This Zyxel is $150 and can be connected to a 10G SFP+ port using an inexpensive (less than $15) SFP+ DAC cable. One solution is to use an inexpensive network switch to perform the 10G to 2.5G conversion. So the helpful attempt by the SFP+ adapter to trick the switch came back to bite us.

The simple explanation is that things do not work well. The problem is that the switch is seeing a 10G network connection and tries to transfer packets based on this, but in reality the packets are flowing at 2.5gbps. But the second you try a large transfer using file sharing (SMB on Mac/windows) the speeds are way below 1gbit. When testing using iperf3 in this scenario speeds look great. This is useful because a LOT of older switches like mine do not know about the new 2.5/5 speeds. Modern SFP+ adapters are intelligent enough to negotiate 2.5G or 5G connections with the device and then tell the switch there is a 10G connection in place. When I connect a 2.5G device using the same SFP+ adapter things get interesting. Connecting my Mac Mini to the switch was a breeze as Apple‘s included 10G network port worked fine with any generic 10G copper Ethernet SFP+ adapter on the Netgear. This works by slotting a SFP+ adapter into one of the ports. This includes 4 SFP+ ports that are capable of 10G networking using copper ethernet or fiber. My main backbone switch is an older Netgear Prosafe GS728TXS. Zyxel makes some very reasonably priced network switches that helped me work around this. One question: how do you tell if an Ethernet adapter is placing a significant load on the CPU? Is there a process to check in Activity Monitor? Or does the computer just feel slower?Īs an aside if anyone else is considering making the move to 2.5G (or 5G for that matter): there are some pitfalls when interfacing 2.5G devices into 10G SFP+ ports. I'll plug the ULN into the Mac's built-in Ethernet port and use the D-Link for the network connection. I want a USB Ethernet adapter so the ULN-8 can have its own Ethernet port.

Hopefully this will work itself out, but I haven't tested long enough to draw any conclusions.

This only lasted a second or so before it switched back to the ULN-8. When playing music files from the NAS using Apple's Music app, there was a moment where the music output switched from the ULN-8 to the speakers on my NEC display. Via hackintosh Ethernet port: 767 Mbps download, 899 Mbps upload, ping: 4 ms, jitter 0.21 ms, loss 0%. Via DUB-E250: 772 Mbps download, 904 Mbps upload, ping: 3 ms, jitter 0.18 ms, loss 0%. Connected to the switch is my fiber internet connection, a Synology NAS, and a Metric Halo ULN-8 audio interface. My first test is connecting it to a Netgear GS105 switch. I'll eventually be using it with a Mac Studio, but that won't arrive for a couple of months. I just started testing the DUB-E250 on a hackintosh running Monterey 12.3.1.

Asix usb to ethernet mac os x