Can't you just put a real PCIe NIC in an eGPU enclosure with a fan? I bet you can solve this problem for like $150 and two craigslist transactions.
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Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#92I'm using the sonnet at work. Work paid for it. Yes it's more expensive. I have gotten over 25 gbps bidirectional, but not by much. Maybe 27. A big downside is that it only supports 15W upstream power which I didn't think to check, so since that laptop only has 2 usb-c ports for power input, it's a bit limiting. The upside, though, was that I plugged it in, got my throughput, and never had to worry ever again. Rememb…
>I'm using the sonnet at work. I initially read this as SONET [1] and was seriously questioning your technical choices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking
Almost 30 years ago, I worked on a corporate campus with several different buildings spread out over about 5 miles. There was a SONET ring linking them. I remember a coworker showing me this add-drop multiplexer thing so he could provision a fractional T1 of bandwidth out of the ring. CSU/DSUs, thick serial cables, cisco 2501 routers... We'd laugh at these speeds today.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#93For us Plugable 2.5G USB-C to ethernet adapter (bought November 2025), SABRENT USB C to 2.5Gbps ethernet adapter (bought October 2024), UGREEN USB C 2.5G ethernet adapter (also October 2024). In my experience they immediately fall on their face in a speedtest and drop to a couple hundred Mbps, experience packet loss, etc. This is testing across a few modern Apple Silicon Macs. I now have a WavLink WL-NWU341G 5Gbps do…
Seconded - those RealTek dongles are no good.
For my Macs, the IOCrest USB4 adapters with the AQC113 chipset have been rock-solid and can saturate my 10Gbe network. They do run hot but no stability issues. That's what I use and recommend.
The newer RTL8159 based dongles are smaller, cheaper, cooler, and can do 10 Gbe on paper. But they top out at 7 Gbps on Macs, which don't implement the USBx2 spec.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm using the sonnet at work. I initially read this as SONET [1] and was seriously questioning your technical choices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking
Almost 30 years ago, I worked on a corporate campus with several different buildings spread out over about 5 miles. There was a SONET ring linking them. I remember a coworker showing me this add-drop multiplexer thing so he could provision a fractional T1 of bandwidth out of the ring. CSU/DSUs, thick serial cables, cisco 2501 routers... We'd laugh at these speeds today.
To get 10Mbps of Ethernet, they would bond together 7x T1s on the SONET side...
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#95For us Plugable 2.5G USB-C to ethernet adapter (bought November 2025), SABRENT USB C to 2.5Gbps ethernet adapter (bought October 2024), UGREEN USB C 2.5G ethernet adapter (also October 2024). In my experience they immediately fall on their face in a speedtest and drop to a couple hundred Mbps, experience packet loss, etc. This is testing across a few modern Apple Silicon Macs. I now have a WavLink WL-NWU341G 5Gbps do…
Seconded - those RealTek dongles are no good. For my Macs, the IOCrest USB4 adapters with the AQC113 chipset have been rock-solid and can saturate my 10Gbe network. They do run hot but no stability issues. That's what I use and recommend. The newer RTL8159 based dongles are smaller, cheaper, cooler, and can do 10 Gbe on paper. But they top out at 7 Gbps on Macs, which don't implement the USBx2 spec.
But op said their RTL-8157, which is also RealTek, is good?
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded - those RealTek dongles are no good. For my Macs, the IOCrest USB4 adapters with the AQC113 chipset have been rock-solid and can saturate my 10Gbe network. They do run hot but no stability issues. That's what I use and recommend. The newer RTL8159 based dongles are smaller, cheaper, cooler, and can do 10 Gbe on paper. But they top out at 7 Gbps on Macs, which don't implement the USBx2 spec.
But op said their RTL-8157, which is also RealTek, is good?
But only 5Gb not 10Gb
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, nfs with rdma will increase your performance significantly.
If your storage devices are native PCIe and your network is actually fast enough and your nics and switches have the proper hardware and driver support and your switches are properly configured and your nfs client and server configurations are tweaked just so , and you hold your face in just the right position The perf is amazing
ROCE do require proper nic/switch tuning. But if you go all in on Mellanox NIC's and switches, its basically on knob on the switch: roce
If you buy CX3 and Mellanox SX6036(easy fan adjustment and low power usage) switches on Ebay for cheap. Which are great up to 56Gbps. You can run infiniband which is way easier to setup, just remember you still need to enable IP over IB to start the handshake for the RDMA connection.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#98I'm using the sonnet at work. Work paid for it. Yes it's more expensive. I have gotten over 25 gbps bidirectional, but not by much. Maybe 27. A big downside is that it only supports 15W upstream power which I didn't think to check, so since that laptop only has 2 usb-c ports for power input, it's a bit limiting. The upside, though, was that I plugged it in, got my throughput, and never had to worry ever again. Rememb…
Asking out of curiosity because I always wanted but never needed such speeds, could you elaborate on what you do and how does this speed help you? And I presume there’s a reason you’re not able to connect directly to the drives etc. with thunderbolt.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#99I’m in the process of gradually upgrading an in-house video production studio with Atto’s new 100G Thunderlinks work well. I’ve seen speeds of just over 5 gigabytes per second. Atto definitely does a lot of kernel extension wizardry to get macOS to achieve these speeds.
A bit OT: I hope Blackmagic really shakes up the 100G connectivity market, and that Apple realizes their platform is extremely well-suited for IP Video 2110 workflows — if they can ever get networking under control.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the NIC does a lot? In past experience, a whole Xeon CPU couldn't keep up with a 10gig NIC if it was sending/receiving min-size UDP packets. Even with Intel DPDK iirc.
I believe the CPU gets an interrupt per packet. It’s just not designed to be interrupted that often.
That's what the DPDK Poll Mode is for.