 6mo ago
  ServeTheHome is a good place to look for reviews of the switches available, e.g. https://www.servethehome.com/10gbe-in-2026-is-finally-hitting-the-tipping-point/2/ https://www.servethehome.com/10gbe-in-2026-is-finally-hittin...
- osamagirl69 6mo ago
  If you are riding the Geerling train you would probably be interested in the upcoming mono router: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/testing-mono-gateway-custom-built-10-gbps-router/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/testing-mono-gateway-... Personally I use an x86 PC (supermicro E300 with X11SDV motherboard with integrated Intel X540 10Gbe NICs) running opnsense.
- jshier 6mo ago
  Full, multiport 10GbE switches are still rather pricy. You could look at 2.5Gb or 5Gb port routers that have a 10Gb input. You won't be able saturate it with a single device, but you would using multiple devices. Ubiquiti has some nice stuff.
  - 15155 6mo ago
    https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-aggregation https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-aggregation https://mikrotik.com/product/crs304_4xg_in https://mikrotik.com/product/crs304_4xg_in https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLGLRTGF https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLGLRTGF
    - sixdonuts 6mo ago
      The Microtik in the link draws 15 watts at idle...
punnerud 6mo ago
RTL8159 is way cheaper from Aliexpress in other products, and most is this small or smaller for 10G. The article should maybe have been focusing on that piece?
cyberax 6mo ago
One another thing to try: set the MTU to 9000. But don't do this on your main interface, or you'll get haunted by traffic being blackholed. At home, I have separate VLANs for the 9k packets. It has a separate subnet (both V6 and V4), so it works perfectly. The devices on this VLAN use it directly if they can, and everything else goes through the router that sends proper ICMP "too big" messages.
ballack007 6mo ago
mbklog4@gmail.com
ridiculous_fish 6mo ago
I bought one of these as soon as I heard about it ($74 from eBay) and tested it against my USB-4 AQC113 mainstays ($87, IO CREST brand on Amazon), from my MBP. The new RTL-based adapter is physically smaller, runs way cooler, but only gets ~6 Gbps from my Mac to my Linux box, with a lot of jitter (iperf3). The AQC adapter is all metal, gets uncomfortably hot, and sustains 9.3 Gbps, no problem. It's about the same size as the middle adapter in the photo. The USB-4 AQC adapters are only ~$13 more, and yet are significantly faster with lower jitter. I'm staying with those. Hope that helps someone!
emirdw 6mo ago
Interesting approach. I’ve been experimenting with browser-based tools lately and the performance is surprisingly good.
- gnabgib 6mo ago
  I'm surprised your experiments with browser based tools, caused you interest in smaller 10GbE USB adapters.
papaver-somnamb 6mo ago
10GbE adoption feels different from the successful string of standard speeds that came prior, since the market congealed around one standards family per Ethernet speed circa say 100Base-TX. We've heard stories as horrific as RJ45 assemblies heating up to a degree such that thermoplastic would flow. Was some threshold crossed where 10Gbit over CAT6-whatever cabling is crossing physics thresholds? Or perhaps 10Gbit was brought to market when tech supporting copper connections wasn't yet mature enough?
- nbf_1995 6mo ago
  I have never heard of ethernet cables getting hot to that degree except when PoE is involved.
galkk 6mo ago
I’m curious, I have 10gb switch and 5gb fiber internet. Will such adapter work on Xbox searies x?
BLACKCRAB 6mo ago
[dead]
l8rlump 6mo ago
I also discovered the other day that you can get high-speed networking between two computers with just a thunderbolt cable. It showed up as a 20G connection anyway.
rincebrain 6mo ago
My question would be, I suppose, how well do they work for extended intervals (e.g. 30+ minutes of saturated traffic)? I've tried buying several USB3 2.5/5/10GbE copper adapters, apparently mostly Aquantia under the hood, and all but one of them would, even with fans actively pointed at them cooling them, rapidly reach a temperature at which they would stop operating entirely, which has turned me off of trying to explore more.

621 points by calcifer 6mo ago

The PCIe version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967

A Framework expansion card was also announced this week. https://frame.work/nl/en/products/wisdpi-10g-ethernet-expansion-card https://frame.work/nl/en/products/wisdpi-10g-ethernet-expans...

