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New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#251

Post by bobbob1921 »

donatj wrote: post #161
MisterTea wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 Gb is cheap! Mikrotik has a 4x10Gb + 1x1Gb port switch for $150 USD and an 8x10Gb version for about $275. I have the 8 port version. SFP+'s and fiber are cheap, like maybe 50 bucks for the SFP+ set and fiber. 10Gb PCIe cards are maybe ~$50 new on Amazon with Intel chips and cheaper on eBay - I bought used 10 Gb Mellanox cards for $25 each - "they just work" under FreeBSD and Linux. Copper 10 Gb used to consume waa…

I redid the backbone of my home in 10Gb fiber, and "cheap" is not the term I would use. Especially when you can get perfectly cromulent 1GbE switches for like $10 these days. The Mikrotik switches [1] work technically speaking but they are quite difficult to configure. You have to pull them from your network, connect physically to a specific port, force your machine onto a specific IP, connect to a specific IP. I cou…

I use mikrotik equipment extensively (as in hundreds/ thousands of them over the years), while I disagree with a lot of of this, the post is absolutely correct about the ridiculous password on a sticker requirements they introduced a few years ago. The pw text is incredibly small and the way it’s printed (dpi and font) makes it very difficult to differentiate certain characters. Also the way you initially connect to them when they’re new out of the box to then enter this obnoxious password has several issues/challenges. It used to be so easy and convenient to configure brand new mikrotik devices in the past, and now it’s become a task I dread and has even caused us to buy non- mikrotik gear in several cases.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#252

Post by bobbob1921 »

amelius wrote: post #174
MisterTea wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 Gb is cheap! Mikrotik has a 4x10Gb + 1x1Gb port switch for $150 USD and an 8x10Gb version for about $275. I have the 8 port version. SFP+'s and fiber are cheap, like maybe 50 bucks for the SFP+ set and fiber. 10Gb PCIe cards are maybe ~$50 new on Amazon with Intel chips and cheaper on eBay - I bought used 10 Gb Mellanox cards for $25 each - "they just work" under FreeBSD and Linux. Copper 10 Gb used to consume waa…

Does microtik have any competition?

in the lower end space kind of, however in many respects no they don’t. Ubiquity would be their main competition, but ubiquity equipment is cloud first whereas a strong point of mikrotik has been that you do not need a centralized cloud controller (ie local first). Also in terms of the vast capabilities of mikrotik equipment at its price point, no there is absolutely no real competitor. (Maybe PFsense is the closest competitor with strong feature set)

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#253

Post by flemhans »

ziml77 wrote: post #211
reaperducer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gets even worse. I now have two cheap Chinese gadgets (a checki printer and a tire inflater) that have USB-C ports for charging, but will only charge wi…

Ah that's a fun misuse of USB ports. The companies will often even dodge issues with the USB-IF by labeling the ports as Type C and letting the customer's mind fill in the word USB. I wish these devices would just use barrel jacks, labeled with the voltage and polarity. But these manufacturers know that the USB-C port weighs into buying decisions (and they know that most people have zero clue about the difference bet…

Or just include a $0.03 pd negotiator in the circuit

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#254

Post by compounding_it »

mort96 wrote: post #53

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.

In all this, people now just go to the Apple Store and buy a cable for their Apple device. This confusion benefitted such vendors and now they sell 1$ cable for an absurd amount of profit.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#255

Post by flemhans »

randusername wrote: post #146
nasretdinov wrote: post #121

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…

I chose 10GbE to fit 20 HDDs in RAID 10. ~ 1 GB/sec seems about right for a long time. I can't imagine the basic files I work with everyday getting much more storage-dense than they are in 2026.

I remember my friend Peter, in 1999, on campus networking with 100 Mbit internet saying: I think this will be enough for many years to come. And he was kinda right — 100 Mbit is still "almost good enough" 27 years later for internet access.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#256

Post by dd_xplore »

exabrial wrote: post #225

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` w…

Or Better use only iperf (or known as version 2), it has multi threading support

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#257

Post by zrm »

simoncion wrote: post #49
zrm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 an…

You can get copper ones for $5.99 (quality may vary):

https://www.amazon.com/1000Mbps-Network-Performance-Gigabit-...

https://www.amazon.com/SALAN-Ethernet-Portable-Internet-Conv...

But it's not competing with those, it's competing with the copper port which is already built into most devices.

Another thing that would work is something like this (also $5.99), but with one of the ports as fibre:

https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Splitter-1000Mbps-In...

The point being you need some cheap way to plug in existing copper devices if you run fibre to the endpoints.

This plus $5 for a transceiver is pretty close at $15:

https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Converter-Auto-Negot...

But +$15 and an extra wall outlet per endpoint is still an inconvenience, and if a two-port device with its own power supply can be made for $15 then where is the PCIe/USB to fibre adapter for <$10?

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#258

Post by fulafel »

exabrial wrote: post #225

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` w…

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.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#259

Post by BenjiWiebe »

barnabask wrote: post #170
movedx wrote: post #160

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.)

TIL that DAS stands for "Direct Attached Storage." In the olden times we called them external hard drives.

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.

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