Will this work for my primary network connection?

 

Reason I ask is because I have no room in my NAS unit for 10G NIC (my mini-ITX motherboard only supports one PCIe slot which is for the SATA/SAS controller).

 

This is the Thunderbolt 3 to 10G adapter.

 

This is the USB-C to Thunderbolt 3/4 cable.

 

Cheers, Rob.

No takers?

You shouldn't need the cable. That adapter seems to have it built in.

I don't know how unraid will see the device and if it has drivers.

 

Out of curiosity what MB do you have?

 

From a review:

I wanted one with an integrated cable and this looks pretty well put together as the cable is detachable but requires a couple screws to be removed. So it’s secure in there you don’t need to worry about the adapter side to be a failure point.

The motherboard is:

 

ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX B760-I GAMING WIFI

 

Thunderbolt and USB-C aren't exactly the same, that cable will convert Thunderbolt 3 to USB-C.

18 hours ago, RobAinscough said:

The motherboard is:

 

ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX B760-I GAMING WIFI

 

Thunderbolt and USB-C aren't exactly the same, that cable will convert Thunderbolt 3 to USB-C.

The end on the 10Gb Network adapter is female.

The ends on that  "adapter cable" is female.

How will you couple them?

 

7 hours ago, BRiT said:

How will you couple them?

 

You're absolutely correct, missed that, my apologies.  Here is what I would use instead.

 

So where can I get a driver for Unraid to support?

On 3/10/2024 at 11:39 PM, RobAinscough said:

ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX B760-I GAMING WIFI

That board doesn't have a thunderbolt controller chip, you would need a card like this. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZS3D6JY/

You can't convert C to thunderbolt with just a cable.

Think of it like USB 1.1 and 2.0. The devices on both ends of the cable must agree on what language to speak, even if the cable ends are the same.

 

Thunderbolt 3 is a language that is spoken using a USB-C connector and cable. If the port can't talk TB, then a cable won't fix that.

Not sure I agree, but I'll research more.

 

Can't use another PCIe slot ... no space or slot ... hence my desire to leverage onboard USB-C ports ... if I had an extra PCIe, I would just install 10Gbe NIC.

 

Sadly I can't find USB-C to 10Gbe external NIC.

First question is do you need a 10 gig NIC, and the issue among other things is B-series may at best have a TB header but it still requires a MATCHED TB card which will cost hundreds.    If you want 10 gig it will be cheaper to just buy a new Mobo (you should consider Z-series) in the future as it has general better connectivity OR there are some mobo out there that have native TB3 in the mid $250+ range.

 

So money wise it is definitely better and for compatibility to upgrade the mobo first, I'm pretty sure you cannot use TB on this board in the config you have.  You could consider a mITX which has dual 2.5 and you could bond them and use scalable CIFS if that is a reason, then of course there is upgrading your entire network apparatus.  5 Gig should be enough and if you need critical work consider direct connection first.

 

I have a 10GbE network at home, it's just the NAS I built doesn't have 10GbE on the MB.  "Need" well that's subjective ... but my need comes from copying large files from the PCs used to convert my BD/DVDs to MKV files (and/or upscales lower quality ones with Topaz Video AI to mp4 files) ... 50-80GB for 4K movies (with future plans for 8K content).

 

When going thru 1GbE my xfers from PCs to NAS are:

 

When going thru 10GbE my xfers from PC to NAS are: 

 

Pretty close to 10X faster ... when doing xfers with a lot of 50-80GB files, can make a big difference.

 

Finding a mini-ITX motherboard with 10GbE port is not trivial ... and finding one that UnRaid supports is even more a challenge ... suggestions welcome, prefer for LGA 1700 but all welcome?

 

I did find this MB for LGA 1700 with USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 here.  Basically the Z version of my B version board with two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports.  