topspin 6mo ago
That link notes: "Card supports 10Gbit/s and 10/100/1000/2500/5000/10000Mbit/s Ethernet" Nice to see; some NICs are shedding 10/100 support. Apparently, it's not necessary to do this, even in a low cost device.
- userbinator 6mo ago
  Low-cost devices are exactly where 10/100 is still widely used. On PCs, it's a common power-saving mode.
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    TVs too.
    - geerlingguy 6mo ago
      And PoE security cams.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
    For those of us who don’t know, how does it save power vs a 1gbe running at low throughput?
    - adastra22 6mo ago
      I assume it is for wake-on-LAN. This of course requires the NIC being powered on while the system is sleeping. Lower bandwidth mode = less power draw.
    - jech 6mo ago
      > how does [100BASE-TX] save power vs [1000BASE-T] running at low throughput? 100BASE-TX uses just two pairs (lanes), one for sending and one for receiving. 1000BASE-T uses all four pairs, for both sending and receiving. Therefore, a 100BASE-TX interface that's only receiving needs to power up one pair. A 1000BASE-T interface needs to power all four pairs all the time. I recall reading about some extensions that allow switching off some of the pairs some of the time ("Green Ethernet"), but I think that they require support on both sides of the link, and I'm not sure if they are widely deployed.
      - userbinator 6mo ago
        100M also needs much less signal processing, and at lower speed, than 1G. 10M is even simpler, to the point that even a fast MCU can bit-bang it.
      - rincebrain 6mo ago
        My only annoyance with "Green Ethernet" things is that often they seem to work poorly. The dedicated machine I still keep around for Windows things has two onboard 2.5GbE ports. It will apparently sometimes, even with all power saving features turned off, randomly negotiate down to 100 mbit if I leave the machine alone for a bit, and then stay at that speed forever unless I manually reset the link after wondering why transferring large amounts of data is bottlenecking severely.
- Tade0 6mo ago
  100 mode saved me once when I really really really needed to have a connection in that moment, but the ethernet cable glued to the wall that I was using had only three out of eight wires even functioning.
  - winter_blue 6mo ago
    Don’t we need at least four for 100 Mbps?
    - Tade0 6mo ago
      According to the technician I spoke with, he could only detect three on their end. The cable was chewed through by cats, so perhaps it was three just in that moment. The connection was overall unreliable, so I guess it must have been four, just not all of the time.
      - reaperducer 6mo ago
        According to the technician I spoke with, he could only detect three on their end. The cable was chewed through by cats, so perhaps it was three just in that moment. Ah, the old Cat-3 cable. Been there.
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      There is two wire ethernet that supports 100. It isn't common, but automotive is starting to use it.
    - gsich 6mo ago
      3 pairs probably. But then again you only need 2.
- t312227 6mo ago
  -
  - oliwarner 6mo ago
    Is that really true? If so, is there a saner way to handle this than upgrade all the things to 10GBE? Like a POE ethernet condom that interfaces with both network and devices at native max speeds without the core network having to degrade?
    - eqvinox 6mo ago
      > Is that really true? It's not, cf. sibling posts. The GP probably learned networking in the 80ies~90ies when it was true, but those times are long gone. (unless you're talking wifi.)
  - HHad3 6mo ago
    That is complete nonsense and not how switched networks work.
  - the_mitsuhiko 6mo ago
    That hasn't been true on switched networks in probably 20 years or so.
  - vardump 6mo ago
    We have switches now, hubs just don't exist anymore. Switches are not affected by some devices having a lower speed.
  - hnlmorg 6mo ago
    Isn’t that only relevant for network topologies that rely heavily on broadcasting to multiple nodes. Eg token ring, WiFi and powerline adapters? For regular Ethernet, the switch will have a table of which IPs are on which NIC and thus can dynamically send packets at the right transmission protocols supported by those NICs without degrading the service of other NICs.
    - 6mo ago
- moffkalast 6mo ago
  Lots of industrial sensors and devices only do 4 wire 100BASE-TX so if there's no fallback to that it would be a paperweight in those situations.
- junon 6mo ago
  100 is needed for embedded stuff, it'd render a lot of devices unusable (wiznet chips are popular and are 100 only). That'd suck.
  - Gigachad 6mo ago
    IKEA smart home hub is also 100mbit.
- rleigh 6mo ago
  There are plenty of embedded chips which only provide RMII. No RGMII or alternatives.
- lucb1e 6mo ago
  Low cost? The link mentions no price, only a "notify me" button as far as I can see. Does it show a(n estimated) price point for you somewhere?
  - topspin 6mo ago
    Low cost, as in not data center/server grade hardware.
  - zamadatix 6mo ago
    $99 when I look at the entry in https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards
- jcalvinowens 6mo ago
  I also appreciate the 10/100 support. I recently needed it for some old voip equipment, and it was shockingly difficult to find an SFP+ module that worked in my 10G switch and supported 100mbps.
sschueller 6mo ago
A Framework SFP+ or SFP28 expansion would be sweet.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
retired 6mo ago
The author only got 7Gbps with a Framework 13 and a 10G adapter from the same brand (WisdPi). If this is the same adapter in a different housing, will it also be limited to 7Gbps?
- geerlingguy 6mo ago
  I'm guessing different mainboards could offer better USB port support for Gen 2 2x2, but right now the Ryzen AI 13" chips at least top out at USB4 / 3.2 Gen 2x1

sva_ 6mo ago

It seems like a lot of laptop manufacturers skipped the USB 3.2 Gen2x2 in favor of USB4/TB4.

