USB to 5GbE Adapters the Good Bad and Ugly

hey guys this is patrick from sth and today we're going to take a look at these things over here which are the 5 gigabit ethernet usb 3.1 gen 1 adapters in this video i'm going to tell you why one of these products even though it has a 4.1 rating on amazon and it's gotten over 80 at other sites was actually the lowest rated product that we had on the sth main site in 2020 but this entire segment is way different than i was even expecting when we started this project because it turns out that all of these actually perform somewhere between say 15 and 30 percent lower than i would expect so yeah we got a lot to talk about today so rohit and i had this idea that we would go and get a whole bunch of you know two and a half gig ethernet adapters and we would use those as part of our project tiny mini micro series now we used them both for these project tiny mini micro nodes which are the one liter systems from you know dell hpe and lenovo we could also use them with something like the hpe microserver gen10 plus that we reviewed and we have a guide on on youtube so there are a whole bunch of devices that don't necessarily have the best networking and so the thought was well why don't we go look at the two and a half gig ethernet adapters and figure out which one is best and then once we finish the two and a half gig ethernet adapters we said well why don't we go look at the five gigabit ethernet adapters because why not go get twice as much performance and it turns out we didn't get twice as much performance so we did at the start of this project was okay we'll just go buy all the ones that we could on amazon so we ended up with a unit from treadnet one from startech and one from sabrind there's also a qnap unit that we didn't get to test yet and if you want us to go test it let us know in the comments happy to go do it it's just you know by the time we finished three of these we kind of felt we knew a lot about the market so i know normally we have a lot of b-roll but these are fairly simple devices so we're just going to talk about them using a couple photos first we have this unit right here which is the trendnet tuc et 5g it is made mostly out of plastic there's this little metal bit here on one end we have a 5 gigabit ethernet so an rj45 so 5g base t connector on the other end we have a usb type c connector this is a pretty simple device so that usb type c connector is wired directly into the unit so it's a stable unit we also have some perforations for airflow the second unit we reviewed is this startech unit its model number is the us5ga30 on this unit we can see a gratuitous use of plastic but on one end we have that rj45 port that says it's a five gigabit per second port more on that soon and then on the other end we have a usb 3.1 type a connector so while the trend net unit has a type c connector this has a type a connector and finally we have this sabrint unit its model number is nts 5g now right away you can see that the sabret unit is a little bit different than the other units that we've looked at the vast majority of this is made out of a metal housing there is a little bit of plastic at the very end but overall this is a metal unit the other thing that you're going to notice is that while on one end we have the rj45 port for five gigabit per second nick on the other end we don't have a cable instead what sabrin has is a usb type c port and then they supply you with two cables one is a usb c to usbc and the other one is a usbc to a type a so while the trendnet unit was usbc and the startech unit was type a this basically can be both so as we started testing these units what we basically found was that they all performed not at five gigabits per second even though they say that their 5g base t or 5 gbe nics they would connect and link up at 5 gigabit per second speed that is true what they do not do is transfer data to your host system at five gigabits per second this actually makes sense but i want to talk a little bit about our process here first because i think that's really important one way that we could test this is just plug it into any old system and say usb 3 port just a gen 1 port could be you know from any system who cares but we didn't just do that because we started seeing some weird things and so we tested on a whole bunch of different systems and a couple of those are these project tiny mini micro nodes where we had units from dell hp and lenovo we also tested not just one generation of these systems we also used the sixth seventh eighth and ninth generation of intel core processors in these systems we also had ryzen based units we tested this in custom threadripper systems we tested in epic systems we tested in xeon scalable systems and we also tested this in a custom core i9 9900k unit just because we wanted to see if you know a per thread cpu performance was a big limiter no matter which system we tried and we tried over a dozen different systems we didn't get five gigabits per second each host was only able to get about 3.4 to 3.5 gigabits per second absolute max and this is with every single one of these nicks it's not just limited to one of them the reason for that is that these all use in a quantity chip and that's the aqc111u and we're going to flash the block diagram up here so just so that way you can see what's going on inside the chips