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  • boozed - Thursday, March 26, 2020 - link

    I guess this is pronounced "ploogable"?
  • close - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    I'll pronounce it "clone". I bought this DIGITUS about 6 months ago (which can be had for the same price as the plugable): https://www.digitus.info/en/products/computer-and-...

    Notice how it's pretty much identical in specs and external design, down to the marketing material. So the only distinguishing feature is the (<$1 worth) unwieldy USB adapter tied to it.

    Add this to the basket of otherwise identical adapters from "dongle" companies like Lindy and others. What makes plugable special to get a special mention here?
  • 29a - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Seems the mention is because of price. I bet you're fun at parties.
  • UltraWide - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    nice catch!
  • mark625 - Thursday, March 26, 2020 - link

    Close. It's Spanish: pronounced Plue-GAH-blay.
  • rrinker - Thursday, March 26, 2020 - link

    Italian: Plu-gablee And it contains a major award.
  • boozed - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    That's pretty good!
  • tommythorn - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    The "25ETHERNET" code didn't work on me (I follow the "$29.99" link to Amazon). US resident.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    It looks like Plugable/Amazon changed how they are applying the discount. It's now a $10 instant coupon, rather than requiring a code.
  • porina - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    £31 on Amazon UK, tempting except I still don't see any affordable switches to go with it. Cheapest beyond gigabit models are still the 2 port 10G ones.
  • Tomatotech - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Yup, like the article said, with everyone working from home, there is almost no use for this. Hence the special offer to get press PR and raise awareness (and it's working!).

    There can't be many laptop-based home offices that require sustained >100MB/s network attached storage ...
  • arglebargle123 - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Fair warning to anyone considering these: I've had *extremely* poor experiences with this chipset on Linux.

    I had one plugged into one of my Linux boxes for extra bandwidth a couple of months back and after ~4 days it took out the entire networking stack. It didn't just crash itself, it hosed every interface on the machine. Rinse and repeat several days later.

    It might work better on Windows or a Mac, but somehow I doubt it.
  • simon123 - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Why? What's the point of this? It's totally useless for home, and for the office. For home, obviously. For the office, you'd need multi-G ethernet switches as access switches. They are expensive as hell without any benefit to the regular office client. They're mainly used for server access, but that is mostly 1 or 10G. So that will be another 5-10 years. For the access, it's mostly 1G if the network is not old as hell and running 100M still.
  • shabby - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Where are the 10gbps routers? What is taking those manufactures so long to come out with them?
  • simon123 - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    There are 10Gbps router already, but why would you want it for home? Are you planning to build a data center in the garage?
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Well to be fair, some of us kind of are...
  • shabby - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Doesn't matter what I need it for, it would encourage others to come out with them and bring down inflated prices.
  • dlum - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    There's a full line of MikroTik 10G-enabled routers & switches, cheap like dirt & perfect (not only but surely) for home use. I've been using them already some time, and switched already all operations that made sense to 10 GbE (mostly SFP+), as well at my home as my company office.

    It seems it'll take anyway don't know how many years untill all that whining & grumbling ends, but as for Anandtech readers - guys, just wake up, update yourselves and stop to live in the world of yesterday.
  • Dug - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    10Gb sfp has been common and cheap for a long time. People are looking for 10Gb ethernet.

    Which I think is an issue because 10Gb requires a lot of power and heat. 2.5Gb is perfect for home use.
  • brontes - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Sfp-to-rj45 adapters are $30-$40. It doubles the per-port price of the popular mikrotik switch but it's still cheaper than native 10gb rj45 switches.
  • shabby - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Show me a router with 4 10gbe ports and wireless built in...
  • cyrand - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link

    Somehow I doubt you want 4 10gbe routing ports. what you really want is 4 switching ports at 10Gbe. I have my lan setup for 10Gbe now and my recommendation is anyone that want 10Gbe switching and make it quickly up-gradable to 10Gbe routing in future go the route I went and separate it into 3 devices.