TMWNN 6mo ago
Conversely, the last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find any USB4 external SSDs on Amazon; only USB 3.2.
- whilenot-dev 6mo ago
  Wouldn't it be better to just buy an M.2 NVMe adapter, eg. ICY DOCK ICYNano MB861U31-1M2B[0]? [0]: https://global.icydock.com/product_247.html https://global.icydock.com/product_247.html
  - justinclift 6mo ago
    That doesn't seem to be USB 4?
    - whilenot-dev 6mo ago
      Is there an SSD that saturates USB3.2 Gen2 speeds and requires USB4?
      - muro 6mo ago
        Many PCIe4 or 5 drives
      - bestham 6mo ago
        Oh yes. Samsung 9100 Pro does 14800/13400 MiB/s over PCIe 5x4.
        alfanick 6mo ago
        I bought this one when upgrading my desktop, it indeed delivers what it promises. 14.5GB/s on my tiny random desktop, it's impressive. Everything feels so instantaneous, my Linux desktop finally feels like a Mac :)

user34283 6mo ago

I have a RTL8157 5 Gbps adapter from CableMatters. Interestingly it seems to get burning hot on the MacBook M1 Pro while it remains cool on the M5 Pro model. Maybe the workload is different, but I would not rule out some sort of hardware or driver difference. I only use a 1G port on my router at the moment.

baybal2 6mo ago
[dead]
red369 6mo ago
Huh! That's very interesting. I am definitely not the person to shed any light on what is going on, but you've added to my feeling that these adapters are all incomprehensible, so I'll try and do the same for you. I have a USB C ethernet adapter (a Belkin USB-C to Ethernet + Charge Adapter which I recommend if you need it). I ran out of USB C ports one day, and plugged it through a USB C to USB A adapter instead. I must have done an fast.com speed-test to make sure it wasn't going to slow things down drastically, and found that the latency was lower! Not a huge amount, and I think the max speed was quicker without the adapter. But still, lower latency through a $1.50 Essager USB C to USB A adapter, bought from Shein or Shopee or somewhere silly! I tried tons of times, back and forward, with the adapter a few times, then without the adapter a few times. Even on multiple laptops. As much as I don't want to, I keep seeing lower latency through this cheap adapter. Next step, I'll try USB C to USB A, then back through a USB A to USB C adapter. Who knows how fast my internet could be!

deepsun 6mo ago

Is it also possible to power a laptop through those adapters? PoE++ can deliver up to 100W of power, more than enough for most laptops.

eqvinox 6mo ago
Theoretically yes, practically that hasn't been built yet. I've only seen it for 2.5Gbase-T, and only for 802.3bt Type 3 (51W). If anyone's aware of something better, I'd be interested too :) (Then again I wouldn't voluntarily use 5Gb-T or 10Gb-T anyway, and ≈50W is enough for most use cases.) [ed.: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807960919319.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807960919319.html ("2.5GPD2CBT-20V" variant) - actually 2.5G not 1G as I wrote initially]
- Iulioh 6mo ago
  Eh. A lot of laptops won't accept less than 60w My work laptop won't accept less than 90w (A modern HP, i7 155h with a random low end GPU) At first everyone at the office just assumed that the USB C wasn't able to charge the pc
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    A Mac mini at home used 4.64w averaged over the last 30 days. Even under load it just sips power.
    - sva_ 6mo ago
      It can draw a lot more under load? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103253 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103253
      - lostlogin 6mo ago
        I’m sure it can, but even that could be supplied by POE++ I think? Mine under very rarely exceeds 10w.
  - 6mo ago

eqvinox 6mo ago

Too bad this is 10Gbase-T, that energy-wasting hot-running garbage needs to die sooner rather than later. Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use. (Fibre is nowhere near as "sensitive" as some people believe.)

zrm 6mo ago
The problem with fibre isn't the sensitivity. It's that most endpoints have a 1Gbps copper port on them and then Cat6A ports can be used with the common devices but also allow you to add or relocate 10Gbps devices without rewiring the building again.
- HappMacDonald 6mo ago
  However — unlike copper twisted pair — the bandwidth current fiber media can carry is nearly limited by nothing but the optics at each end.
  - zrm 6mo ago
    That doesn't solve the chicken and egg problem. What probably would is something like having PCIe and USB to 1Gbps fiber adapters that cost $5.
    - simoncion 6mo ago
      You've been able to get Intel X520 NICs [0], with transceivers included for ~40USD on Newegg for a long time. This is a little more than double the price of Newegg's cheapest single-port 10/100/1000 copper card, but even the cheapest available such card is three times your "chicken and egg"-solving price point. I suspect the combination of the absence of cheap-o all-in-one AP/router combo boxes with any SFP+ cages and fiber cabling's reputation of being extremely fragile have much more to do with its scarcity at the extremely low end of networking gear than anything else. [0] This is a two-port SFP+ PCI Express card
      - 6mo ago

shevy-java 6mo ago

Will they be cheaper? I look at the RAM prices. Granted, RAM is in a different category than USB adapters, but I no longer trust anyone writing "will be cheaper" - the reality may be different to the projection made.

jordand 6mo ago

For Thunderbolt 4/5 docks, I've held off from buying a high-end Thunderbolt 5 dock as many still have 2.5GbE Ethernet and other limitations with displays. The CalDigit TS5 Plus is one of the only options with 10GbE and its $500 (and usually OoS). I managed to buy an ex-corporate refurb HP Thunderbolt 4 G4 dock for only ~$64 and would recommend others do the same (this has an Intel 2.5GbE and good display outputs)

fmajid 6mo ago

FWIW I got a Xikestor 10G adapter with the Realtek chipset from AliExpress and it underperforms my much cheaper 5G one.

dijit 6mo ago
Yeah. Just because it negotiates, doesn’t mean it can utilise.

