Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt

I think, tragically, the blog post has caused this price increase.

The offers on Amazon are most likely all drop shippers trying to gauge a price that works for them.

You might have better luck ordering directly from China for a fraction of the price: https://detail.1688.com/offer/836680468489.html

I'm going to try a couple other fan assisted cooling options, as I'd like to keep the setup reasonably compact.

I just ran fiber to my desk and I have a more expensive QNAP unit that does 10G SFP+, but this will let me max out the connection to my NAS.

In my experience, the cheap eBay MLX cards are DellEMC/HPE/etc OEM cards. However I also encountered zero problems cross-flashing those cards back to generic Mellanox firmware. I'm running several of those cross-flashed CX-4 Lx cards going on six or seven years now and they've been totally bulletproof.

You'd also mostly be limited to short cables (1-2m) and a ring topology.

Also, if you remember where you saw that logo, please let me know!

The placement is mostly determined by the design of the OCP 2.0 connector. OCP 3.0 has a connector at the short edge of the card, which allows exposing/extending the heat sink directly to the outer case.

If somebody has the talent, designing a Thunderbolt 5 adapter for OCP 3.0 cards could be a worthwhile project.

Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.

> Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.

For both laptops and desktops, PCI lanes. Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.

For laptops in particular, power draw. The faster you push copper, the more power you need. And laptops have even less PCIe lanes available to waste.

For desktops, it's a question of market demand. Again - most applications don't need ultra high transfer rate, most household connectivity is DSL and (G)PON so 1 GBit/s is enough to max out the uplink. And those few users that do need higher transfer rates can always install a PCIe card, especially as there is a multitude of different options to provide high bandwidth connectivity.

It all comes down to performance per Watt, the availability of cheap switching gear, and the actual utility in an office / home environment.

For 10 Gbps, cabling can be an issue. Existing "RJ45"-style Cat 6 cables could still work, but maybe not all of them.

Higher speeds will most likely demand a switch to fiber (for anything longer than a few meters) or Twinax DAC (for inter-device connects). Since Wifi already provides higher speeds, one may be inclined to upgrade just for that (because at some point, Wireless becomes Wired, too).

That change comes with the complexity of running new cabling, fiber splicing, worrying about different connectors (SFP+, SFP28, SFP56, QSFP28, ...), incompatible transceiver certifications, vendor lock-in, etc. Not a problem in the datacenter, but try to explain this to a layman.

Lastly, without a faster pipe to the Internet, what can you do other than NAS and AI? The computers will still get faster chips but most folks won't be able to make use of the bandwidth because they're still stuck on 1Gbps Internet or less.

But that will change. Swiss Init7 has shown that 25GBps Internet at home is not only feasible but also affordable, and China seems to be adding lots of 10G, and fiber in general.

Fun times ahead.

On consumer devices, I think part of the issue is that we’re still wedded to four-pair twisted copper as the physical medium. That worked well for Gigabit Ethernet, but once you push to 5 or 10 Gb/s it becomes inherently expensive. Twisted pair is simply a poor medium at those data rates, so you end up needing a large amount of complex silicon to compensate for attenuation, crosstalk, and noise.

That's doable but the double whammy is that most people use the network for 'internet' and 1G is simply more than enough, 10G therefore becomes quite niche so there's no enormous volume to overcome the inherent issues at low cost.

For 10 Gbps I find it simpler and cheaper to use fiber or DACs, but motherboards don't provide SFP+, only RJ45 ports. Over 10 Gbps copper is a no go. SFP28 and above would be nice to have on motherboards, but that's a dream with almost zero chances to happen. For most people RJ45 + WiFi 7 is good enough, computer manufacturers will not put SFP+ or SFP28 for a small minority of people.

Servers had a reason to spend for the 10G, 25G and 40G cards which used 4 lanes.

There are 10 Gigabit chips that can run off of one PCI-E 4.0 lane now and the 2.5G and 5G speeds are supported(802.3bz).

wifi is not faster.

However ethernet is not as critical as it used to be, even at the office. People like the conveniency of having laptops they can move around. Unless you are working from home, having a dedicated office space is now seen as a waste of space. If the speed of the wifi is good enough when you are in a meeting room or in your kitchen, there is no reason to plug your laptop when you move back in another place, especially if most connections are to the internet and not the local network. In the workplace, most NAS have been replaced by onedrive / gdrive, at home NAS use has always been limited to a niche population: nerds/techies, photographers, music or video producers...

Where did you get "several ms of latency" figure from? I have not measured external card, but may be I should do it... Because cards themselves have latency in range of microseconds, not millis.

A micro-ATX motherboard with on-board 2xSFP28 (Intel E810):

* https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/server/D3052-data...

* https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-amd-motherboard-has-a-uni...

Displayport 2.1 UHBR20 is 80 gbps.

USB4 maxes out at 80 gbps.

As you can see, 1gbps ethernet is starting to look like stone age technology. 2.5gbps becoming the next step seems a bit strange when we were jumping orders of magnitude every few years before. But also, ethernet tends to be used on longer cables than DP or USB, and trying to push it much faster results in exponentially increasing losses to resistance and radiation, the cable starts acting like an antenna even with the twisted pairs. Fiber optics are much better suited to high speed long distance, but too expensive and fragile for consumer use.

`sudo su - <user>` also seems easier for me to type than `sudo -i -u <user>`

If you're using an adapter card to add Thunderbolt functionality, then your mainboard needs to support that, and the card must be connected to a PCIe bus that's wired to the Intel PCH, not to the CPU.

All I want to do is copy over all the photos and videos from my phone to my computer but I have to baby sit the process and think whether I want to skip or retry a failed copy. And it is so slow. USB 2.0 slow. I guess everybody has given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?

It 'reduces it by' ... not reduces it TO