StarTech USB3 to GbE
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I have an older Zotac MA320 with a single GbE port and bought a Startech USB3 to GbE (AX88179 chipset) adapter to use as a 300Mbps router. It's a Quad core A4-5000 cpu with 8GB DDR3 ram and a 60GB SSD. but for the life of me the adapter won't hit over 150-180 Mbps in pfsense. I had windows 7 installed on another drive that was in this unit and it would hit 800+Mbps on the various online speed test site. What am I missing? Yes I have Gb fiber at my house and have 300Mbps cable fail over that I have used for the speed testing on this new unit and its connected directly to the cable modem.
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USB ethernet adapters are crap and the box itself is likely using a Realtek NIC, so one of the worst possible combinations for pfSense. Try to update the Realtek driver if it's a Realtek NIC (hint: search the forums) and use it with a managed switch as a router on a stick, this way you may get somewhat acceptable performance from it. But don't expect too much.
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Ya… standard industrial (bad?) practice, when they say USB3, they are not guaranteeing you USB3 speed, they are simply saying this device "speak" USB3. For full Gig, am afraid u need another box with discrete LAN ports.
P.S.: Sometimes with these USB thingies, you won't attain full speed until you use the vendor's specific driver.
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I use one of those on my laptop when I want something faster than wifi. It can do 1gpbs all day long under linux, no problem. The problem here is that pfsense/freebsd have limited hardware support. You have basically two options: 1) stick with pfsense and buy different hardware or 2) keep the hardware and use a different OS. What you can't do is just assume that any hardware will work with pfsense the way it does on other OS's.
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I use one of those on my laptop when I want something faster than wifi. It can do 1gpbs all day long under linux, no problem. The problem here is that pfsense/freebsd have limited hardware support. You have basically two options: 1) stick with pfsense and buy different hardware or 2) keep the hardware and use a different OS. What you can't do is just assume that any hardware will work with pfsense the way it does on other OS's.
That's a bit of a blanket statement. For wireless and USB devices it tends to hold true but for your bread and butter wired PCI/PCIe/PCI-X hardware it doesn't really. FreeBSD/pfSense has excellent support for most common server grade wired NICs.
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@kpa:
I use one of those on my laptop when I want something faster than wifi. It can do 1gpbs all day long under linux, no problem. The problem here is that pfsense/freebsd have limited hardware support. You have basically two options: 1) stick with pfsense and buy different hardware or 2) keep the hardware and use a different OS. What you can't do is just assume that any hardware will work with pfsense the way it does on other OS's.
That's a bit of a blanket statement. For wireless and USB devices it tends to hold true but for your bread and butter wired PCI/PCIe/PCI-X hardware it doesn't really. FreeBSD/pfSense has excellent support for most common server grade wired NICs.
Sure, you can get endorsements for any intel nic you might choose. Anything else that doesn't work is at fault for not being good enough for pfsense. (When an Intel nic, on the other hand, doesn't work, it's obviously a driver problem which will be resolved soon.)
