2.5G Ethernet to USB Adapter

[Re-yoso]

If i get a usb 2.5G Ethernet to help with FTP transferring.
Do you think the steam deck can handle it?
Does anyone know any compatible USB version for the steamOS? That wont mess up anything in the background?

[V𝐢𝐧𝐢gas Ba𝗸𝗸 🫎]

Linux kernel is mostly responsible for hardware compatibility, not SteamOS. Search for Linux compatible USB Ethernet instead.

[zBeeble]

I mean... firstly, do you have 2.5gig in from the interwebs? If not, are you just looking for local file transfer? 2.5 gigabit is going to represent approximately 250 megabyte/sec file transfer (plus or minus some percent). That would fill the 500-ish gig disk on the big deck in about 2 minutes (if the NVMe can handle it). As far as the plug-in micro-SD, it probably can't handle that speed.

[retrogunner]

About the Linux kernel USB Ethernet driver -- it also depends on what kernel modules Valve compiled with their spin. Having just got my Deck, I've not done a deep dive under the hood yet to see what kmods come with. Valve was able to shrink the OS side from about 20GB down to 5GB (two 5GB, plus /var & extra = 12GB for OS). As a highly tuned machine (almost console/appliance like) a lot of bloat was removed.

Be aware, most wired ethernet shouldn't be a problem as they tend not to use crazy binary-blob firmware like WiFi does. And, most wired ethernet NICs (USB, PCI, etc.) can use the legacy E1000 driver (which is usually/always compiled with the kernel.)

But like Beeble mentioned, can you support 2.5Gb? If it costs about the same and you can only do 1Gb - it's a no brainer as 2.5Gb will work & future proof you.

There's also the bottleneck of USB 3 gen 2 on the Deck. That must support all the throughput of Alt-DP (HDMI) bandwidth, any USB Storage, etc. plus legacy USB could degrade the throughput depending on the dock you use.

In the end, like usual, YMMV depending on your hardware & use-case.

Cheers. Retro.

[Zosuzne]

Just get something with a RealTek RTL8125 or RTL8125B RTL8156 or RTL8156B chip and it'll just work as soon as you plug it in. Both in desktop mode and if using DHCP in game mode as well.

The test setup was two identical USB Type-C 2.5Gbps adapters that make use of the RTL8125 RTL8156 chip, one connected to the Steam Deck directly and another connected to a PC using a Type-C to Type-A adapter, a single Cat6 STP cable was used to connect them directly.

In the Steam Deck's desktop mode the Plasma network settings were set to assign a Link-Local address and no other network configuration was performed.

The Homebrew Package Manager (Brew) was used to install iPerf3.11 on the Steam Deck.

Testing using iPerf3, this setup got a real world throughput of 283 MiB/s.
The test duration was 60 seconds and the amount of data transferred was 16.6 GiB.

The Steam Deck also easily handles copying a 3 GiB dummy file from an SMB server at over 220 MiB/s to the internal SSD.

2023-03-15 Edit: Somehow listed the wrong chipset name, must've misclicked in device manager and checked the hardware ID of the one on my motherboard instead.

[Re-yoso]

Holy Deck!
This was the info i was looking for thank you all for your input.
Yeah its mainly for local FTP and i was gonna try and future proof my set-up in general just wanted to see if sooner was better for my bigger library/ future use cases.
I did try (syncthing) but that's when i noticed things are odd and wanted to see if this was addressed. Thank you all again!
I did go with this (ASIN: B084L4JL9K)

[Tarantula]

Originally posted by Zosuzne:

Just get something with a RealTek RTL8125 or RTL8125B chip and it'll just work as soon as you plug it in. Both in desktop mode and if using DHCP in game mode as well.

The test setup was two identical USB Type-C 2.5Gbps adapters that make use of the RTL8125 chip, one connected to the Steam Deck directly and another connected to a PC using a Type-C to Type-A adapter, a single Cat6 STP cable was used to connect them directly.

In the Steam Deck's desktop mode the Plasma network settings were set to assign a Link-Local address and no other network configuration was performed.

The Homebrew Package Manager (Brew) was used to install iPerf3.11 on the Steam Deck.

Testing using iPerf3, this setup got a real world throughput of 283 MiB/s.
The test duration was 60 seconds and the amount of data transferred was 16.6 GiB.

The Steam Deck also easily handles copying a 3 GiB dummy file from an SMB server at over 220 MiB/s to the internal SSD.

I found that RTL8125 or RTL8125B is a pci-e add-on, the usb version is RTL8156 and RTL8156B.
So could you please check it, thanks!

[Zosuzne]

Originally posted by Tarantula:

I found that RTL8125 or RTL8125B is a pci-e add-on, the usb version is RTL8156 and RTL8156B.
So could you please check it, thanks!

You're right, I just plugged the USB NICs back in to check and they use the RTL8156 chipset not RTL8125, I must've misclicked and selected the NIC of my motherboard instead back then since they showed up right next to each other.