Gigabit NIC recommendation

[electron]

I need to purchase a PCI gigabit NIC for my SageTV server (older machine), and was wondering if you guys had any recommendations. My gigabit network is configured for jumbo frames (9K), but since it's an older machine, I don't want to invest a lot of money into it. Any suggestions?

 

[drozwood90]

Are you looking for cheap, middle of the road, or the ultimate "server" level card?

I've got a few cheapies (I think $15 each) that I use...work as good as the middle of the road ones I have...but nothing beats the "Server" NIC that's in my server. Nice Intel that does ALL the work / processing / etc. on the card itself. Frees up the Processor to do other stuff...but for my desktops, the cheapies are doing fine...

I'll be testing it out with Windows 7 pretty soon.

--Dan

 

[electron]

My SageTV box is kind of slow, so a server NIC is probably preferred. However, I don't want to spend much money on it, since I am not sure how long I will keep this box around.

That said, I couldn't even a find a card <$40 which supports 9000 bytes jumbo frames. Maybe I should just give up on the jumbo frames requirement for now. What is the make/model of your card?

 

[drozwood90]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...;Tpk=33-180-026

Link

$8

I paid $7.49. I can get 60+meg per second using FTP over this (PCI limitation on the desktop) to my Server...which is why I'm switching to Win2k8 server...which has SMB2.0 (So I can get these same speeds using Windoze file sharing).

Also, without using their driver, the realTek generic driver will work (as it's a realtek / realtech chipset ).

--Dan

 

[drozwood90]

I'm not too sure about the Jumbo frames...as I don't use them. I remember seeing it, but never pursued it.

What's the advantage? It seemed like something that was terribly hard to setup...and since Gigabit was so fast anyhow, I didn't care to get more speed out of it (as I'm starting to encroach on the PCI bus speed limitation as it is).

 

[pete_c]

A bit off the topic and not related to "jumbo gig frames" but....believe that mostly all NIC gig cards do support jumbo frames though...layer 2 internally

Slowing just getting into the Gb world. Basically looking for small footprint / large capacity gig switch. Today in my media panel have a 24 port box which has served me well in the last few years.

Specifically my 24 port 10/100 switch is: 2" high X 10" wide X 5.75" deep. All of the NIC ports/power is on one side and the box fits perfectly in my media panel with a W2C device on top of it still letting me put the cover on the media panel. It is currently utilizing all 24 ports and connected to 18 ports internally to a patch panel and 6 ports externally to another two small footprint switch (another 24 port (for servers) and 16 port switch)

Anyone see any 24 port gig switches this small yet. The Dell 2508 that I purchased is: 1.75" high X 13" wide X 9" deep. Still too big and not enough ports.

Found this one but it still too big...

Trendnet

As a test looking initially to put all of the servers on one gig switch. 2-3 of the servers already have gig NICs but the rest don't at this time so first piece to to get these over to Gig. First gb switch is a Dell 8 port gig switch.

 

[pete_c]

I take the sentence back about most gig cards doing jumbo frames. They may have at one time. They may be capable but not really evident so much anymore. With the BSD FreeNas box I noticed that I can adjust the MTU for jumbo frames. With the "old" USR 8700 NAS it has a drop down box for configuration of Jumbo frames.

So I decided to get a "few" of the cheapies ($8 gig NICs) to see how they work. First one installed and found right away was in the BSD FreeNAS box. Before connecting anything to the Dell gig switch was to see how they behave. Next one is going into a Wintel 2003 box.

 

[electron]

I ended up buying a cheap $7 DLink model from eBay (had some eBay bucks waiting to be spent), and supports Jumbo frames up to 9k, so it will do.