Review of the AliExpress IoCrest USB4-to-10GbE Adapter

Why is a USB 10GbE network adapter such a big deal? USB NICs have been around for literally decades, so a new network adapter that takes advantage of USB can’t be that exciting, right? Well, if you’ve been in the market to buy a network upgrade for more modest and streamlined systems that lack PCIe slot expandability, then chances are you have noticed the severe lack of USB options in the market. Although a number of domestic-level systems for home and business have started rolling out with greater than gigabit network connectivity, when it comes to expanding older generation devices (or even scaling up relatively modern devices to take advantage of greater network speeds), the range of solutions on the market is actually pretty limited. A few years ago, this was alleviated slightly by the rollout of Thunderbolt to 10G adapters arriving in the market, but because of Intel’s restrictive use of Thunderbolt certification and numerous hurdles in adding Thunderbolt to the majority of devices, these are pretty expensive adapters and also have zero backwards compatibility. Fast forward to now, and thanks to the more open-ended compatibility that USB4 features (supporting USB and Thunderbolt 3/4), the idea of a 10GbE USB-connected network adapter has become a reality.

So, the new IO crest USB4-10G adapter is now available. Although I’m sure we will see rebranded versions of this flooding the market relatively soon, alongside established players like QNAP and Sonnet rolling out their alternatives, let’s take a deep dive into the device and find out whether it deserves to be your next network upgrade purchase.

Buying the Adapter: A Quick Note !!!

The adapter is currently available from several different retailers, but is more widely available at the time of writing on AliExpress. Pricing on this adapter will fluctuate rapidly, and I have seen it retailed for as little as $82 all the way up to $140. For this review, I purchased a unit at £72 without tax. It arrived in under 8 days, and although the packaging is phenomenally bare-bones, I can vouch for the fact it arrived intact. Below are a few suggested links to retailers selling the USB4 to 10GbE adapter that you may find useful. Using these links will result in a small commission fee to NAScompares, which helps us keep doing what we do.

Where to Buy?   IOCREST USB4-to-10GbE NIC Adapter – $87 HERE – $108 HERE – $114 HERE Check Amazon HERE

Given the similarities between this adapter and the Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE alternatives in the market, this IO crest device takes a slightly different approach in its hardware. Arriving in a much chunkier surrounding heatsink, this device has the network connection and the USB input on the same side.

Despite the large look of the thing and its firm metal exterior, it is surprisingly light. It’s really the size more than anything that might bother some users.

Currently, the device is only available in copper/10GBASE-T hardware configurations, but almost certainly we’re going to see SFP/fiber versions of this adapter in due course. The copper 10G connection supports auto-negotiation, so you will still be able to take advantage of lesser 5G/2.5G/1G connections when utilizing this adapter.

The USB Type-C port, however, is a mixture of good and bad news. On the one hand, USB Type-C on this adapter allows for power delivery, meaning that adding this 10G connection does not require any additional power input to establish a connection with a 10GbE network. Additionally, you can utilize this adapter on a modern USB4 system, as well as on a Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 system too.

Given the big price difference between this USB4 10G adapter and established Thunderbolt-specific adapters from ATO, Sonnet, and QNAP costing much more, this allows for a greater degree of flexibility and affordability versus those Thunderbolt options. A big part of this is down to the increased compatibility that USB4 brings and a much easier threshold of integration compared with previous generation Thunderbolt client devices.

Specification	Details
Model	IOcrest USB4 to 10GbE Ethernet Network Adapter
Compatibility	USB4, Thunderbolt 3/4, Windows, Linux, Mac OS
Interface	USB-C (Thunderbolt 3)
Ethernet Port	10Gb/s, 5Gb/s, 2.5Gb/s, 1Gb/s, 100Mb/s Base-T
Power	Bus powered
Jumbo Frame Support	Up to 16 KB
Operating Power per Port	2.5W (10GBASE-T), 1.5W (5GBASE-T), 1W (1GBASE-T)
Advanced Features	AVB, PTP/1588v2, Sync-E, MSI, MSI-X, INTx, NC-SI
Protocols Supported	MCTP, IEEE 802.3an/bz/ab/u/q/x/az
Temperature Range (Operation)	0°C to +108°C
Temperature Range (Storage)	-40°C to +110°C
Chipset ID	AQC113
Number of Ports	1 Port
Transfer Rate	10000Mbps
Dimensions	102.7mm x 40.4mm x 25.6mm
OS Compatibility	Windows 10/11, Linux Kernel 3.10 and later, Mac OS
Additional Notes	Does not support Type-C, USB 3.0/3.1/3.2 interfaces

However, the bad news is that despite it being a USB4 adapter, it does not support the usual backwards compatibility of the USB4 port on your laptop, NAS, or desktop computer. In essence, this means that you cannot utilize this device with a USB 2, USB 3, USB 3.1, or USB 3.2 port. This is going to be quite a blow for users who were looking forward to a USB to 10G adapter for older legacy hardware that does not accommodate PCIe upgrades. A big part of the logic behind this is USB4 supporting Gen4 architecture and the extra bandwidth and negotiation that it brings, but it’s still going to be a bitter pill for users who have been waiting for a USB-convenient option to scale up to 10GbE networks. This is made especially galling when you know that USB 3.2 Gen 2 gives 1,000 MB per second and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 provides 2,000 MB per second, yet neither of these options can be used with this 10G/1000 MB adapter.

