Doing home automation of lamps, sensors, speakers via PoE would be great too. It should faster and more stable than Zigbee/Wifi and with no need to change the batteries often.
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.)
Nothing in my home has SFP ports other than my routers and my primary network switch (two, hooked up to the routers). All of my computers and USB adapters for laptops expect RJ45 at 10/100/1000/2500/5000/10000 Mbps. None of my runs are over 50 ft.
So IDGAF about how much "better" fiber is. It's unfathomably worse when you factor in the cost and work I'd need to do to convert everything and every new adapter I'd have to buy or build (can I get an $80 USB SFP adapter? Do I have a cable?). The extra marginal cost in electricity will take longer than the lifetime of my equipment to exceed the cost of redoing everything.
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.
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)
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. More often than I like I have just hoped that something works. Anything above 5W charging and 5gbps transfer is optional.
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?
I predict in future when our civilization will advance to higher level, this phenomenon will happen with english words and jargons. e.g. here are versioned and namespaced words. topology.bio.23, topology.math.45 etc.
Welcome to the brave new world we will enter in far future.
Unfortunately "USB 3.2" is just a version of the standard, which does not give any information about the performance of a USB port or device.
USB 5 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 1, available on Type A or Type C connectors (or on devices on a special extended micro B connector)
USB 10 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 2, available on Type A or Type C connectors
USB 20 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 2x2, available only on Type C connectors
Moreover, "5 Gb/s" is a marketing lie. The so-called USB of 5 Gb/s has a speed of 4 Gb/s (the same as PCIe 2.0). On the other hand, 10 Gb/s and 20 Gb/s, have the claimed speeds, so USB of 10 Gb/s is 2.5 times faster than USB of 5 Gb/s, not 2 times faster.
10 Gb/s USB and Ethernet have truly the same speed, but the USB overhead is somewhat higher, leading to a somewhat lower speed. However, the speed shown in TFA, not much higher than 7 Gb/s seems too low, and it may be caused by the Windows drivers. It is possible that on other operating systems, e.g. Linux, one can get a higher transfer speed.
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.
I will say, casual users don't really care. Pretty much any combination of a wall plug and a cable will charge a phone at acceptable speeds, and that's all 99% of people need.
In my experience, its just best to stick with Thunderbolt when you want to make sure you are getting the best speed for external devices that require it (external SSD's, Graphics Cards, Network adapters)
Much easier and reliable than navigating the confusing sea of USB standards
/*
* 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.
*/
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.
Modern transceivers can do 10G on absolutely garbage twisted pair. My house was wired with absolutely dire cat5 cabling. Zero shielding and barely any copper in the pairs. I thought I'd barely be able to do 1G on them, but modern transceivers (amazon) easily do 10G over like 30M of that sort of cables.
In fact I had more trouble getting quality fiber working for that sort of distance than El Cheapo cat5. They do heat up a bit, but they work wonder.
Yep, 10gb over copper is not power efficient so any savings you get from getting a cheap 10gb switch will just go to your power bill. Most cost effective and flexible is a used 25gb switch. Most 25gb switches can do 1/10/25gb. 10gb networking has been dead for over 10 years.
> No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7,
You don't need Cat7 for 10G.
Cat6 is spec compliant up to 55mm. Cat6a to 100m, which is the same as Cat7.
If you're doing short runs like to a nearby switch, good Cat5e works fine in practice. I've run 10G over Cat5e through the walls for medium runs without errors because it's all I had. It works in many cases, but you're out of spec.
I use DAC where I can, but most people just want something they can plug into that RJ45 port in their wall that goes to the room down the hall where they put their switch.
There are several SFP+ to Thunderbolt/USB4 adapters on the market. Not cheap, though.
> No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7,
Ethernet is media independent. Yes, yes, it was first classified for thick net, but ethernet over twisted pair (rj45 typically) is still ethernet despite the lack of vampire taps. You can run ethernet on thick or thin coax, twisted pair, dac, fiber, or even over the ether so to speak.
That said, 10g over rj45 is pretty handy when you have existing wire in walls. In my experience, it runs fine on the cat5 (not even cat5e) that's already there. Maybe it won't work on all my runs, especially if I tried all at once, but so far, I'm two for two.
