Volans VL-HJ45
A handy adapter that proves Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 are a match made in heaven.
The reliability of wired networking will always have it’s advantages over Wi-Fi, but ultraportable laptops these days often just don’t have the real estate for a dedicated Ethernet port. As such, investing in an adapter can be a worthwhile decision.
It’s not difficult to see how an Ethernet adapter with three USB 3.0 ports is a handy tool, but we were surprised at just how accessible and convenient the VL-HJ45 made charging USB devices, performing file transfers and connecting to the internet. The body of the adapter hosts three USB 3.0 ports on the top side, so it’s easy to insert and remove USB drives or peripherals and the Ethernet port sits nicely at the far end of the adapter, so the networking cable sits flat on the table. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a trade-off in USB transfer speed in our tests when compared to having them directly plugged into our MacBook: external flash drives performed 6% and 44% slower on sequential read and write tests, respectively, and the write speeds of smaller files showed similar shortfalls.
When it comes to networking throughput speeds, though, there’s little compromise, with the Ethernet port pushing an average of 448Mbps up and 533Mbps down across a local network using the TamoSoft Throughput test. That’s about the same as we see in native Ethernet adapters and five times the fastest NBN internet speeds. In other words, it has more than enough grunt to handle anything except maybe a seriously souped-up local server... and even then, this one’s still plenty fast.