A USB to 10GbE Adapter - YES PLEASE!!! (Review)

then go ahead and use those links I hate see guys I really thought I'd get through a video without having to do [Music] that hello and welcome back and that's right today I want to talk about this this little box here is a USB 4 to 10gbe network adapter that my friends is a big deal although I say that I reckon the audience of watching this video can be split right down the middle there's going to be half of you that I think include myself that have been wondering for years why the USB conventions that have been opening up the doors to 10 gbit ethernet uh 10 gbit performance bandwidth to 20 gbit performance to now in usb4 with 40 gig performance why there wasn't a simple USB powered 10g adapter and it's going to be the other half of people are watching this video saying that already exists this is a thunderbolt to 10gb adapter these have been around for the about part of 2 to 2 and a half years loads of brands have been on board with it and it has allowed us to take advantage of Thunderbolt 3 connectivity at 40 gbits per second to translate towards 10 gbit Ethernet there so why is this a big deal if that's already existed for a while well this device knocking around a price point again I've seen it as low as $82 going as high as $114 frankly the pricing is absolutely bnk ERS on this device it is different no matter what website you go to isn't just your AliExpress and your Amazon but I will say I picked this up myself on um AliExpress we paid 72 nickel without the tax here me and Eddie here at NAS Compares and it arrived pre promptly in 8 days so I was already pleased with that and I looked into a little bit there of the background and the similarities between this and Thunder B alternatives are remarkably similar the uh controller inside you require the driver the aqc 1113 and quantia controller there which also Bears Stark resemblance there to the Marvel um this is a USB type-c usb4 Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 enabled device that allows you to add 10gbe so straight away some of you may have notice there that USB 2 USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 did not make the cut that's right you can't use this in anything lower than Thunderbolt 4 3 and USB Type 4 and that's because USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4 only supporting thunder volt 3 are interchangeable with the right devices there are some devices that don't support both protocols do double check your drivers and the hardware support there but this means that this is sort of like this device plus it's allowing you to add 10 GPU conveniently that is you heard it bus powered also although you can only really pick it up right now in a copper based version I'm pretty sure we're going to be seeing SFP versions any day now but that does bring us back to that question once again about the differences between this and the Thunderbolt with that because another thing a number of you may have noticed is that pricing even when we were talking about that fluctuating all over the place price of $882 to $114 without the tax the majority of Thunderbolt to you uh Thunderbolt 10gb adapters whether you go for the Sonic solo you go for qaps offering Stark offering a Kito all of them together even the owc's all of those are retailing roughly about $60 to $250 this manages to simplify things significantly and arrive at a better price point again I very much doubt IO Crest hold any kind of control or you know IP on this architecture I'm surprised it's not flooded out with others in the market indeed when we were over at cutex when we saw qap stand they're already running a qap version of this and they're also planning a dual Port version to add USB Type 4 to two 10gb adapter and even a 25 gig version of this which only doubles down on the idea of what USB 4/ Thunderbolt 4 is opening the Gateway on for easy Network conversions and therefore no more relying on pcie cards to add 10gbe there you're going to be obviously limited by the portant connections on your physical system there and we're going to do another video with nas testing by the way we'll get to that later on but at least for now as more system do start to arrive with USB 4 on board this is opening the gateway to adding 10 GB ethernet and greater very conveniently I would argue the system itself is perhaps a little Bare Bones currently at the moment jumbo frames could be adapted up to 16 KB but you're again you're going to be fine at 9 uh power consumption is rated at 2.5 Watt if you utilize the full 10gb connection there but as it supports Auto negotiation you can go down to 5 gig where it's 1.5 uh Watts being utilized there and one watt if you go for the one and 2.5 gig utilization I had to go from official uh documentation for this um I will say when I started taking the device apart unsurprisingly it's quite simple inside you've got that entire external um uh build there for the heat dissipation there's no active fan there's no noise inside this once you open this up it really is just two boards inside the first board that you find there is the main m.2 adapter there with a couple of controllers on board and a m.2 that slides in that delivers that 10gp connection on there so it's not a single board internally there's only really one heat sink and that's on top of that a aqc 1113 controller inside I don't know if it's the C version there um one of the things that USB 4 does bring to the table is support of PCI E4 and that means each one of those Lanes opening up the door to 2,000 megabytes per second however despite the fact I've tested this on both a US usbp 4 and a thunderbolt 3 and four device more on that in a moment I will say that when I opened up the uh the box and have a look at the documentation time and time again I saw Thunderbolt 3 I saw Thunderbolt to 10gbe I