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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

#311

Post by ssl-3 »

reaperducer wrote: post #172
ssl-3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eithe…

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…

Yeah, they got cheap. They either got cheap with the BOM, or they got cheap with the QC and never tested it with USB C power sources, or they got cheap with the spec and it's working as-designed.

It just takes a couple of insignificant resistors and a USB C socket that brings out CC1 and CC2 to pads on the board to do it right. I wrote about how that works in a sister comment if you want to read more.

But those devices will charge/work just fine with any bog-standard USB A to USB C cable, alongside any decent power brick with USB A outputs. It doesn't have to be the exact cables they came with.

It's annoying in the "you cheap bastards" sort of way, but regular A to C cables will work.

(If it's really important to you, then it can be possible to hack in a couple of 5.1k resistors inside the cheap-bastard devices and make them work with regular USB C power bricks and regular USB C to C cables. The resistors will tell the source to provide 5v at up to 3A. All compliant USB C cables are required to safely pass 3A.

The mod can range from very easy, to somewhat problematic, to "fuck this, I quit". In reality, there might already be pads on the board to connect CC1 and CC2 to ground; just solder in the resistors. Or, the pins are probably brought out at the connector itself, so it can be bodged with some extra wire.

But reality is a cruel mistress and not all available PCB-mounted USB C connectors expose CC1 and CC2 at all, although in a sane and pure world absolutely all of them should.)

[tl;dr, just keep an A to C cable with the devices, always have USB A where they get used, and forget about it. The next round of cheap stuff will be better, worse, or the same, and that's a future problem.]

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

#312

Post by cyberax »

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…

Hah. I used a dremel tool, some radiators, and a bit of thermal glue to make my Mikrotik switch work reliably: https://pics.ealex.net/share/UxeSf_AWHLIuc-qzK5zl7JIgQvQDAZh...

It's been like this for the last 3 years. And amazingly, I still can't find a 10G switch that is just as compact.

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

#313

Post by ssl-3 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #230
ziml77 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if it's not actually USB-C, at best you're looking at the device not working when plugged into a proper USB-C power supply. At worst you're facing fried electronics.

Agreed that would be like wiring a standard North American household wall outlet with 240VAC. Technically possible, but will probably fry anything not expecting it.

I came across a group of racks in the IT room in a (US) factory once that had 208v on their standard NEMA 5-15R sockets.

Their global-market IT stuff didn't care at all. But some of the US-market audio stuff I was integrating came with old-school linear power supplies, and those items cared a great deal.

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

#314

Post by geerlingguy »

retired wrote: post #290
GeertJohan wrote: post #3

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

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?

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

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

#316

Post by cyberax »

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.

AI model files can be rather large...

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

#317

Post by mixmastamyk »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #273
flal_ wrote: post #246

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

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 T…

Why not connect it directly to the server/workstation?

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

#318

Post by Latty »

Aurornis wrote: post #206
bri3d wrote: post #200

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…

> 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.

> That's why Thunderbolt eGPU setups don't perform as well as plugging the GPU directly into a PCIe slot.

The bigger factor is probably that PCI-e tunnelling at most a ×4 link, while when you plug a GPU in you are generally doing so into a ×16 or at least ×8 slot, and very few GPUs target ×4.

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

#319

Post by jasomill »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #120
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.

USB is just a complete mess. I don't mind so much ports having different capabilities if they are well documented in the specification sheets of the hardware because then at least I can find out what they are capable of, but alas it never seems to be the case. Its very hard to work out whether a port can do Displayport and to what extent/performance or its true power capability or just its real data transfer speed. M…

I have an Intel NUC where 10 Gbps devices can run faster when plugged into the 3.1 Gen 2 ports than the Thunderbolt 3 ports under NVMe load, due to the former having dedicated PCIe lanes and the latter sharing the PCH lanes with the M.2 slots, which could be highly relevant if I were doing heavy disk I/O over a 10 Gbit Ethernet adapter.

This is more than a mild annoyance in the case of faster Thunderbolt devices like eGPUs, especially since, in addition to the 2 PCIe lanes dedicated to the USB ports and a third dedicated to an SD card slot, an additional five lanes are unused.

IIRC there was a reason at one point that Intel insisted on connecting Thunderbolt controllers through the PCH, but I don't understand why they didn't at least use four lanes for one of the M.2 slots. Sure, they may have had to move the SD card slot due to configuration limitations, but in what world is SD card performance more important than NVMe performance?

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

#320

Post by _blk »

eqvinox wrote: post #67
_blk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue might not be the wattage bit rather the minimum voltage. (Some?) Macs seems to charge at 15v already, most laptops need 20v

Coincidentally, the USB-C spec is written such that wattage implies a minimum set of supported voltages: * ≤15W charger: must have 5V * ≤27W charger: must have 5V & 9V * ≤45W charger: must have 5V & 9V & 15V * (OT but worth noting: >60W: requires "chipped" cable.) * ≤100W charger: must have 5V & 9V & 15V & 20V (levels above this starting to become relevant for the new 240W stuff) (36W/12V doesn't exist anymore in PD…

Thanks for the write up, I didn't know that.
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