    Also it makes it easier to upgrade just the component you need in future. on top of that the price really was not much more given how expensive the so call "3 in 1(routing,switching,wifi) gaming routers have become"

    My setup is got a central 10/1Gbe managed switch in basement that connects to every room in my house through CAT6A. 2 rooms in my house got a 1/2.5/5/10gbe dumb switch in it. I got a ubiquiti wireless access point to handle my wifi. Then I got a ubiquiti Edge router 4 in same location as managed 10gbe switch to handle routing. At the moment don't have a need for greater then 1Gbe on the wan but if I did all I would need to do is replace the Edge router with a router with a single 10Gbe port and am good to go.

    Also when I ready to go to wifi 6 all I need to upgrade is the access point and am done. I much prefer this over combing everything into a single device. I don't want to replace router every time I want to upgrade my wifi and vice versa. Also make debugging issues easier.

    For $30 I grabbed one of these for my laptop. A little faster connecting to my Nas when got it connected in one of the 2 rooms I got the mutigig switches in never hurt and it cheap enough.

    10gbe routers out there but a bit on expensive side and not many residential area offer over 1gbe speeds and if they do it a huge jump in price over 1Gbe. Also most the time they implemented through port teaming multiple 1gbe ports on the modem. Maybe there some places that offer direct fiber modem with greater then 1gbe port on it but other then commercial I not seen it.
  • TheUnhandledException - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    I know this is a nitpick especially at $30 but I wish companies would just have a usb-c port (note port not plug) and a seperate cable. If this devices fails it is very likely going to be in the cable from being bent. Can someone just make a little box with ethernet one one end and usb-c port on the other end? I will even pay extra.
  • zorxd - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    I disagree, that would make one more connection, and makes it two pieces (more likely to lose one)
  • zorxd - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    I always thought 2.5 Gbps Ethernet is useless (not significant enough speed increase over GigE)

    But at this price it's not too bad.
  • zeroidea - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Anyone with networked storage, or even two PC's that could benefit from a 2.5GbE link (no switch required) could benefit from these. Can't exactly pop a 10G card into a laptop, NUC, or many SFF systems (if their one PCIe is occupied). MS510TX 10-port multi-gig switch goes on sale for $200.

    Beyond-gigabit home networking is reasonably affordable now, even without resorting to old enterprise equipment. It's a huge improvement if one's use case frequently involves transferring a few tens or hundreds of GB between machines with fast storage.

    These realtek adapters though.. I haven't been able to use the $30 CableCreations version of this adapter because it it's not supported by any of the Linux releases I'm using.
  • Dug - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    The MS510TX only has one 10Gb ethernet port and 1 10Gb sfp port.
    That's why it's cheap. But it may be enough for home if you are only using 1 to a storage server.
  • zeroidea - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    It's been about the same price as the GS110EMX which only has two 10G ports and 8 1G. If one has 2.5G gear, or even systems than can handle 10G adapters but can't really reach full speed, I think it (the switch) is worth it.

    I've got 100TB of drives in multiple compact servers, so.. I'm not the "most people" that commenters are saying this is useless for :P It's useless because of the poor Linux support.
  • zorxd - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    If you already have a GigE port in your laptop it's not worth it for most people to carry a dongle just to get up to 2.5x the speed. Even if it was free.
  • zorxd - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    and if you have two PCs, well they will also need to be connected to the Internet somehow

    So you are suggesting they be connected using a GigE link to the main router/switch, while also being connected together directly with this 2.5 Gbps link? Again, I don't think it's worth the hassle for a lot of people.
  • zeroidea - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link

    Yes. You're right, not worth it for a lot of people, but for someone who's bought a NAS with 2.5GbE or faster, it's a cheaper option than buying a ~$200+ N-BaseT switch. That's what I did when I first got my 10G NAS - installed an Aquantia 10G card in my desktop, ran a second cable to the NAS. 40TB of storage available at 500MB/s (because I was using two RJ45 cards and one was on a 5G port. I've since added a cheap SFP+ NIC to the mix).

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