Yeah it's oddly large. The QNAP QNA-UC5G1 has been around for a long time now and is much smaller, despite using the same chipset (AQC111U) at the same price point (~$79). One could imagine maybe the plastic body on the Sonnet needs more room for heat dissipation (the QNAP has a metal exterior), but at least in the QNAP, that chipset (unlike TB3 10 GbE NICs) doesn't produce all that much heat.
What is the impact of latency and USB overheads? It's a 5Gbps USB to host which allows slightly less than 5Gbps of network traffic plus the USB traffic to squeeze through at best. Adding another 125 microsecond to each end and the usual 40 to 125 microsecond network latency (NIC1->switch->NIC2->switch->NIC1) can start slowing down transactions. Waiting for confirmation/reply before sending next packet is very sensitive to overall latency. File transfers with large send & receive windows and multiple data streams fill the pipe better.
Consumer apps doing bulk transfers won't notice. I really don't think the use cases for a USB ethernet adapter include anything so latency sensitive that the USB overhead will be noticed. This is for moving large files a few times faster to/from a machine that only has a 1gb NIC.
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GreenReaper - Friday, February 28, 2020 - link
Good choice for HP Microservers released with 2xUSB 3.0 and 2x1GbE if you need a little more later on.nicolaim - Friday, February 28, 2020 - link
Why is it so big?amb9800 - Friday, February 28, 2020 - link
Yeah it's oddly large. The QNAP QNA-UC5G1 has been around for a long time now and is much smaller, despite using the same chipset (AQC111U) at the same price point (~$79). One could imagine maybe the plastic body on the Sonnet needs more room for heat dissipation (the QNAP has a metal exterior), but at least in the QNAP, that chipset (unlike TB3 10 GbE NICs) doesn't produce all that much heat.tygrus - Saturday, February 29, 2020 - link
What is the impact of latency and USB overheads? It's a 5Gbps USB to host which allows slightly less than 5Gbps of network traffic plus the USB traffic to squeeze through at best. Adding another 125 microsecond to each end and the usual 40 to 125 microsecond network latency (NIC1->switch->NIC2->switch->NIC1) can start slowing down transactions. Waiting for confirmation/reply before sending next packet is very sensitive to overall latency. File transfers with large send & receive windows and multiple data streams fill the pipe better.cygnus1 - Sunday, March 1, 2020 - link
Consumer apps doing bulk transfers won't notice. I really don't think the use cases for a USB ethernet adapter include anything so latency sensitive that the USB overhead will be noticed. This is for moving large files a few times faster to/from a machine that only has a 1gb NIC.