superjan 6mo ago

My favorite USB ethernet adapter is a lowly 100 MBit one that works everywhere without requiring driver downloads.

woohin 6mo ago

[dead]

mort96 6mo ago

All these USB version names. I used to know what they all meant, but then the USB IF went ahead and renamed them all and made a bunch of versions have the same name and renamed some versions to have the same name as the old name of other versions. I have absolutely no idea what anyone means when they say USB 3.2 gen 2x2. I used to know what USB 3.2 meant but it's certainly not that.

ssl-3 6mo ago
Oh, it's fine. The lack of clarity is in keeping with the USB C connector itself, which may supply or accept power at various rates or not at all, may be fast or slow, may provide or accept video or not, and may even provide an interpretation of PCI Express but probably doesn't. It probably looks the same no matter what, and the cable selected to use probably also won't be very forthcoming with its capabilities either. (Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.)
- theandrewbailey 6mo ago
  This quagmire (along with the version names) is why I call it the Unintuitive Serial Bus.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  The USB A connector stayed the same between USB 1, 2 and 3. Yet most manufacturers voluntary distinguished them by giving USB 1 and 1.1 a white insert in plug and port, USB 2 a black insert and USB 3 a blue one This was neither standarized nor enforced, yet it worked remarkably well in the real world Then we decided to just have no markings at all on USB C cables. On the ports at least we occasionally get little thunderbolt or power symbols
  - mbreese 6mo ago
    The exterior of the USB A connector stayed the same. The number of pins increased when we went from USB 2 to 3. So, even in this case, it’s slightly more complicated. The colors helped because the capabilities were very different between the ports. But when the USB IF increased the number of options (and reduced the size of the connector), different colors became impossible to do. The problem is that there are too many uses for one connector. But this is wha we wanted - a reduced number of standardized connector/power options.

souravroy78 6mo ago

Can these support local LLM’s?

simonjgreen 6mo ago

From the source of the RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver in FreeBSD: (old, not directly relevant, just amusing) https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_rl.c https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_r... /* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on * the RealTek chipset. Datasheets can be obtained from * www.realtek.com.tw. * * Written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu> * Electrical Engineering Department * Columbia University, New York City / / * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers. * * For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor * registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned * on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to * do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely * case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet * is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only * four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four * packets queued for transmission at any one time. * * Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large * buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received * frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets * will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer * area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol * levels. * * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it. * * On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although * rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the * PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register * space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast * filter. * * The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY * chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where * the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need * to select which interface to use depending on the chip type. */

eqvinox 6mo ago
8159 != 8139 > /* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on […] Also, please, for the love of whatever entity, at least remove the *s on that paste. This is just atrocious and disrespectful of any reader.

realxrobau 6mo ago

Are there any that actually have a SFP+ port? That's all I want. No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7, and you can just change it up to a $7 multimode when you need longer runs.

Galanwe 6mo ago
10G DACs are no cheaper than cat6, which is perfectly fine for 10G at most practical distances. Considering the target audience of these cards it seems pretty obvious to me that letting users "just buy a cat 6 cable" is miles more reasonable than having them buy a transceiver or DAC. As for allowing to switch to fiber, that just seems orthogonal again to what these USB NICs are for, not to mention the SFP+ itself is probably more expensive than the NIC shown here...
- Fnoord 6mo ago
  DACs are very cheap (second hand and AliExpress) and they never use much W. If both machines are near each other though (which a DAC cable implies) and both run Linux and both support Thunderbolt, you might be better off with a direct ethernet over TB connection. Whether macOS supports such, I don't know. The other side will then also need a low power NIC (of which fiber and DAC over SFP+ are less power hungry). What this article doesn't mention, is that there are also a lot of PCIe NICs on the market which aren't power hungry (RTL8127), as well as RTL8261C for switches/routers. I've seen low power RTL NICs with SFP+ on it, too (example: [1]). With SFP+, you'll have a lot more versatility. DAC and SFP+ fiber are very cheap, btw. Especially second hand they go for virtually nothing. I have 10 SFP+ fiber lying around here doing nothing which I got for a few EUR each. For me as European with high energy prices and solar energy gotten the beat next year (in NL), this is all very interesting. There's a couple of good reasons why to opt for fiber in the home. You keep the energy between the different groups separated which can help. I also find fiber very easy to get through walls, allowing me to have multiple fiber connections through walls (currently I use 1x fiber + 1x ethernet for PoE possibilities from fusebox). With all above being said, AQC100S is low power and does not get very hot. You can get these with SFP+ and PCIe/TB. They've been available for a while. [1] https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005011733192115.html https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005011733192115.html (no vouching for, just first hit on search)

nottorp 6mo ago

By the way, how are switches and cables for > 1Gbps these days?

