Vahan's Blog

UNIX tips and Mac OS X tricks

Additional Gigabit Ethernet ports for your Mac

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Vahan

If you need additional Gigabit Ethernet ports for your Mac, there are several options depending on what accessory ports you have on your Mac. If you have one of the latest models with Thunderbolt ports, you can use the Apple’s own Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

However, if your Thunderbolt ports are used up for devices that do not support Thunderbolt daisy chaining, you can go with a USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet adapter from StarTech. Requiring an additional driver installation, this adapter is also backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports too, but your real network throughput will be limited to 480Mbps due to USB 2.0 standard bandwidth limitation.

High-performance Gigabit Ethernet PCIe card with native OS X Lion and Mountain Lion support

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Vahan

Not happy with your Hackintosh’s ethernet speeds? Tired of wake/sleep issues with Realtek drivers? How about a natively supported PCIe card that works OOB with OS X Lion and up?

Please welcome the Koutech Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (x1) Card. It uses the same Marvell Yukon chipset that Apple has used with some of their hardware, so it doesn’t need any additional drivers. I was able to get up to 85mbyte/sec transfer rates with my Time Capsule.

The card is currently on a $27.99 sale on Amazon!