that power all these nicks now at the bottom of this block diagram you can see that we actually have a five gigabit per second nick and we have the network link that can be up to five gigs per second they also do support two and a half gig speeds and one gig speeds no problem so if you just want to use it for that you could but there are cheaper options if you just want two and a half gig and one gig ethernet but what's more interesting is what happens when you get towards the top of this block diagram when you look at the top of it you see a usb 3.1 gen1 phi and the reason that that matters is that no matter what usb 3 port you put this into you're still limited to gen 1 speeds and a usb 3.1 gen1 port is only a 5 gigabit per second port the gen 2 ports are 10 gigabit per second but we're limited to 5 gigabits per second here and why that matters is that if you want to do 5 gigabit per second ethernet but then you have to convert that ethernet to usb and you have some usb overheads and you only have a 5 gigabit per second usb link well clearly you're gonna have some loss we didn't necessarily know before doing this project just how much loss we would have and that was one of the goals of doing this entire series and what we basically found was that all of these nicks the when they were working we basically got somewhere between on the low end about 3.19 gigabits per second all the way up to about 3.5 ish gigabits per second so you're not necessarily getting five times a one gigabit ethernet speed you're more or less getting maybe about three and a half times practically what that means is you only get somewhere between 400 to 420 megabytes per second transferring between systems using these nics now on one hand you could say wait a second that's not five gigabits per second what is going on here that's nowhere near what i was expecting there are other people though that are going to look at this and say well you know three and a half gigabytes per second 400 megabytes per second that's fine that's way better than a one gig ethernet link so i'm perfectly okay with that and it's in fact more than a two and a half gig ethernet link as well but at this point that's where the paths of these nics diverge because we didn't just see the same performance on all these nicks and i think i know the reason why both the sabrin and the star tech units performed just about the same we saw about nine ish percent when we were doing our three and a half ish gigabit per second link since we see something about nine percent uh cpu utilization on an intel core i7 8700 t so there definitely was some extra cpu utilization there but it wasn't necessarily so bad that i would say hey we should go back to using one gig ethernet just to save a couple percent on cpu utilization i think that for anybody that needs this kind of network performance that actually is not too bad both of these units worked pretty well and i'm just going to tell you a little bit about the difference of those later because those are going to talk really about our recommendations but what i wanted to talk about first is what we found with this trendnet unit so after a little while of doing this series rohit sends me a note and says hey this thing keeps dropping what's going on and i was like wait a sec well why is this dropping and so what we started doing was we started looking and trying to troubleshoot why this nick was dropping in the first place so we tested on a whole bunch of different systems because our first thought was well maybe it's the actual test setup maybe it's a usb 3 controller maybe that's what's causing our issues and that well that didn't fix it so then the next thing i did was i said okay well let me go buy one and so i bought we i bought a set of all these nicks as well just because i wanted to test them out to make sure that we didn't have like a bad nick because well that would be a bummer if we just had a bad nick and that's why we were finding an issue so i bought a second one and i tested it on my systems and i was finding the exact same thing no system that we put up we could get this nick to last for 24 hours sometimes it would die quickly and sometimes we would see the nick basically shut off and it would only take you know a couple minutes sometimes it took a couple hours but this nick constantly failed so at that point we said okay well something weird must be going on here and so what we started doing was looking online and started to look at what what could we find on this unit there's one big difference though that we saw and we should mention before we talk about anything else and that's the fact that trendnet when we plug this unit in it's not just showing up as a marvel or a quantia marvell acquired a quantia so you know it's not just a marvell nick it shows up actually as a trendnet nick and it wants you to use the trendnet drivers the trendnet drivers were last updated in their initial release in october 2019 and that had other impacts as well not just on stability we also in terms of cpu utilization you can see that this nic has a lot higher cpu utilization than we would see at the same speeds as the other nics that are based on the exact same chip we would see instead of 9 cpu utilization doing the same transfer we would get somewhere in the 17 range that's a huge difference there's another difference with the driver now we