Galanwe 6mo ago
You can find 2.5G switches with a reasonable amount of ports on the cheap. For 10G though the cost is still prohibitive IMHO unless you are fine with 2 ports. For cables, I think everything converged to cat6a a while ago, which is both reasonably cheap and perfecrly fine for 10G (up to 100m from what I remember)
- geerlingguy 6mo ago
  Mikrotik has a couple 4-5 port 10 GbE switches (one has SFP+ ports, one has RJ45), and Ubiquiti has a couple small switches now that don't quite break the bank at least.
- wpm 6mo ago
  Nicgiga and Trendnet have 8 and 5 port 10G switches for less than $250 respectively.

randusername 6mo ago

TFA doesn't compare the performance of the new adapters with the older ones. Does anyone know if the old bulky ones will hit 10G speeds on the same hardware? I assume I can get a few old TB2 models and adapters on the cheap and they'll run cool enough and stable enough for constant 1G internet and occasional 10G intranet

freedomben 6mo ago

I've had such terrible success with usb-ethernet adapters on linux, to the point where wifi is usually much more performant. The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. It's so frequent though that even scp-ing a medium-sized file is likely to fail or stall. Hardware is a Framework 13 3rd gen laptop. Is this just my hardware? It's hard to imagine these issues would be so prevalent with how many people use these on linux...

TacticalCoder 6mo ago
> The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. I never ever saw that and I'm literally using usb-to-ethernet adapters on Linux since forever. It's about the chipset you're using and how the kernel supports it no? For example for 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet if you go with anything with a Realtek RTL8156B (and not the older non 'B') or anything more recent it should work flawlessly. Before buying I look on the Internet for users' returns / kernel support what the latest chipset the cool kids on the block are using. As I've been perfectly happy with Realtek 8156B for 2.5 Gbit/s if I wanted to buy a 10 Gbit/s one, I'd look at cool kids, like that Jeff Geerling dude from TFA/Youtube, and see he's using a Realtek 8159 and I'd think: "Oh that's close to mine, I trust that to work very well". I literally still even have an old USB2.0-to-100Mbit/s that I use daily and that has never failed me neither (it's for an old laptop that I use as some kind of terminal over SSH). I don't recommend 100 Mbit/s: my point is that it's been many moons all this has flawless support under Linux. > Is this just my hardware? To me it's due to a poor chipset / poor chipset support in the USB-to-ethernet adapter you're using. These things, when they're a well supported chipset, are flawless.

yread 6mo ago

I have a 5G USB and getting it to work at 5G speeds in Linux was a challenge. The driver worked properly only with kernel 6.12 not 6.10 nor 6.14

nasretdinov 6mo ago

10 GbE sits in a really weird spot for me, maybe I'm just not understanding something though. It's at most 1.25 GB/sec of bandwidth, yet it's relatively quite expensive. It's not sufficient bandwidth for getting good performance out of most SSDs, yet it's really excessive for any hard drives (except for RAID10 setups I guess). For SSDs you want thunderbolt (or 40+ GbE) connection for best latency and performance, and for hard drives 2.5Gbit/sec is more than enough. As I said, I might be misunderstanding something, but 10 GbE sits between the two sensible options for me.

whatevaa 6mo ago
Are you gonna run thunderbolt more than a few meters? If you think 10 is expensive, check prices above 10. You may even need fiber for that.
- nasretdinov 6mo ago
  No, of course I'm not going to if I choose thunderbolt :). But in many cases it's fine because SSDs aren't nearly as noisy as HDDs, so the NAS can just sit under your desk. For 40+ GbE or fibre I agree they are expensive, but at least you get full performance out of your system. SSDs aren't cheap these days either...
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  Making a long distance complex network may be expensive, but to connect directly a few computers one can use 25 Gb/s Ethernet at a reasonable price. Last time when I checked, dual-port 25 Gb/s NICs were not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs. If you have a few computers with no more than a few meters distance between them, you can put a dual-port 25 Gb/s card in each and connect them directly with direct attach copper cables, in a daisy chain or in a ring, without an expensive switch.
- butvacuum 6mo ago
  fiber vs DAC isn't really a cost concern st a home level. a 2m LC patch cable is $5 and used bidi cisco optics $5-10 each. not much more for new optics either.

p0w3n3d 6mo ago

What cat cable works with it?

oytis 6mo ago

Can any of them do TSN?

Razengan 6mo ago

> USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 What the fuck

Neywiny 6mo ago
It's still not named well but the way to understand it is: gen 1 is 5gbps/lane, gen 2 is 10. x1 is 1 lane, x2 is 2. So really there are only 4 combinations, 5, 10, 10, 20. It just took them a really long and windy time to get there.

flyingsquirrel_ 6mo ago

wow. Maybe i should try it

LoganDark 6mo ago

I don't understand how a 10GbE adapter is possible without Thunderbolt, or why not being Thunderbolt makes it smaller. In my experience USB speeds faster than 3 don't happen in practice unless you have a Thunderbolt port and device. Maybe I just don't have devices that use the faster USB speeds, but Thunderbolt has always been the one and only way to exceed the speed of USB for me. I think USB 4 exists based on the Thunderbolt spec (or the other way around?), but doesn't require any Thunderbolt capabilities and therefore isn't very telling. I think Apple's approach of supporting Thunderbolt 4/5 on every USB port of the MacBook Pro is the only sustainable way forward.