The spec is for ~ 100m in dense conduit; real world runs in homes are typically shorter and with less dense cabling... and cabling often exceeds the spec it's marked for, so there's wiggle room.
The big bulky black box this little adapter replaces in Jeff's uses is actually just a PCIe/OCP card in an enclosure and you can replace that with a 10g card with SFP.
I would rather use Ethernet where possible. I used SFP28 for a while, but this meant an extra networking card was needed in each PC. Ethernet is universal, and now that bandwidths are catching up, I no longer see SFP as necessary in a typical home or small office network.
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
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
74 comments
[ 865 ms ] story [ 1843 ms ] threadIf this is the same adapter in a different housing, will it also be limited to 7Gbps?
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.
https://www.procetpoe.com/poe-usb-converter/ (some of these are power-only)
https://shop.poetexas.com/products/gbt-usbc-pd-usbc?variant=...
65W 802.3bt and gigabit Ethernet out on the same PD cable.
Also a crude fixed hub for data and a keyboard and mouse for docking laptops:
https://shop.poetexas.com/products/bt-usbc-a-pd?variant=3938...
(Fibre is nowhere near as "sensitive" as some people believe.)
So IDGAF about how much "better" fiber is. It's unfathomably worse when you factor in the cost and work I'd need to do to convert everything and every new adapter I'd have to buy or build (can I get an $80 USB SFP adapter? Do I have a cable?). The extra marginal cost in electricity will take longer than the lifetime of my equipment to exceed the cost of redoing everything.
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.
Welcome to the brave new world we will enter in far future.
USB 5 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 1, available on Type A or Type C connectors (or on devices on a special extended micro B connector)
USB 10 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 2, available on Type A or Type C connectors
USB 20 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 2x2, available only on Type C connectors
Moreover, "5 Gb/s" is a marketing lie. The so-called USB of 5 Gb/s has a speed of 4 Gb/s (the same as PCIe 2.0). On the other hand, 10 Gb/s and 20 Gb/s, have the claimed speeds, so USB of 10 Gb/s is 2.5 times faster than USB of 5 Gb/s, not 2 times faster.
10 Gb/s USB and Ethernet have truly the same speed, but the USB overhead is somewhat higher, leading to a somewhat lower speed. However, the speed shown in TFA, not much higher than 7 Gb/s seems too low, and it may be caused by the Windows drivers. It is possible that on other operating systems, e.g. Linux, one can get a higher transfer speed.
Much easier and reliable than navigating the confusing sea of USB standards
/* * 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. */
Oh no!
In fact I had more trouble getting quality fiber working for that sort of distance than El Cheapo cat5. They do heat up a bit, but they work wonder.
You don't need Cat7 for 10G.
Cat6 is spec compliant up to 55mm. Cat6a to 100m, which is the same as Cat7.
If you're doing short runs like to a nearby switch, good Cat5e works fine in practice. I've run 10G over Cat5e through the walls for medium runs without errors because it's all I had. It works in many cases, but you're out of spec.
I use DAC where I can, but most people just want something they can plug into that RJ45 port in their wall that goes to the room down the hall where they put their switch.
There are several SFP+ to Thunderbolt/USB4 adapters on the market. Not cheap, though.
Ethernet is media independent. Yes, yes, it was first classified for thick net, but ethernet over twisted pair (rj45 typically) is still ethernet despite the lack of vampire taps. You can run ethernet on thick or thin coax, twisted pair, dac, fiber, or even over the ether so to speak.
That said, 10g over rj45 is pretty handy when you have existing wire in walls. In my experience, it runs fine on the cat5 (not even cat5e) that's already there. Maybe it won't work on all my runs, especially if I tried all at once, but so far, I'm two for two.
The spec is for ~ 100m in dense conduit; real world runs in homes are typically shorter and with less dense cabling... and cabling often exceeds the spec it's marked for, so there's wiggle room.
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
Is this just my hardware? It's hard to imagine these issues would be so prevalent with how many people use these on linux...
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.
What the fuck
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.