A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.

I was looking for a new USB-c hub and came across this article. It’s an interesting write-up of what is on the inside of some popular options

  • @Copernican@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    Thanks, some folks on reddit were saying the ethernet to USB degrades the speed of a native ethernet port or PCI (unfortunately my ITX build has no extra PCI slots). But even if I took a minor hit in speed, I prefer the consistency of having no packet loss. I live in a high density area with a lot of wifi networks nearby.

    Ideally should I try to find a Intel Ethernet device?

    • nfhEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      If you have a native Ethernet port, use that. If you don’t, ethernet over USB-C or on a PCI card is approximately as good. A USB 3.0 adapter + port is technically slower, but if your network isn’t capable of speeds faster than a gigabit, the adapter won’t be the limiting factor. For most people, these are all good solutions. Faster networking equipment is still somewhat specialty/niche.

      USB 2.0 adapters/ports can cause problems though, as it’s capped around half a gigabit. While this likely won’t affect your access speeds to the public internet, it will likely slow file transfers to other devices on your home network.

      The chipset maker isn’t a perfect heuristic, as shown in the article, but I’ve had pretty good luck with Intel and Marvell.