Neywiny 6mo ago
Because USB can do 2 lanes of 10 gbps. So that's 20gbps. 10 < 20. Thunderbolt isn't part of the equation here because it's not a thunderbolt device or thunderbolt host (even if the port is thunderbolt capable). The reason it's smaller to go with USB is that AFAIK thunderbolt only bridges to other interfaces like USB or PCIe. So any thunderbolt NIC is actually thunderbolt -> PCIe, then PCIe -> Ethernet. USB is more often interfaced with directly. 2 big power hungry chips vs 1. 1 < 2 so it is smaller. Thunderbolt also carries overhead vs oculink. Thunderbolt tunnels PCIe. The PCIe tunnels the ethernet traffic. Oculink is just PCIe, which is why it's not as hot pluggable but gets significant performance increases for PCIe devices. USB in this case tunnels Ethernet traffic. So thunderbolt NICs have 2 layers, USB has 1. 1 < 2. Less overhead means lower power and less heat so smaller heatsinks, fewer chips means smaller board so smaller device. If more devices had oculink connectors, it's highly conceivable that an oculink adapter would also be smaller than a thunderbolt NIC, because again there's no such thing as a thunderbolt NIC just a thunderbolt -> PCIe -> Ethernet.
- LoganDark 6mo ago
  > Thunderbolt isn't part of the equation here because it's not a thunderbolt device or thunderbolt host (even if the port is thunderbolt capable). The article directly states this device is smaller than a Thunderbolt adapter. I was not calling Thunderbolt part of the equation, just asking how it's possible to reach high speeds without it. The rest of your explanation makes sense, thanks.

rowanG077 6mo ago

I'm still curious why it can't reach full 10GbE in both directions. Afaik USB gen 3.2 2x2 the transmit and receive directions are independent. So it doesn't really make sense to reach full speed one way and not the other way, purely from a USB perspective.

jauntywundrkind 6mo ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not really a straightforward next place to go, no? 10Gbe is 4x2.5Gbit, right? Then 25Gbit is 1x25Gbit? Four of em for 100Gbit? That's right isn't it? It's unfortunate thinking that this is the end, this is as good as it's gonna be, for a while. Especially with usb4 going faster and faster still. Edit: ah! 25Gbase-t exists, is four pairs. Defined at the same time as 40Gbase-t, 802.3bq-2016. A PAM-16 encoding. Yes, 100Gbe was originally defined as 4x25Gbe for optical but there are base-t. Also! The 10Gb adapter here is $80. Worth noting for folks that 2.5Gbe adapters are ~$13 and 5Gbe adapters a hair over $20! Very affordable very nice boost. Make use of those USB ports!

ranon 6mo ago

Just got an rtl8127 pci e card to replace my aqc113. Runs cool, doesn't have as much contention on the chipset. Price was right. Good purchase and that $10 chip will allow cheaper more power efficient home 10gb equipment within the coming years.

aggregator-ios 6mo ago
Was the card $10 or are you saying that the chip is a $10 part?

movedx 6mo ago

The inaccessibility of 10GbE, and the even higher inaccessibility of anything faster, made me move away from NAS devices to DAS. Not everyone can do this, or needs move TBs of data on a frequent basis, but if you do then a USB4/Thunderbolt 5 DAS is the way to go (and it’s basically the only way to go in film and TV data management.)

barnabask 6mo ago
TIL that DAS stands for "Direct Attached Storage." In the olden times we called them external hard drives.
- Telaneo 6mo ago
  A DAS device will typically hold more than one hard drive. But yes, it's a more fancy version of having four seperate external hard drives hooked up.
- BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
  Well with the move to SSD's, it added two syllables. Maybe external solid state drive is just too long and it finally had to be sortened somehow.

cycloner 6mo ago

Price is the key factor. If it's too expensive, even if the performance is excellent, it won't be necessary.

bri3d 6mo ago

I'm disappointed that both the article and comments don't go into the actual differences between how these adapters work and the overhead incurred by USB. At a high level, I'm pretty sure Thunderbolt will be significantly better in all situations: Thunderbolt is PCIe; depending on the way the network card driver works, the PCIe controller will usually end up doing DMA straight into the buffers the SKB points to, and with io_uring or AF_XDP, these buffers can even be sent down into user space without ever being copied. Also, usually these drivers can take advantage of multiple txqueues and rxqueues (for example, per core or per stream) since they can allocate whatever memory they want for the NIC to write into. USB is USB; the controller can DMA USB packet data into URBs but they need to be set up for each transaction, and once the data arrives, it's encapsulated in NCM or some other USB format and the kernel usually has to copy or move the frames to get SKBs. The whole thing is sort of fundamentally pull based rather than push based. But, this is just scratching the surface; I'm sure there are neat tricks that some USB 3.2 NIC drivers can do to reduce overhead and I'd love to read an article where I learned more about that, or even saw some benchmarks that analyzed especially memory controller utilization, kernel CPU time, and performance counters (like cache utilization). Especially at 10G and beyond, a lot of processing becomes memory bandwidth limited and the difference can be extremely significant.

eqvinox 6mo ago
ACK. From some cursory experimentation, my laptop can roughly saturate 1G via USB, but on 2.5G things get wonky above roughly 1.9G unidirectional or 2.9G bidirectional. > Thunderbolt is PCIe Nit: Thunderbolt isn't PCIe, it tunnels PCIe. Depending on chips used, there's bandwidth limits; I vaguely remember 22.5G on older 40G TB Intel chips.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> Thunderbolt is PCIe Thunderbolt allows PCIe tunneling, but it has some overhead over raw PCIe. That's why Thunderbolt eGPU setups don't perform as well as plugging the GPU directly into a PCIe slot. > USB is USB Until you get to USB4, when USB 4 supports Thunderbolt 4.
- bri3d 6mo ago

