How to 10 Gigabit on Mac | Caldigit Connect 10G Review | Thunderbolt 3 to 10 Gbe | 10gb

hey what's up guys welcome back to the channel on today's episode we're going to talk about 10 gigabit ethernet but in order to do that we need this so we're going to be talking about this stay tuned all right you guys so this right here is a thunderbolt 3 to 10 gigabit ethernet adapter from cal digit we ordered this one on amazon uh nobody sent this to us it's not sponsored video that we bought with our own monies this is the second one that we have we have a few other ones like the owc and some internal cards and things like that but for external devices like for instance if you have a macbook and you have thunderbolt three ports this is probably the one i would recommend you the owc one is also just fine too we have another video about that but today we're going to talk about this this one is from cal digit and what it basically does is takes your thunderbolt 3 port and gives you one rj45 nbase t port on an external adapter okay and because it is nbase t it does support one gigabit and 2. 5 gigabit and 5 gigabit and also 10 gigabit ethernet assuming you're using the right cable but the adapter is capable for that okay it has some other features like wake on lan it is mac and windows compatible it has a two year limited warranty from the manufacturer from cal digit and in order to use this you need to use mac os 10. 13. 6 or later or windows 10 or later alright but this is what the box looks like when you get it we've already used it and a bunch of stuff and unbox it so what you actually get in the box is this the ethernet adapter or the external ethernet adapter looks pretty much like this it's a pretty solid build feels like a little heavy i don't want to it feels a little too heavy to be aluminum but we'll just say that some kind of metal let's just say it's aluminum okay it has one thunderbolt port on the front or the back depending on how you look at it and you know it's thunderbolt port because it has a thunderbolt icon okay if it did it did not have a thunderbolt icon it would just be a usb type-c port okay on the other side it has an n-base t connector rj45 port okay and like i said in base t it supports more than just one and 10 gigabit ethernet okay the entire body is pretty much in heat sink so it does get warm and if it does get warm you don't need to worry it is designed to get warm because the heat inside is being dissipated to the body outside that's what kind of has like this fin or heatsink type look on it okay it does have feet like rubberized feet so that it does help you keep it a little bit off the ground or the table or whatever you're setting it on and that way it promotes airflow flowing through it interestingly designed enough the if you look at it it has a big like airflow port that that kind of encourages i guess air to flow through it to do better cooling it is not actively cold so it doesn't have a fan or something blowing on it but it is a passively cold device like i said it does get warm so if you put it in the area with good ventilation it doesn't have a problem we've used these things for days on end without having any problems but we usually have good airflow like air purifiers and fans and even the computer fans and things like that going around but so that's what you really get with this it's really a no frills no no issues device just plug it in on a macbook pro you just plug it in or even on a mac you just plug it in and it works you don't need install drivers or any of that fun stuff it just works okay on the bottom of the box make sure you check the bottom of the box pull the little thing out there is a thunderbolt 3 cable do not throw it away because there is a cable hidden in the bottom of the box cal digit branded cable and it does have a thunderbolt icon on the cable so that way you know it's a thunderbolt 3 capable cable and a not a usb type-c cable so just in case you didn't know a thunderbolt cable can also support usb type-c but a usb type-c cannot always support thunderbolt 3.

