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cheap 2.5G NIC for home server (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by rudeer_poke@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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Thinking about adding a 2,5 Gig (dual) NIC to my fileserver. Unfortunately I have only Cat5E cables in my house, so would not utilize 10Gig outside of my rack.

On ebay and alexpress i can see Intel I225 or 226 based cards for reasonable prices, but from brands like "Derapid", "Fenvi" or just simply no name. I know these chips are quite troublesome and had multiple revisions. None of the products I found make any mention of the revision number, what makes me assume they are not the 'fixed' ones. On the other hand I recall that these cards had problems only on windows, linux and freebsd was ok - not sure how much of that is true.

Some of them have funny specs like this, listing 3 different transfer rates.

Does anyone have experience with those cards?

https://preview.redd.it/vsrkvcojisxb1.png?width=1058&format=png&auto=webp&s=058ca7995d7ee9050788097ababb1dd8b28290af

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[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I would strongly recommend going with used 10Gig NIC’s from a good brand over those 2.5G ones. If that’s too much cost I’d suggest a dual or quad 1Gig card.

2.5 is still rather an odd duck. It’s not adopted much in the server and commercial space because companies go from 1G straight to 10 (with others going from 10 to fiber). It’s mainly settled into being a stopgap for ISP’s selling 1.2Gig and over service to home customers.

Anyways those different brands all likely come from the same Chinese factory. The real issue is the chipset just isn’t the greatest.

Personally I went with i350 1G stuff because it has support for things like SRV-IO and is more usable for virtualization.

Anyways contact the sellers if you need a specific revision and ask them what revision they currently ship and stock and confirm they’ll ship you that one if it is recent enough to meet your needs.

[–] zhiryst@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

not the cheapest, but I've been using this qnap dual 2.5g card for my PFSense box (just an old optiplex 7050) and its been rock solid https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0923FL2K3/