 

I can't find any LGA 1700 mini-ITX MB that has 10GbE support ... found mini-ITX for older Xeon CPUs but that's basically entire MB/CPU/Fan/RAM replacement.

 

Per Intel article it suggests USB 3.2 is compatible with Thunderbolt 4 and they use the same USB-C "connector" ... see article here.  Since Thunderbolt 4 is compatible with Thunderbolt 3 the USB 3.2 port C should work per spec for the Z version of my motherboard (which is mini-ITX).

 

So will UnRaid support USB 3.2 (Thunderbolt 3/4) port C?  If not, are there drivers that will?  From the ASUS support page there is no driver support for anything other than Win10 or Win11.

 

There's a few posts in this thread that one might find useful for mini-ITX even if the initial focus was on lower power setups with cpus integrated. 

 

I'm interested in the Minisforum MS-01 system with 2 SFP+ ports and a free PCI-Express slot but they won't ship until April 20th or so. It would work well with an external 4-drive cage. 

 

I was looking for what networking options I could use on my Legion Go that has 40 Gbps USB-C ports. So the timing of this thread was convenient.

 

 

I was able to locate more info on the Thunderbolt 3/4 to 10GbE external network interface.  It supports Linux Kernel 5.0+ ... so I guess the question now is what version of Linux is UnRaid based on?

 

Cheers, Rob.

More digging it seems UnRaid is based on Linux Slackware 15.x which was released in 2022 and that was based on Linux Kernel 5.15.x ... sooooo, I thinking a motherboard swap for the Z and getting that external 10GbE Thunderbolt 3/4 NIC will hopefully work -- $500 experiment unless someone has more info?

 

Cheers, Rob.

Edited March 12, 20242 yr by RobAinscough

edit/delete: looked into the wrong manual

Edited March 14, 20242 yr by eicar

Here are screenshots from the Asus Z690-I manual for USB4/Thunderbolt:

 

 

 

 

It should work with just an MB replacement for Z690-I

 

Cheers, Rob.

I went into the kernel modules built in the latest unraid on my machine and here are the kernel modules compiled. You can also see the thunderbolt network service is there and the ko thunderbolt net module is also compiled in.  In the case of this TB3 network adapter I don't know if it needs to load the net module or not, but it is there.  You may have to load it manually though (if it is necessary).  This would be interesting to see if it is actually plug and play.  I have no USB4 ports to test. 

 

 

 

alias tbsvc:knetworkp00000001v*r* thunderbolt_net
alias wmi:86CCFD48-205E-4A77-9C48-2021CBEDE341 intel_wmi_thunderbolt
alias pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc0Csc03i40* thunderbolt
 

 

LM in kernel driver:

thunderbolt-net.ko.xz

thunderbolt.ko.xz

 

I am not sure USB4 is compiled into the kernel yet so the modprobe needs to know about the port and how to attach the module to it but I am unsure it will  work w/ USB4 but probably a trad TB3 port.  But that is conjecture because I didn't look at the kernel symbols and have no idea what the Mobo would report upon plug.

With all of that said just because you CAN do it, if it's not supported by limewire then you will be on your own.

 

 

Edited March 13, 20242 yr by psychic99

Many thanks, sounds like it might be an experiment ... make sure my Amazon return policy is good. 🙂

 

Cheers, Rob.

 

EDIT: reading thru this doc and still not absolutely clear if it'll work so I think experiment is the only option.

Edited March 13, 20242 yr by RobAinscough

I did a little digging and it seems that Maple Ridge or Goshen Ridge (TB4) controllers are supported as of mainline kernel 5.11:  Source:  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Maple-Ridge-Linux

There is also a document which goes deep into TB:  https://stderr.nl/Blog/Hardware/Thunderbolt/TechnologyOverview.html

 

My box on 6.1-74.  I assume 6.5 is coming because this is not an LTS kernel, but good luck.  I have a TB3 NVMe and a laptop w/ TB3 I may try it out this weekend if I have some time.