alt Hacker NewsAre there any that actually have a SFP+ port? That's all I want. No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7, and you can just change it up to a $7 multimode when you need longer runs.
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The SFP+ ones are all Thunderbolt or USB4 this far, i.e. not backward compatible with USB 3.x, like this QNAP one: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qna-uc10g1sf
10G DACs are no cheaper than cat6, which is perfectly fine for 10G at most practical distances. Considering the target audience of these cards it seems pretty obvious to me that letting users "just buy a cat 6 cable" is miles more reasonable than having them buy a transceiver or DAC.
As for allowing to switch to fiber, that just seems orthogonal again to what these USB NICs are for, not to mention the SFP+ itself is probably more expensive than the NIC shown here...
Modern transceivers can do 10G on absolutely garbage twisted pair. My house was wired with absolutely dire cat5 cabling. Zero shielding and barely any copper in the pairs. I thought I'd barely be able to do 1G on them, but modern transceivers (amazon) easily do 10G over like 30M of that sort of cables.
In fact I had more trouble getting quality fiber working for that sort of distance than El Cheapo cat5. They do heat up a bit, but they work wonder.
Yep, 10gb over copper is not power efficient so any savings you get from getting a cheap 10gb switch will just go to your power bill. Most cost effective and flexible is a used 25gb switch. Most 25gb switches can do 1/10/25gb. 10gb networking has been dead for over 10 years.