saw Thunderbolt 3 documentation and overall there's every possibility when you're buying something like this online you may just be getting something not similar to this which will probably still work but it does bring into question the vidil of this as a product compared with something that's already existing it's definitely cheaper but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a whole new product now moving over to Performance we tested this with over here an Asus door flash door uh 12 Pro this has got a 10gb connection here we went with a single connection onto this with four m.2 ssds in a raid five environment internally on this we made sure that uh jumbo packets or uh jumbo frames on both devices will set to 9k and did a simple SMB mapped drive now with that we went through several tests with the atto uh test there with atto dis bench marker 256 MBT and that pretty much fully saturated hit the full 1 GB per second or um 10 GBE very comfortably there and that was just a nice simple ATO repeated test now we moved on to Aji uh we did a 1 Gigabyte 1080p video file there and we saw performance numbers of 550 to 600 Megs over 800 Megs now when we went to the windows testing that's where things kind of got very very messy I started with 1,000 PNG files and it was just shy of a gig and transferred them over and performance was very very spotty how much of that was uh the flash doors seller on process and how much of this was the adapter I know my rig can definitely transfer that kind of performance uh but it was very negligible when I went for um 30 GB of uh video data there separated I think just around 10 files from an unraid video that's coming up very very soon that ended up sitting around a right of 580 over 600 give or take and when we did a single 10 gig file direct transfer there onto the system it averaged about 600 Megs but that 600 Megs throttled and bottlenecked it didn't go higher than that which made me wonder about the overhead and the performance potential of this device when I couldn't during that 10 gig file transfer get outside of that 600 it was nothing to do with obs recording on my local system but I just could not get out of that bandwidth nevertheless this all provided a greater degree of performance afforded to my system at a very convenient competitive price now as mentioned USB 4 Nas systems are becoming increasingly common from dry boards that we' talked about here on the channel That Rock out the gate with USB 4 to OS free Nas ready solutions that all arrive with either Thunderbolt 4 connectivity or arriving with USB 4 out the gate and then you got systems like ug greens where several of them arrive with Thunderbolt now a lot of these systems still do not currently support direct network connectivity via their Thunder bottle USB connections there and qap really has that in the market but an adapter like this and them integrating that driver via GitHub via a third party or in their OS perhaps will allow you to add 10gbe to those systems the rest of the turnkey Nas solution Market not many of them outside a very expensive systems have got USB 4 but it does mean right now that you are going to be able to jump on the bandwagon and add 10gbe to a number of systems that do not have pcie upgradeability ultimately the blurry lines between these two devices aren't enough reason for me to not recommend this I do think I can recommend this to most users looking to add 10gb to a usb4 or thunder Bar Quick system one the performance was what I expected it 2B it wasn't out of this world but I will say compared with the majority of Thunderball 10g adapters I've seen it was comparable even at that 600 Mig cap at times on top of that right now if you have a system that doesn't have PCI upgradeability you are limited to just two options you either go for USB to 2.5g adapters which knock around for about $ 15 to $20 or you go for USB to 5 GBE adapters to add better bandwidth and these retail for $60 to $80 so with that in mind spending $80 to $100 on average to add 10 GBE and remember you can get multiple of these isn't a bad thing I'm just going to be very interested to see how this gets utilized by Nas BRS because if they don't have USB 4 this is going to be useless anyway because you can't go earlier than that you can only go with Thunderbolt and USB 4 but as new systems are rocking out the gate with USB 4 and SMB multi channel is going to be supporting on devices like this we've got to wonder is now the time that pcie upgrade cards in Nas should either start getting more affordable or at the very least very least the next few years not become the status quo let me know what you think we're going to go into another video with this device soon as we test different Nas systems hoping for the best if you want to learn more if you got questions about this device put them in the comments below I'm in the middle of writing the review for this and I'll add those questions add those test the followup video there's a link to this I've on AliExpress I'll list a few different retailers below and if you're interested in getting hold one of these and you were going to go to one of those shops anyway and that's very important then go ahead and use those links I hate seear I really thought I'd get through a video without having to do that thank you so much for watching and have yourselves a bloody great weekend

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 22,026

Keywords: NAS Server, NAS Drive, NAS Guide, usb to 10g, usb4 to 10g, 10g usb, 10g usb c, usb c to 10g, usb c 10g adapter, 10g nic, 10g adapter, 10g usb adapter, usb to 10gbe, usb to 10g adapter, usb nic, usb 2.5g, usb 25gbe, 10gbe to usb, usb c to 10gbe, nas 10g, 10g nas, 10g nas adapter, 10g nas upgrade, nas usb 10g, nas usb 10g adapter

Id: ClSwiGEdhpo

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024