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Comment by preisschild

4 hours ago

I wonder how well a usb 10gbit ethernet adapter would work then

But I really apprecate your reply!

I'll definitely buy one for testing when they become available for reasonable prices <500EUR for 16gig memory

6 comments

preisschild

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adrian_b  3 hours ago

10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces work fine on 10 Gb/s USB.

Both interfaces have almost the same raw bit rate (in both cases "10 Gb/s" is only an approximation, but the differences between the true bit rates and 10 Gb/s are negligible, unlike for "5 Gb/s" USB, where the data bit rate is only 4 Gb/s).

The USB protocol has a slightly higher overhead than the Ethernet protocol, so the throughput of an Ethernet 10 Gb/s interface attached on 10 Gb/s USB will be a little lower than that of a PCIe NIC, but the difference is negligible, of only a few percent.

volemo  3 hours ago

Hmm, is it possible to skip the Ethernet adapters in a configuration of USBC-Eth-Eth-USBC and connect USBCs directly one to another?

  • adrian_b  3 hours ago

    Unfortunately, USB does not work like Firewire, where this was possible.

    USB 4, i.e. Thunderbolt, allows the emulation of network interfaces if you interconnect the USB Type C ports with a cable, but here you have USB 3, so this does not work.

    On USB 3 you could interconnect 2 ports only if one of them implemented the On-the-Go specification, so it could work as either a peripheral port or a host port. Here this also does not work. On a system where this had been allowed by the hardware, it is likely that you would have needed to write yourself a device driver that emulates a network interface, because I am not aware of an already existing one, unlike for USB 4.