double checked on december 31st 2020 just before we published a review on this whether there was an updated driver because it seems like it could be a driver issue and so we went to the trendnet website we downloaded the latest driver and there are a couple weird things with that so this is still the 2019 driver and the other weird thing with it is that it actually gets picked up by microsoft smart screen or defender smart screen whatever that is in windows and says hey we protected your pc do you really want to go install the software conversely when you go and install the standard marvel a quantity driver you get a normal installation process and everything goes through fine and you don't have to deal with any of that stuff but this adapter actually shows up as a trend net adapter that didn't actually take the equancha drivers when we used it so that was a kind of a weird difference like trendnet has their own driver tree for this but it's not i guess as good as the mar-vell one so we had this trendnet unit that we just could not get stable so we said okay well let's go look out on the internet and see if we can find anybody else who's had this issue and it turns out that a lot of people have if you look on amazon there are over 800 reviews and it has over a 4.1 rating yet there are plenty of people on there that say oh yes i have this unit and it's overheating or whatever and the link keeps dying there are actually plenty of form posts on it i think we're even getting readers that ever since we went and published this review we've actually gotten a couple readers that have said oh yeah we're having this issue too or we have this issue as well so while it could just be the actual units that we have we have two different units we've tried them in multiple different systems and we see reports of this online so it seems like it's a pretty consistent problem and so what i did was i looked up okay well well has any professional reviewer looked at this and so i looked and i saw zd net has a little piece on it and they say you can get five gigabit per second speeds which well it links up at five gigabits per second but you can't actually get five gigabit per second speeds because of the block diagram actually shows us that that would basically be impossible but that's not mentioned in the zdnet review so i don't know what's going on there there was a more complete review that was done by tweettown in 2020 where they actually talk about you know the fact that this is using the quench nick they tore down and they said yep it's the 111 u in there and because of that we're only getting about three and a half gigabits per second i think maybe they have 3.6 or whatever it is sure but tweektown apparently didn't see any of these dropping issues or any of these issues that we're experiencing on multiple units and multiple systems nor amazon reviews they're starting to see and we're seeing users have so i guess tweettown maybe just somehow didn't run into that issue but they gave it an 85 overall so at the end of the day i talked to rohit and we were like what are we going to do with this thing because well clearly something is weird here but we're using everything public and you kind of expect that a usb ethernet adapter you just plug the thing in and it just works and this is definitely not the case it's at least not stable enough to go use on a daily basis so the reason that this got the lowest rating of 2020 on the sth main site was because it's not stable enough to use and we cannot recommend it after seeing what we saw we cannot recommend this unit to any of our readers the other thing that's kind of interesting here is it's not necessarily the best built and it's also not necessarily the best value i mean this is still just a plastic case and it only has usb type c you didn't get an adapter for type a there and so that's a relatively simplistic design on the other hand it's also twenty dollars more or more than the sabrint unit that we have that's made out of metal and has both the type a and type c connectors oh and that sabrin unit also worked so there's that again if you want to go see the full review and rohit's full review on that go check it out and we're gonna have a link in the description along with the reviews for the other units all right so let's talk about this startech unit now frankly this thing is about a hundred and two dollars when it first came out i think it was like a hundred and twenty hundred and thirty dollars so it's come down in price quite a bit this unit works actually just fine we didn't really have any issues it took the latest the quantity drivers and it performed just kind of how we would expect it does have only a usb type a port though and so i kind of don't know of how i feel about this on one hand if you look at these units for example a lot of these project tiny micro nodes all have usb 3 type a ports they have plenty of type a ports but they're usually only maybe about one type c port in any of these nodes and the same thing kind of happens for a lot of other types of workstations that maybe you build or notebooks or whatever a lot of times you're going to have more type a than type c connectors although there are definitely some laptops out there that only have type c so you know i don't know just that's going to be something that you just have to decide that if you like or not the