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by preisschild 10 days 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

2 comments

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.

RTL8159 10GbE usb adapters seem to require USB3.2 Gen2 x2 and this seems to only have gen2
Hmm, is it possible to skip the Ethernet adapters in a configuration of USBC-Eth-Eth-USBC and connect USBCs directly one to another?
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.

How could I forget about the staggering complexity of USB versions! Of course the answer is “maybe”.
> USB 4, i.e. Thunderbolt

USB4 and TB are different things (confusingly enough)

USB 4 includes more than Thunderbolt, because Thunderbolt was not compatible with USB, despite using the same connector.

All features of Thunderbolt 3 have been inherited by USB 4, like also all those of USB 3, including the ability of Thunderbolt to emulate Ethernet interfaces when you interconnect 2 computers with a cable through their USB 4 ports, like it was already possible with Thunderbolt ports.