10GbE over USB used to be a scam that melted your desk. Jeff Geerling's new benchmarks show that the dark ages are over. Good news for homelabbers.
Ever plugged a network adapter into your laptop only to have it turn into a literal frying pan? 10GbE over USB used to be a meme, an expensive scam that drained your battery and crashed under heavy load. But put down your pitchforks—it looks like the tables have finally turned.
Enter Jeff Geerling, the patron saint of Raspberry Pi and homelab networking. He just dropped a benchmark on the new batch of 10 GbE USB adapters.
Historically, these dongles were chunky bricks. You plug them in, transfer files for 5 minutes, and they'd get hot enough to melt your desk, eating up CPU cycles and throttling to oblivion. Now? Things are different. The new generation of network silicon (mostly newer Realtek or Aquantia chips) has finally optimized power draw. They are cooler, significantly smaller, and best of all, way cheaper. Sure, it still can't beat slapping a proper PCIe NIC into a dedicated cloud vps or bare-metal server—USB protocol overhead is a bitch—but for laptop and mini-PC users, this is an absolute godsend.
Shooting straight to the top of HN with over 500 upvotes, the community is doing what it does best: aggressively debating the physics of USB.
TL;DR: 10G over USB used to be garbage, but now it’s actually viable. If you’re a video editor working directly off a NAS, or a dev pulling massive Docker images for local virtualization, go grab one.
Just one survival tip: don't cheap out on the Type-C cable, or you'll bottleneck your shiny new toy. But if your daily grind is just pushing broken code to GitHub, sitting in endless Zoom calls, and browsing Reddit? Stick to your built-in Wi-Fi. A 1Gbps connection is plenty. Save your hard-earned cash for a new mechanical keyboard or some beer. Don't fall for the 10G hype if you don't need the speed.
