Comment by realxrobau
4 hours ago
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.
4 hours ago
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.
The SFP+ ones are all Thunderbolt or USB4 this far, i.e. not backward compatible with USB 3.x, like this QNAP one: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qna-uc10g1sf
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.
10G DACs are no cheaper than cat6, which is perfectly fine for 10G at most practical distances. Considering the target audience of these cards it seems pretty obvious to me that letting users "just buy a cat 6 cable" is miles more reasonable than having them buy a transceiver or DAC.
As for allowing to switch to fiber, that just seems orthogonal again to what these USB NICs are for, not to mention the SFP+ itself is probably more expensive than the NIC shown here...
DACs are very cheap (second hand and AliExpress) and they never use much W. If both machines are near each other though (which a DAC cable implies) and both run Linux and both support Thunderbolt, you might be better off with a direct ethernet over TB connection. Whether macOS supports such, I don't know.
The other side will then also need a low power NIC (of which fiber and DAC over SFP+ are less power hungry). What this article doesn't mention, is that there are also a lot of PCIe NICs on the market which aren't power hungry (RTL8127), as well as RTL8261C for switches/routers.
I've seen low power RTL NICs with SFP+ on it, too (example: [1]). With SFP+, you'll have a lot more versatility. DAC and SFP+ fiber are very cheap, btw. Especially second hand they go for virtually nothing. I have 10 SFP+ fiber lying around here doing nothing which I got for a few EUR each.
For me as European with high energy prices and solar energy gotten the beat next year (in NL), this is all very interesting.
There's a couple of good reasons why to opt for fiber in the home. You keep the energy between the different groups separated which can help. I also find fiber very easy to get through walls, allowing me to have multiple fiber connections through walls (currently I use 1x fiber + 1x ethernet for PoE possibilities from fusebox).
With all above being said, AQC100S is low power and does not get very hot. You can get these with SFP+ and PCIe/TB. They've been available for a while.
[1] https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005011733192115.html (no vouching for, just first hit on search)
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.
Zero shielding may actually help. Shielding acts as an antenna when not properly grounded and continuous, which is more common than not.