(See Video Below to Learn More – or visit the article on the QNAP USB4-to-10GbE Adapter HERE)

This device does not represent the end of the road for this kind of adapter, though. At Computex 2024, QNAP demoed the first of a large range of USB4 to network adapters that they plan to introduce in the next 6 to 8 months. These began with a USB4 to 10GbE copper and SFP adapter but plan on scoping out towards dual 10GbE adapters and even 25GbE adapters too. Needless to say, these will be considerably more expensive and no doubt are going to require a great deal of tooling before they hit retail, but at least we know that this is not going to be the only adapter in the market for USB users.

Opening up the adapter, by removing two screws at either end of the casing, reveals that the internals do not have any kind of active fan. This means that there will be no noise during operation and cooling internally is managed via passive dissipation through strategically placed internal heat sinks into the surrounding casing.

Indeed, the inside of the USB4 10G adapter only comprises two core pieces: a main M.2 mounting board that connects to the USB4 port, and a separate M.2 PCB that has the 10G copper connection mounted.

The main Aquantia controller that requires the AQC113 driver to be used is placed under a full-width black heatsink. This heatsink has thermal paste but also additional adhesive to keep it firmly in place to connect with the external casing. This means that removing that black heatsink will likely damage the adapter, so we have decided to hold off on going for a deeper dive into the internals for now until we’ve completed our testing.

Putting the device back together, we decided to conduct multiple tests with a 10G NAS system and a Windows 10 NVMe-based laptop with USB4 connectivity to see what output we could get.

We set the NAS up (an Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro with 10GbE and 4x Gen 3 SSDs in RAID 5) directly connected to the adapter, which was then connected to the Windows PC. We mounted an SMB share as a mapped drive, set jumbo frames to 9k on both devices, and began some fairly rudimentary file transfers.

We did a 256MB ATO disk benchmark transfer and we saw the full saturation of 10GbE quickly and easily.

We then performed an AJA disk benchmark test of a 1GB 1080p config, and performance was middling between 600MB and 800MB up and down.

We then performed three separate Windows transfer tests. The first was a single 10GB 4K media file which transferred over at a seemingly capped 600MB per second. It was unclear whether this was caused by the host machine, the Celeron-powered NAS, or the device itself. But given that we’d already observed greater performance in other synthetic tests, this was quite unusual.

Then we transferred 1,000 PNG files that amounted to just 1GB of data and performance was pretty mediocre, rarely going above 50MB per second. This huge IO factor of so many transfers per second being managed was still fairly mediocre, and I’ve seen performance numbers of 300 to 500MB per second using comparable Thunderbolt 10G adapters by comparison.

Finally, I transferred over 10GB of a little over 33 high-end multimedia files and we saw performance numbers of around 500 to 600MB per second maximum. Once again we saw that unusual cap for Windows transfer of around 600MB per second with that higher-end multimedia, which did indicate oversaturation was present here, or at the very least poor PCIe routing internally.

UPDATE – During my testing and rushing, I didn’t notice the BLOODY OBVIOUS fact that the m.2 that supported the 10GbE connector is attached to SATA M.2 connector! Therefore there is clearly going to be a limitation down to 6Gb/s. This still doesn;t quite explain how the ATTO test hit full saturation at 256MB (an SMB mapped drive without caching), but this does make the results alot clearer Thank you to YouTube user @sl1ckk1ll3r and his comment here.

We will be testing several different NAS systems in the coming weeks and creating a separate article bench testing a lot more performance numbers for different NAS systems, as well as highlighting how many systems actually support this adapter to increase network connectivity on modest NAS systems soon. At the time of writing, I’m not going to say the performance is bad, but I am going to say that this does seem lower in performance compared with Thunderbolt to 10G adapters released a couple of years ago.

IOCREST USB4-to-10GbE Adapter Review Conclusion

As an alternative to a PCIe upgrade on your system, I think it’s unquestionable that this is a much more convenient option for most users. Equally, this is considerably more affordable than dedicated Thunderbolt alternatives in the market that are forced to have increased price points due to Intel certification and licensing, as well as being in the market a little while longer with stock sitting on shelves. However, this is definitely the first of a new wave of network adapters that are going to allow users greater degrees of flexibility to scale up the network connectivity of their systems. The fact that you cannot take advantage of backwards compatibility with older legacy USB connections is definitely going to hurt older generation servers and client hardware, but in the grand scheme of things, I think I am a little bit more excited about the idea that this kind of technology is going to allow affordable and accessible means for dual 10GbE connectivity and even 25GbE in the future. I can definitely recommend this adapter, but just keep your expectations on performance in check. Also, do not be fooled into thinking you can use this on older generation hardware. USB4 may well support Thunderbolt connectivity, but the backwards compatibility that USB4 promises is not present in this adapter.

Where to Buy?   IOCREST USB4-to-10GbE NIC Adapter – $87 HERE – $108 HERE – $114 HERE Check Amazon HERE

PROS of the IOCREST USB4-to-10G NIC Cheaper than a Thunderbolt NIC Alternative Similar Pricing to 10GbE PCIe Adapters BUS Powered and USB-C Thunderbolt 3 & 4 Support Low Power Use (1W to 2.5w Max) Opens the door to 2x10G and 25GbE	CONS of the IOCREST USB4-to-10GbE NIC No Support for USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 Deployment Only currently on AliExpress Currently Performance is mixed

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