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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

#151

Post by Someone1234 »

TomatoCo wrote: post #141
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.

Going by Fabien Sanglard's cheat sheet (who I trust uncritically) https://fabiensanglard.net/usbcheat/index.html it looks like 3.2 actually is a broader term than expected. Maybe there was some awful attempt at backwards compatibility? Or forwards?

Great site, thanks for the link. But holy heck, that "Also Known As" column is complete chaos. What the heck is wrong with the USB Consortium, do they have brain damage?

Also, according to that table, "USB4 Gen 2×2" is a downgrade on "USB 3.2 Gen 2x2", since the cable length is 0.8m instead of 1m for the same speeds. Which is uhh unexpected.

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

#152

Post by CTDOCodebases »

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 have a zfs x 3 disk hard drive mirror and 10GbE.

For writes yes 10GbE overkill but for for reads it's faster than 2.5GbE would be.

Sure there is 5GbE but most switches that support 5GbE support 10GbE.

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

#154

Post by TacticalCoder »

freedomben wrote: post #101

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'…

> 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.

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

#155

Post by adrian_b »

whatevaa wrote: post #123
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…

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.

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.

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

#156

Post by geerlingguy »

Galanwe wrote: post #100
nottorp wrote: post #89

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

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)

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.

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

#158

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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!

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

#160

Post by movedx »

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.)
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