thing is that this is made out of plastic and for 102 dollars you kind of expect that this is made out of premium materials but i guess it's not it's just made out of plastic you can literally depress i can push this thing in and start deforming the case you probably can't see that on camera but i'm actually deforming the case by just pushing in with my fingers the third unit that we're looking at is the sabrin unit now this sabrina unit is a 60 option so it is significantly less expensive than either the 90 trend net unit or the 102 star startech unit it's made out of metal which is by far the highest quality feeling unit frankly if i were going to run over any three of these with my car i would definitely hope that i was running over this one if i wanted to work afterwards because well this thing feels like a tank personally i also like the fact that we have both type a and type c usb connections the other kind of interesting thing is that this actually comes with a longer cable so if we connect this in we can see that this is about how long the cable is which is you know pretty pretty long and we're gonna hold up the startech unit for some kind of comparison and what you can see is that kind of clearly this is much longer than that i guess that that kind of begs the question you know do you really want a longer cable or are you okay with a shorter cable i would say that if i were backpacking and i needed something that was a little bit lighter i actually think the star tech unit is like i'm holding both of them right now and i think the star tech unit is significantly lighter i think because of the shorter cable and also being made out of plastic rather than metal so if i had something where i wasn't really worried about it getting broken but i just wanted something light to carry i think that the startech unit is actually kind of better they both use the same marvell quantity drivers they both both work about the same and so i guess it's just up to our readers whether you'd rather spend 60 on the more robust one or you'd rather spend 102 on the plastic one that's lighter so when it comes down to a forced ranking system on which five gigabit ethernet usb 3 adapter i would get i would say i would personally get this apron because i'm cheap and 60 for something like this i think is somewhat reasonable the 102 dollars if you have basically a less robust chassis than this one and they work about the same then i think that the startech one probably doesn't get my recommendation unless you really need that kind of lighter form factor and the trend net one it worked for some time and maybe if you're only using it for five minutes at a time ten minutes at a time maybe it's going to be fine for you but frankly just what we saw in this thing i just can't recommend it i also just don't like the fact that the drivers have not been updated since 2019 on the trendnet website now again we have reviews of all three of these units on the sth main side so go check them out i'd love to hear your feedback on which one you think you'd like and if you have used any of these and you've had either issues or they've worked well for you well tell us about it tell us about your use case tell us about you know what how you're using all that kind of stuff i think that's really interesting at the end of the day though these things are not five gigabit ethernet adapters so really maybe about 3.5 gigabit ethernet adapters or something like that and so that's just something to keep in mind what i don't necessarily know is whether or not getting a say three and a half gig ethernet adapter for 60 is better than getting the two and a half gig real tech usb 3 adapters that we see all the time and we've done a whole bunch of reviews on those as well on the sdh main site those work great and those things are typically only in the you know 20 to 30 dollar range and so i don't necessarily know if it's worth twice as much however on the other hand i also think that there are certainly people out there that are going to look at this and say well you know what frankly just getting that extra one gigabit per second or so is worth spending 30 dollars because well it's just 30 and i'd rather just have a faster port i totally get that use case as well but i'd love to hear your thoughts on that man guys we just nerded out on some usb three to five gigabit ethernet adapters huh now as you might imagine coming up with something like this test plan to go test over a dozen systems with multiple different adapters and even getting more than one of each adapter just to verify that it's not just a one-off issue with a unit that's actually very time consuming it costs us a lot of money so if you do want to support sth what you can do you can check out our teespring shop where you can go buy merch like this that's kind of how we pay for all this stuff you can also just give us a like click subscribe turn on notifications because that helps us as well as always thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 101,072

Keywords: Marvell, aquantia, usb 3, usb 3.1, 5gbe, 5gbase-t, 2.5gbe, startech, trendnet, sabrent, sabrent 5gbe, startech 5gbe, trendnet 5gbe, aqc111u, USG5GA30, startech USG5GA30, TRENDnet TUC-ET5G, TUC-ET5G, Sabrent NT-SS5G, NT-SS5G, adapter, nic, 5gbe usb adapter, 5gbe adapter

Id: HPq2gKdwD80

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021