GoKawiilGetting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on my Mac Studio
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec.
But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
I looked up 25G networking options for the Mac, and they're all crazy expensive:
The problem is Macs all require Thunderbolt adapters; you can't just plug an inexpensive(ish) PCIe card into a Mac (RIP Mac Pro).
I stopped looking until I saw this blog post. Christian Kohlschütter found a cheap 25G Thunderbolt adapter that uses a server-pulled OCP 2 NIC with a little Thunderbolt 3 adapter board. And it works on any computer with Thunderbolt.
Back in January, it was only $160, which was insta-buy territory for me. Since that time, the Amazon listing jumped to $299, which still might be good compared to the Sonnet... but you might have to go digging through some Chinese sites to find a non-marked-up version now.
This blog post is a companion to the following YouTube video:
First Test - Two Problems to Solve
Once I had pulled some new fiber to my desk (where I only had Cat6A cabling before), I tested the bandwidth using iperf3 between my Mac and my NAS. That's when I ran into two problems:
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