keep that in mind it's a pretty short cable it's probably about 1. 6 or 1. 5 feet and it is a passive thunderbolt 3 cable so make sure you keep that in mind um the nbase t here we'll talk a little bit about that before we really get into testing but because it does support multiple connection speeds so what there's like a light code that kind of blinks up there so if you have two green lights you know it's connected at 10 gigabit if you have one green light and one orange light is connected at one gigabit okay so make sure you keep that in mind you can kind of mess with the setting and stuff inside your own mac but if you have this device and you have other a 10 gigabit network why would you use anything that's not 10 gig so we're going to get into that so let me grab the computer and we'll be right back all right you guys and we're back so we're back here with the 2019 16 inch macbook pro and we're going to be connecting this thunderbolt to 10gb ethernet adapter to the macbook so in order to do that all you really got to do is connect it up and you got to connect this up okay that's all there really is to it if you're on a mac you don't need to install any drivers if you're on windows you probably need to install some kind of drivers so this macbook and the other server at the end are the mac server on the end it's both running mac os x big sur okay that's the latest osx version at this time of the video recording so before we get into testing let's talk a little bit about the cables okay so in order to get 10 gig ethernet or 10 gig speeds other connections you need to be using at least you need to be using good quality cable and you need to be using a minimum of cat 6 cable this one right here is a cat 6a cable you can use also cat 7 cable but cat 6 is the minimum if i were you i would definitely try to use at least a cat 6a cable even though you can get away with cat 6 because cat 6a is a little has a little bit more stringent standards which allows which was really amended of cat6 just to so that you can really get 10 gigabit speeds it's really designed to help you get 10 gigabit speeds so make sure you get a good high quality cat6a cable that's shielded and if you can i would get the one that has individual parachutes because the better quality cable you get generally the better it's going to be a lot of times you'll see that it works fine but if you look at this specifics and things you'll see like retries and all that fun stuff so actually not that fun stuff but get a good cable that's into that story so get a cable plug it in and let's wait a little bit in order for it to connect it doesn't connect right away but while we are waiting for that to connect one thing i will tell you about this cal digit connect thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter is it doesn't have any lights on the front or back saying that it is plugged in when the cable is not connected so when on the rj45 ports it has lights on it telling you that that the connection is working so two green lights like i said is 10 gig if you have one green one orange you're not a 10 gig you're probably yet i think let's gig a bit so but other than that there's no real lights on here tel saying that the the adapter is working on the owc one it does have a blue light on the back on the thunderbolt port side that tells you that the adapter is powered on this one it doesn't so let's keep that in mind so let's go see what's going on here so here we are on the cal digit nick nick i just put for a network interface card so if i go look at it yours is probably going to be set to dhcp mine's just set to manual mainly because i wanted to hit be on a specific network to to connect a specific server okay so none of that none of this manual stuff right here is really important right now but we will get into it in a little bit so if you go to configure or hardware and then you'll see that mine set to manual yours will probably automatically set to automatic but the reason i said it this way is that i can manually set certain things so i can show you during a test so right now this speed right here said at 10 gig base t full duplex flow control with mtu size of 1500 okay so let's do a speed test we're going to be using a program called iperf so iperf allows you to test socket to socket to an iperf server so the other end is running a 15 inch 2016 macbook pro with a thunderbolt 3 2 ethernet adapter and we're going to be running this in iperf client mode and hitting that server okay we'll see how this goes but you're gonna get roughly around six to seven gigabits per second okay so the reason you're getting a lot of that because there's a lot of overhead and things like that involved when you're sending a lot of packets really fast so as i mentioned earlier we'll go back into network preferences here and you'll see if you go into advanced this hardware when you set it to automatic will automatically set to the default of this will be auto determined and the mtu size would be 1500 in order for you to really see the 10 gig speed benefits you really need to start using jumbo frames so on this hardware you can actually enable on on this configuration to use a jumbo a frame size of pretty much 9000 mtu size of 9000 okay if you don't know what that means what it basically means is it comes down to if you're selling a lot of packets really fast on 1500 maximum transmittable unit size you're you're sending there's a lot of overhead involved because you're sending a lot of packets really fast a jumbo frame really makes takes all those packets and just think of it as takes a bunch of small packets and makes one big packet okay that way every packet that you're getting still has still has overhead in it but now it's one small overhead versus thousands of little packages that have overhead so because of that it you actually see a lot of benefit gained by using jumbo frames so quick note in order for this to work you need your adapter having mtu size set to 9000 there's custom sizes but just use 9000 the server or whatever you're connecting to needs to be have have the same mtu size set to whatever you're using to 9000 in this case and if you're connecting through a network switch your network switch needs to have jumbo frames enabled okay if you don't have that you're not going to see this you're going to be setting it on your computer and you're not going to see any benefits you can sitting on the server you're not going to see any benefits if the switch does not have it enabled okay so make sure you keep that in mind we hit apply so it should be applied but we'll go back and look at it see right here 10 gig base t full duplex flow control jumbo frames 9000 okay so now let's run this exact same test again and we should get closer to about 9. 6 or 9.

7 there we go look 9. 6 9. 7 9. 2 9.

7 so right now we are connected to the other server at 10 gig really 9. 7 gig 10 gigabit speeds so this is important it works really well especially for us since we do youtube videos in 4k now so we have video files we got to transfer back and forth i'm not going to show you a video of it transferring copying to another server whatnot because that's going to be completely dependent on what you're using the speeds of your network switch the speeds of your servers your hard drives or whatever you're running so but what i can tell you is that because we did a socket to socket connection on from client to the server and that connection is getting 9. 7 9. 8 it says on here roughly around 9.