AntiUSAbah 6mo ago

Thats just a depressing situation for 10G networking. If its p2p, its easier to just use usb-c inbetween. Apparently someone doesn't understand my post so let me edit it for the downvote?!... 10G is old tech, its 2026 and the best thing we still have today is a 80$ Adapater while USB-C already can do 5, 10, 20 and 40gb I'm waiting for 10g network for home for ages now but infra is more expensive, consumes more energy and gets hotter.

userbinator 6mo ago
while USB-C already can do 5, 10, 20 and 40gb ...over a few meters at most. 10GBASE-T Ethernet goes dozens of meters, and the other variants using optic fiber reach into kilometers.

bitvvip 6mo ago

[dead]

exabrial 6mo ago

Jeff: I see a possible problem with your tests that bit me before! ipferf3 is not multithreaded by default. The more capable computers probably have an interrupt rate sufficient to handle 10gig over USB (which likely multiplies the interrupt rate needed), but it's completely possible you're pushing the interrupt rate limits on the Macbook Neo and other lower powered hardware. Any chance you could re-run with `-P 4` where 4 is the core count?

geerlingguy 6mo ago
I ran all the tests at P 2 and P 4 to verify cpu cores weren't hindering the speed, but got the same result (within 2%). Modern A/M cores and Zen 5 cores individually have enough grunt to handle at least 10 Gbps through USB without a hitch. On my Pi's and N100 mini PCs, I do have to use threads to hit more than about 5-6 Gbps. And testing a 25 Gbps adapter I'm testing separately, I had to use multiple threads to get my Ampere CPU to measure speeds greater than 10 Gbps.
- exabrial 6mo ago
  Awesome! We had a Intel Atom board with 10g, and we could never get iperf3 to saturate the interface until we used `-P`!
dd_xplore 6mo ago
Or Better use only iperf (or known as version 2), it has multi threading support
fulafel 6mo ago
A single threaded benchmark better represents real performance, I'd argue. 10 Gbps is only 1.2 GB/s after all and few applications use parallel streams.
- stonegray 6mo ago
  I think the intention is to measure the adapter itself independent from the CPU/overall system. Besides, I can’t think of a typical single threaded application that would use those data rates, can you?

flal_ 6mo ago

What would be actual use cases ? I mean, I get the nerdery of having the fastest possible network, but in practice ?

CaliforniaKarl 6mo ago
Recently, I had a researcher who had been delivered a blob of research data. It was multiple TB, and the data was delivered in a little RAID-1 drove enclosure, which had a USB-C connection. (I don’t remember the exact make or model.) The user originally wanted to do the transfer over WiFi. I helped them set up the transfer, and they eventually realized it would take multiple months to complete. I set them up with a Thunderbolt 10GBASE-T Ethernet adapter. The wiring was Cat-6, but the distance was low enough such that 10G would’ve been achievable. The switches in the network closet were only 1GbE, though the uplinks were 10GbE. Even so, switching the transfer from wireless to 1GbE wired brought our ETA down to just under one month. I wish we could’ve gotten a 10GBASE-T port for the researcher; that would’ve brought the ETA down from ~1 month to ~1 week.
- mixmastamyk 6mo ago
  Why not connect it directly to the server/workstation?

deferredgrant 6mo ago

[flagged]

aggregator-ios 6mo ago

For those that read the article and are still confused (as I was) about what Apple hardware would give you the full 10GbE speeds: - 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo). - No Apple hardware supports the 3.2 v2x2 standard (20Gbps) and your connection will be downgraded to 10Gbps on these RTL8159 chips. Because of processing overhead, you will only get 5-7Gbps of total Ethernet throughput. - Upgraded Mac Mini or Apple Studio base models have builtin 10GbE ports For now, thunderbolt adapters are still the most reliable 10GbE for Apple laptops.

wolvoleo 6mo ago
> 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo). The neo doesn't have thunderbolt at all so no, that won't fly.
- aggregator-ios 6mo ago
  Thank you, I was suspecting the same but was not sure.
- bdavbdav 6mo ago
  Luckily I suspect the intersect on the Venn diagram isn’t huge for Neo buyers, and those wanting / needing 10gigE
  - aggregator-ios 6mo ago
    Yup.
    - AnthonBerg 6mo ago
      Thinking about it, it would be pretty magical. Neo with 10GbE to fast storage and CPU and GPU: Thin client that's pretty damn thick for how thin it is.

wolvoleo 6mo ago

I remember getting my first laptop with gigabit ethernet in 2005, more than 20 years ago! I'm surprised 10gbit is still so uncommon and eyewateringly expensive. And I don't just mean the adapters which are coming down in price finally but also the switches. For more than 10 years we've had semi managed gigabit switches for 25€ like the TP-SG108E. 10gbit is still crazy expensive. Even though it is quite needed these days for fast transfers from computer to computer, the old "your harddrive won't keep up anyway" excuse is no longer valid. I still have max 10 gbit here and I'd have to replace 3 switches at least so it won't be coming soon. The 2.5 and 5 options are too meh for me to be interesting. I hope the arrival of these new chips will increase the number of systems with 10g it and then hopefully the prices of switches will come down too.

