Pros and Cons USB NIC
 

My traffic is around 10MBdown/2MBup. Would you consider an USB NIC(wired) at these needs? How would the latency be affected?

Hello erhardm, welcome to LQ,

why do you need an USB-NIC? doesn't your computer have a networkadapter? why not using a PCI-adapter?

Could you please provide more information about your situation and what you want to achieve.

Markus

Hi Markus,

it has to do with this situation:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...m-d525-872734/

A pokey Atom computer will get bogged down with any large amount of traffic. Nic's tend to use a lot of cpu working on checksums. Only higher end cards tend to let you offload that to the nic. Never heard of a usb doing it. But most cheap cards do not either. So if you are trying to use this as a high speed router or firewall you may see some or a lot of slowness on some processes. Remember that there is always a lot of other overhead to any connection both traffic and other resources needed.


Would I guess this to work. Well, yes if the driver is pretty good and your normal other cpu use is low. It would be much better than a second IP on the single nic.

I think that 10MBdown/2MBup isn't that much traffic for the Atom. Usb 2.0 supports 60MB of bandwith, but what about the overhead of USB->TCP?

My concerns are latency and CPU time used to work on the USB->TCP. The latter I think that the Atom and Zacate will do the work with no problem. But how would the latency be noticed in the real world scenario, like browsing?

I think they would work but I only wanted to warn you of a possible issue.