In view of my previous post on a USBNET dongle with an Asix AX88772B chipset, I finally managed to secure a free unit from a friend who bought it from here. Unlike shown on the pictures in the ad, it has 2 LEDs situated on the side without the blue logo. So, it does not look like the one in the ad. However, when I plugged it into my computer and/or PogoPlug Pro 02, it gets detected as the Asix AX88772 USB 2.0 Ethernet adapter with a weird SerialNumber 001A1E and MAC address of 00:00:00:00:0f:07. According to the Anatomy of a cheap USB to Ethernet adapter, it is a rather clone USBNET adapter. However, when I tested on my AMD64 Phenom II X3 Linux desktop computer by downloading the linux-4.4.tar.xz source from ftp.kernel.org site, most of the time it showed the download speed was about 10.8 MBps. OTOH, when I tested the same thing on my PogoPlug Pro 02, the download throughput was about 3 MBps. I checked the CPU usage on my PogoPlug Pro 02 while the download was in progress and did not see any spike is CPU usage. I don't know why there is a huge discrepancy in download throughput. I did this test more than 10x on each device. Regardless, this is much better than the cheap one (based on a Davicom DM96xx based USB 10/100 ethernet chipset) I have which could only attain an average download throughput of 512 KBps.
I hope this will open up your eyes on many different cheap/inexpensive USBNet dongles out there. If I were you, I would certainly get the one using an Asix AX88772 chipset.
I hope this will open up your eyes on many different cheap/inexpensive USBNet dongles out there. If I were you, I would certainly get the one using an Asix AX88772 chipset.
[1390551.423831] asix 1-2:1.0: eth3: unregister 'asix' usb-0000:00:12.2-2, ASIX AX88772 USB 2.0 Ethernet [1390557.404040] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 83 using ehci_hcd [1390557.549191] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0b95, idProduct=772b [1390557.549197] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [1390557.549201] usb 1-2: Product: AX88772B [1390557.549204] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: ASIX Elec. Corp. [1390557.549206] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 001A1E [1390558.347581] asix 1-2:1.0: eth1: register 'asix' at usb-0000:00:12.2-2, ASIX AX88772 USB 2.0 Ethernet, 00:00:00:00:0f:07 [1390558.480552] udevd[10164]: renamed network interface eth1 to eth3 [1390558.497536] asix 1-2:1.0: eth3: link down [1390558.499550] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth3: link is not ready [1390560.109308] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth3: link becomes ready [1390560.111837] asix 1-2:1.0: eth3: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0xCDE1