kd913 6mo ago
How often do you have to do fast transfers from computer to computer? Would argue for those purposes 40gig thunderbolt makes a lot more sense.
- wolvoleo 6mo ago
  It would but none of my systems have thunderbolt and besides that my NASes are on the other side of the flat where the noise doesn't bother me. Thunderbolt only reaches a metre or two. I assume thunderbolt PCI cards are a thing but the distance is a bigger problem. I need fast transfers pretty often. I do a weekly image of all my workstations as backup. Right now I do them overnight as it's limited to 110MB/s but this could be done within 15 minutes with 10gbit. Also, huge media files.
sixdonuts 6mo ago
10GB ethernet switches will never be cheap because of the power requirements. Just get a 25GB switch and skip 10GB all together.
- wolvoleo 6mo ago
  Of course they will go down in power just like these USB controllers have done.

tobinfricke 6mo ago

How about 10 GbE switches/routers? I have 10 GbE fiber-to-the-home via Sonic, but so far just have it plugged into a Google Wifi router with gigabit ethernet. Would love to have 10 GbE wired to my desk.

jburgess777 6mo ago
ServeTheHome is a good place to look for reviews of the switches available, e.g. https://www.servethehome.com/10gbe-in-2026-is-finally-hitting-the-tipping-point/2/ https://www.servethehome.com/10gbe-in-2026-is-finally-hittin...
osamagirl69 6mo ago
If you are riding the Geerling train you would probably be interested in the upcoming mono router: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/testing-mono-gateway-custom-built-10-gbps-router/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/testing-mono-gateway-... Personally I use an x86 PC (supermicro E300 with X11SDV motherboard with integrated Intel X540 10Gbe NICs) running opnsense.
jshier 6mo ago
Full, multiport 10GbE switches are still rather pricy. You could look at 2.5Gb or 5Gb port routers that have a 10Gb input. You won't be able saturate it with a single device, but you would using multiple devices. Ubiquiti has some nice stuff.
- 15155 6mo ago
  https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-aggregation https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-aggregation https://mikrotik.com/product/crs304_4xg_in https://mikrotik.com/product/crs304_4xg_in https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLGLRTGF https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLGLRTGF
  - sixdonuts 6mo ago
    The Microtik in the link draws 15 watts at idle...

punnerud 6mo ago

RTL8159 is way cheaper from Aliexpress in other products, and most is this small or smaller for 10G. The article should maybe have been focusing on that piece?

cyberax 6mo ago

One another thing to try: set the MTU to 9000. But don't do this on your main interface, or you'll get haunted by traffic being blackholed. At home, I have separate VLANs for the 9k packets. It has a separate subnet (both V6 and V4), so it works perfectly. The devices on this VLAN use it directly if they can, and everything else goes through the router that sends proper ICMP "too big" messages.

ballack007 6mo ago

mbklog4@gmail.com

ridiculous_fish 6mo ago

I bought one of these as soon as I heard about it ($74 from eBay) and tested it against my USB-4 AQC113 mainstays ($87, IO CREST brand on Amazon), from my MBP. The new RTL-based adapter is physically smaller, runs way cooler, but only gets ~6 Gbps from my Mac to my Linux box, with a lot of jitter (iperf3). The AQC adapter is all metal, gets uncomfortably hot, and sustains 9.3 Gbps, no problem. It's about the same size as the middle adapter in the photo. The USB-4 AQC adapters are only ~$13 more, and yet are significantly faster with lower jitter. I'm staying with those. Hope that helps someone!

emirdw 6mo ago

Interesting approach. I’ve been experimenting with browser-based tools lately and the performance is surprisingly good.

gnabgib 6mo ago
I'm surprised your experiments with browser based tools, caused you interest in smaller 10GbE USB adapters.

papaver-somnamb 6mo ago

10GbE adoption feels different from the successful string of standard speeds that came prior, since the market congealed around one standards family per Ethernet speed circa say 100Base-TX. We've heard stories as horrific as RJ45 assemblies heating up to a degree such that thermoplastic would flow. Was some threshold crossed where 10Gbit over CAT6-whatever cabling is crossing physics thresholds? Or perhaps 10Gbit was brought to market when tech supporting copper connections wasn't yet mature enough?

nbf_1995 6mo ago
I have never heard of ethernet cables getting hot to that degree except when PoE is involved.

galkk 6mo ago

I’m curious, I have 10gb switch and 5gb fiber internet. Will such adapter work on Xbox searies x?

BLACKCRAB 6mo ago

[dead]

l8rlump 6mo ago

I also discovered the other day that you can get high-speed networking between two computers with just a thunderbolt cable. It showed up as a 20G connection anyway.

rincebrain 6mo ago

My question would be, I suppose, how well do they work for extended intervals (e.g. 30+ minutes of saturated traffic)? I've tried buying several USB3 2.5/5/10GbE copper adapters, apparently mostly Aquantia under the hood, and all but one of them would, even with fans actively pointed at them cooling them, rapidly reach a temperature at which they would stop operating entirely, which has turned me off of trying to explore more.