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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Cool, but try to get 25Gbps on your mac. It's tough. We have our own 10 gig symmetrical fiber backbone connection and wanted 25Gbps on a mac in our film production facility. Thunderbolt maxes out at 40Gbps so you're already close to the max data transfer rate for a peripheral. We had to use ATTO's hardware which is bulky, a pain to configure on a macbook (you need to bond two interfaces) and honestly most of the time it's just easier to stay on Wifi and deal with 400Mbps throughput.

Not sure about windows, but USB-C maxes out at 10 Gbps IIRC, so I'd love to hear what folks in that realm are doing.

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Please, Br’er Fiber, don’t throw me in the 25 Gbps patch. Anything but that.

Seriously, I would be happy to take up the challenge if someone is willing to provide such service.

More seriously, that bandwidth probably doesn’t go to a single computer — those of us with multiple people in the household working or playing from home can do more & better things simultaneously.

In the Windows world one would just get a 25Gb NIC and be good to go.

* and supporting network equipment/cabling of course

I think it would be hard to get that NIC on a laptop though.

Yeah frankly I just hardline for 1Gbps and anything over like…I don’t know, 1TB? I just ship a drive. Anything beyond 1 or 2 requires too much effort to make work for me.

It helps that I’m an in-house video producer at a tech company and not working at a post house/on major sets anymore haha

The main current use case for this isn't people syncing their Dropboxes very fast, it's businesses and groups of users who can now all reliably each get gigabit+ speeds rather rather than slowing down when multiple people share a connection...

Sure, but I’m talking about my use case/the use case for most freelancers. We are shipping drives and transmitting footage constantly.

Hell fiber enabled me able to start charging people to send it quickly because it was cheaper than buying and shipping a drive (usually $80-$100). I just started going “I’ll have it to you in a few hours for $35” and call it a day.

How big do you think the carrier pigeon needs to be for an HDD? Carrier Albatross? Can they even be trained?

>USB-C maxes out at 10 Gbps

Lower. I've got a 5gbps usb-c adapter...ends up being more like 3.5. And like 4x the price of a 2.5 dongle

What you need to keep in mind is that a lot of USB-C Ethernet adapters run over the USB3 lines - USB has a lot of CPU overhead which becomes visible at those speeds.

USB-C, with the right cable, connector and machine, can support Thunderbolt which is PCI-Express. If you go for a Thunderbolt adapter (and not a USB-based one, as above), you will get around this problem. You can also get one of those external GPU cases and put a desktop-grade PCIe network card in there and it should work provided your computer has the drivers for it (for Mac, I'd suggest trying an Intel card and hoping for the best).

I have this setup (eGPU case with a 10GbE NIC) and what you want for a Mac is an Aquantia AQC107 card, which I’ve managed to get a few of. Those have the same 10Gb chip as Apple uses so work perfect with no issue.

thunderbolt to pcie enclosure with a connectx 25GbE card

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