Solo10G SFP+ Thunderbolt Adapter

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.

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 size 2. Quietness 3. Affordability Pick 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_nNoGEbTA4E9H6 The 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.

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.

These are awesome! I needed to sniff a 10G fiber and commercial products are upwards of $10K. Two of these, a 10G fiber tap, and a Thunderbolt hub (also from Amazon) and I've got enough to sniff both sides of a 10G conversation non-intrusively. "Just use a span port" I can here other network engineers saying ... yeah, too often you don't get ALL the data off a spanning or mirroring port. Just try that to see PTP traffic travelling peer to peer. Anyway, I've now got access to four of these for double ended non-invasive sniffing fibers! Oh and it is also good for putting your system on the fiber at 10Gig! which is probably what they designed it for, but not how I'm using it. I'll probably write an article on setting up the 10G sniffer if I see enough interest in doing this.

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.

I have tested both versions of this Sonnet Solo10G ThunderBird 3 adapter (RJ45 vs. SFP+). The SFP+ version has better performance than the RJ45 and has no heat issue. Avoid the usage of 10GbE RJ45 modules for this TB3 adapter if possible or otherwise you will have the heat issue again. Use Twinax DAC cables upto 7.5m or OM4 fiber cables with fiber transceivers. The Sonnet Solo10G ThunderBird 3 RJ45 adapter version decreased the bandwith to avoid overheating or turned off completely. FreeNAS custom build shared storage for video editing (XEON 5680, 48GB RAM ECC, Mellanox ConnectX3 EN): 8x WD Red 4TB (RAIDZ2), L2ARC SanDisk 120GB Plus, ZIL/SLOG SanDisk 120GB Plus AFP: write: 448.2 MB/s, read: 890.6 MB/s SMB: write: 547.4 MB/s, read: 847.0 MB/s NFS: write: 125.1 MB/s, read: 789.6 MB/s iSCSI: write: 135.8 MB/s, read: 771.7 MB/s

Possiedo già l'altra versione, 10GbEthernet, e devo dire che le prestazioni sono pressoché identiche fra le due versioni. Cavo Thunderbolt un po corto ma adatto alla mia scrivania. Questa versione SFP+ scalda pochissimo. La versione 10GbE molto di più ma funziona sempre perfettamente. Un prodotto professionale e da consigliare assolutamente.

It just plugged in and worked. MacOS Sequoia 15.3.2 . Using with a 10Gb MikroTik switch connected via Multimode fibre, amazing speeds. Great for transferring big video files to NAS with 10Gb network card.

Todo muy bien! Impecable!

Fonctionne parfaitement avec Windows 11 et UDM Pro de Unifi. Vérifiez bien que votre PC est compatible thunderbolt 3 ou plus