I won’t go into the detail, but my main challenge with the Sabrent adapter was its loose Thunderbolt cable. Disable the Native VLAN 129 and only use VLAN 130 for all traffic Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 to 10 Gbps Ethernet Adapter TH-S3EA VLAN 130 virtual interface will stay up and forward traffic. If you only want to use VLAN 130 (without touching the Native VLAN 129), you can disable the adapter itself. Verify that we are indeed in VLAN 130: VLAN 130 is being used instead of the Native VLAN 129 Let’s tag all traffic with VLAN 130: Create VLAN interface on macOS Here is my Trunk port with Native VLAN 129: Trunk port configured on the access switch The OWC adapter also supports VLAN tagging. OWC connected to an M1 MacBook Pro Thunderbolt side Ethernet side Raspberry Pi 4 for scale It supports Jumbo frames including a custom MTU setting VLAN tagging When I reviewed 2.5 GbE and 5 GbE adapters, this setup has become my reference I ran all iperf3 tests against. 9.5 Gbps uplink iperf3 speeds with Jumbo frames enabled.between 7 Gbps and 8.74 Gbps uplink speeds with default iperf3 settings.The limitation is on my part, I just don’t have another 10 GbE computer I could test against. OWC Thunderbolt 3 10G Ethernet Adapter OWCTB3ADP10GBEįrom throughput perspective, I personally tested it up to 3 Gbps down and 3.3 Gbps up using iperf3 with default settings. It comes with great documentation, and even the Thunderbolt cable itself is thicker and feels premium. Mainly because of the loose Sabrent cable issue explained below, I recommend the OWC adapter. Yes, no driver installation required on your part on macOS! 🎉 They both look alike, both perform very well, both get quite warm, and both work out of the box on macOS.

One made by Sabrent, and the other by OWC. I tested two of these Thunderbolt 10 GbE adapters.

That should be most new MacBooks, Mac Minis, Intel NUCs and similar platforms. Before you order one of these adapters, double-check that your computer supports Thunderbolt 3. That’s the only thing USB and Thunderbolt have in common. They use Thunderbolt 3 and they happen to use the same USB-C connector as USB. While the USB-C connector might temp you to connect these adapters to a standard USB port, these adapters don’t support USB protocol. Or you can consider an add-on 10 Gigabit Ethernet Thunderbolt 3 adapter for your current Mac.

If your other half approves, get yourself an M1 Mac Mini with built-in 10 GbE port.When it comes to the fastest copper Ethernet adapter for your Mac, you have only 2 options:

10gbe server for mac