Hello
I've seen several threads on the options for 2.5 gigabit connectivity. It seems the Realtek 8125 might be better supported going forward, but my experience has been that I have not been overwhelmed by the quality of Realtek driver on FreeBSD, and there's been reliability problems.
Something that appears to now be available is the Mikrotik S+RJ10 v2 transceiver, which supports NBASE-T. A lot of previous transceivers claiming support reported 10G to the cage and hence ran into a lot of problems when the link speed disagrees with the reported speed. This transceiver is the first one I'm aware of other than AQS-107 that deals with this satisfactorily, and is quite a bit cheaper.
I've tested it on several switches and my TrueNAS host and it appears to provide 2+ gigs in both directions as expected. With other transceivers the throughput will often drop to <1 gigs due to overrunning the transceiver's buffer, and the rate limiting setups needed to deal with this are non-trivial.
A 10 gig NIC with a 2.5 gig transceiver is a roundabout way to get 2.5 support, but it may be the simplest way in some scenarios. Now that there's cheap unmanaged NBASE-T switches I believe this is quite well suited to a lot of small/home office setups, reusing old cable runs, etc. The main caveat is that I have not been able to force the link to 2.5G, so you may have a situation where the transceiver auto-negotiates to 10G over cabling that can't handle it reliably if you have one of these on either end.
Posting this mostly so people trying the same searches I was doing last year can find it.
I've seen several threads on the options for 2.5 gigabit connectivity. It seems the Realtek 8125 might be better supported going forward, but my experience has been that I have not been overwhelmed by the quality of Realtek driver on FreeBSD, and there's been reliability problems.
Something that appears to now be available is the Mikrotik S+RJ10 v2 transceiver, which supports NBASE-T. A lot of previous transceivers claiming support reported 10G to the cage and hence ran into a lot of problems when the link speed disagrees with the reported speed. This transceiver is the first one I'm aware of other than AQS-107 that deals with this satisfactorily, and is quite a bit cheaper.
I've tested it on several switches and my TrueNAS host and it appears to provide 2+ gigs in both directions as expected. With other transceivers the throughput will often drop to <1 gigs due to overrunning the transceiver's buffer, and the rate limiting setups needed to deal with this are non-trivial.
A 10 gig NIC with a 2.5 gig transceiver is a roundabout way to get 2.5 support, but it may be the simplest way in some scenarios. Now that there's cheap unmanaged NBASE-T switches I believe this is quite well suited to a lot of small/home office setups, reusing old cable runs, etc. The main caveat is that I have not been able to force the link to 2.5G, so you may have a situation where the transceiver auto-negotiates to 10G over cabling that can't handle it reliably if you have one of these on either end.
Posting this mostly so people trying the same searches I was doing last year can find it.