I don’t know if this is possible but I have no more free pcie slots (m.2 included) and I want to add 10 gig or greater. I have lots of available USB ports with 20gigabits and may be one with 40. Are there any usb to pcie slots/boxes? Its just cheaper to get a used 10gig card then getting a thunderbolt doc or something with 10gig and I have heard they aren’t great and are really expensive? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated. Thanks
I don’t think it’s practical (or even possible) to get what you propose.
AFAIK, USB as a protocol isn’t well suited for this particular case of carrying the high speed 10gbit ethernet packets - it’s a polled protocol, with relatively high latency, lack of direct memory access, high CPU usage, etc. I don’t remember if I ever seen a USB Ethernet dongle faster than maybe 2.5Gig (here I’m not talking about thunderbolt, but just a pure USB3 based one)
Now, the idea of carrying the raw PCIe over USB (non thunderbolt) seems even more unrealistic to me, again mainly due to USB protocol design and it’s limitations. While there are certain specialized bridge chips, like NVME to USB, I don’t think it’s possible to make a generic PCIe over USB. This is essentially a Thunderbolt zone now, which is basically a PCIe bus, suited for external connectivity
So if I understand you correctly USB 3.2 can’t do pcie tunneling and therefore even though it can do 20gbs it couldn’t connect to a doc with a card in it even if the card is below the bandwidth limits?
Thanks again for any advice
Could you elaborate what doc do you mean? Like an eGPU enclosure, with a network card in it?
yes exactly like an eGPu enclosure just using a network card rather then a gpu.
Well, as of today, that’s exclusively Thunderbolt territory. So for the cheap path, you’d either need to somehow free up a PCIe slot or settle down with a 2.5G USB dongle (or maybe 5Gbit already exist).
Ok Thanks a bunch. I appreciate the help