Sonnet Solo 10G Thunderbolt 3 to SFP+ 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (SFP+ [SR] Included)

For all of those that are saying the NIC gets hot and / or overheats...you unfortunately cannot beat physics. 10Gb NICs get hot by their nature.1. Small size2. Quietness3. AffordabilityPick 2 out of the 3 above. 3 out of 3 are impossible.You can have a small, affordable device with a tiny, whiny internal fan that will stay cool. You could have a small, affordable device with an intricate and expensive heat sink design but it would be expensive. You can have an affordable device with a cheaply made but giant metal heat sink that will stay cool.NOW, with that said, I want all 3 :). Luckily I'm an engineer, so this wasn't a challenge. I simply purchased the following 80mm fan for $11 and affixed it to the heat sink side of the housing:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G059G86/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_nNoGEbTA4E9H6The design of the housing and the assembly is actually very well done from a thermal management perspective.I disassembled the unit and verified that the ribbed side of the housing is thermally connected to the controller. From the factory they applied thermal interface material to the controller and created a raised area in the housing to make contact with the TIM. They also placed a thermal pad on a secondary SMD. I replaced the TIM with higher quality since I had it open anyway and replaced the pad with a fujipoly of the same size. That was totally unnecessary, but I figured why not since I had it open anyway.Now the unit stays warm to the touch at best with the fan on the lowest setting.Yes, you can buy another brand of external NIC for the same price that already has a fan, but they sound like jet engines. My solution, while ugly lol, is very effective while remaining quiet.

Heat is the #1 problem with 10 GbE so after reading many review I opted for this one and it did not disappoint. Works out of the box with macOS and it's 100% silent and just barely warm (using a DAC cable to my switch). Performance was as expected (and will be better with Jumbo packages which it supports). I'll be getting at least one more.Only cons: at $200 it's a tad expensive compared to a simple PCIe add-in card.EDIT: fixed typo "barely work -> barely warm" LOL. Note, this is the SFP+ version which will run cooler than the Base-T version. It's important to state which because of this.

Product works fine with a laptop as long as you have a Lightning 3 port that is separate from the charging port. 10g sfp+ uses a lot of power, most laptops will go into "low power mode" on their external ports that provide power if the unit is not plugged in. So if you have a windows laptop and it has 1 Lightning 3 port, BUT that port is also used as a charging port for the laptop... this device will most likely not work for you. The port will be in low power mode when it is unplugged from the wall and then you plug in the soho 10gb sfp+ adapter and it will want to draw too much power and it cannot get it. A message may be displayed... "Thunderbolt device functionality might be limited"... you need a device that is not powered by the single thunderbolt 3 plug and you will need the laptop plugged in while using this device

I chose this adapter because, at the time, about two years ago, it was the only one I could find that did not have significant complaints of overheating. It does get warm, but seems adequately cooled, at least which using it with the provided SFP+ module. I have no been able to test it with an Ethernet module to see if that would generate too much heat, but, luckily, my 10gb switch has a couple of SFP+ ports, so, at least for now, I can use it in this configuration. I get full speed results using iperf when I have it attached to my Mac M2 laptop, but it is a little picky about what USB-C ports it likes, and some that say they are Thunderbolt 3 or 4 may not give top results. I am going to g to try testing it with a mini computer I have that has USB 4 and see how that goes. Overall, it was a good purchase at the time, but it remains one of the most expensive options available, and there are now other options for a fraction of the price, one of which I am about to try out soon.

I needed a way to connect an astronomy imaging camera using 10g SPF+ (fibre optic) ethernet to a thunderbolt 4 equipped laptop. The Sonnet SFP+ transceiver is a great fast transceiver. Installation was painless as was getting the correct Marvell drivers. When I was bench testing the laptop/transceiver/camera I collected some performance data.I setup an image sequence to generate dark frames (an image type used for calibration). It's an easy way to generate a lot of data. I took 300 images with exposures ranging from 1 to 5 seconds. Each image is 119,183kb in size for a total of 35.7gb of file data. The sequence ran for 1496s (24m 56s). We subtract the exposure time (800s) since exposure and data transfer occur sequentially leaving 696s. That equates to ~51 megabytes/sec. The performance is actually better as I didn't account for the overhead taken by the command sequence.