PCI Network Card

[pjadias]

Goodnight community, do not know if someone has already put the question here, but here goes.

Recently installed FreeNAS on a machine to be our internal database server, I installed 3 discs.

1 - 250GB IDE
2 - 360Gb SATA
3 - 1TB SATA

I have a problem my motherboard only has network connectivity 10/100 and wanted to put a PCI card with Gigabit, tested an Asus NX1101 and I could not.

Anyone know if FreeNAS and not compatible, or if there is a card that works in these conditions?

 

[survive]

Hi pjadias,

Intel is almost always a safe choice when it comes to NICs. Something like this should work just fine:

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/adapters/pro1000gt/pro1000gt-overview.htm

If PCI-Express is an option I would suggest you get an Intel 1000CT card over the 1000GT.

-Will

 

[b1ghen]

I have an Intel PCI like the one linked above in one of my FreeNAS boxes, it works fine but since it's only PCI you won't get full gigabit speed, but you should easily get 500Mbit, so anyway a nice upgrade from 100Mbit.

PS. I don't know how I would create a redundant and yet efficient storage pool with the drives you have available though.

 

[Gnome]

I have an Intel PCI like the one linked above in one of my FreeNAS boxes, it works fine but since it's only PCI you won't get full gigabit speed, but you should easily get 500Mbit, so anyway a nice upgrade from 100Mbit.

Not entirely true, conventional PCI has at least 133 MB/s of raw bandwidth with some of the faster versions supporting up to 533 MB/s.

I have a Intel Pro/1000GT adapter in my previous build (FreeNAS 7), it could do about 80MB/s on Gigabit LAN and that was with 2GB of RAM with a RAID-Z with of 6x2GB Seagate Barracuda 5400RPM Green. Doubt it would have been faster even if I had a better card since the performance isn't significantly better on a new build I made the other day using the same kind of setup with an intergrated Intel NIC.

 

[b1ghen]

Not entirely true, conventional PCI has at least 133 MB/s of raw bandwidth with some of the faster versions supporting up to 533 MB/s.

I have a Intel Pro/1000GT adapter in my previous build (FreeNAS 7), it could do about 80MB/s on Gigabit LAN and that was with 2GB of RAM with a RAID-Z with of 6x2GB Seagate Barracuda 5400RPM Green. Doubt it would have been faster even if I had a better card since the performance isn't significantly better on a new build I made the other day using the same kind of setup with an intergrated Intel NIC.

Yes normal PCI is 32-bit and has a theoretical maximum of 133MB/s, everything connected on the PCI bus is sharing this bandwidth though. PCI-X which is 64-bit has higher bandwidth but is really only used in server motherboards. Sure there are other implementations of PCI (66Mhz and such but they are really uncommon).
Anyhow what I was saying that you will not see gigabit wirespeed out of a PCI NIC because of the limitations of the PCI bus, results may vary though.

 

[Gnome]

Brings me to a new question:

My new NAS has an integrated Intel 82579V Gigabit Ethernet Controller (uses the Intel Pro/1000 driver) which seems to have good speeds but it quickly drops off.Not sure if it is a driver problem, NIC problem or FreeNAS problem.

Anyone else have one of these and more importantly has it made a difference switching to an Intel Pro/1000 CT for example?

 

[lrusak]

this is the network card I use. I currently am only using one ethernet port until I get a switch that supports LACP. I am using it in a PCI slot and am getting read and write speeds of ~120MB/s so it's almost fully saturating my gigabit network.

Intel 8492MT Gbit Dual Port Server Network PCI Card NIC

 

[Gnome]

New motherboards (Sandy Bridge) don't even come with PCI slots any more. Couldn't get that one on account of running an Intel Sandy Bridge based motherboard.

And as stated, better to get PCI-express.

 

[lrusak]

New motherboards (Sandy Bridge) don't even come with PCI slots any more. Couldn't get that one on account of running an Intel Sandy Bridge based motherboard.

And as stated, better to get PCI-express.

I agree, it's just the one I bought was $20 so it was worth it to me. So getting a dual port pcie NIC is a bit more expensive :)

 

[Gnome]

Ok well I picked up a Intel Pro/1000 CT locally. Did a couple of tests.

It was nearly impossible to distinguish the Intel Pro/1000 CT and the on-board Intel 82579V Gigabit Ethernet Controller that is fitted to my low cost Intel DH67BL motherboard. Using dmesg I couldn't really notice any difference between the two, both used the Intel Pro/1000 driver, only the reported "PCI" slot differed in dmesg.

But the short and sweet of it was that the Intel 82579V on board controller had the same speeds (most were slightly better) than the Intel Pro/1000 CT.

When copying from the NAS to my OCZ Vertex 3 SSD I got 115MB/s from both controllers. Write speeds however were lower because I tested with a single drive (OLD WD 80GB SATA-1 drive) while I prepare hard-drives from my old NAS to be moved. Only got around 50MB/s write. They did however max out the write speed of the drive based on my own tests when copying to the drive (directly in Windows).

My point being, if it uses the Intel Pro/1000 driver then it is probably safe to use.

Btw. my test file in Windows was a 20GB random pattern file. The NAS has 16GB of RAM so it isn't really possible for it to have been cached in RAM.

 

[Trianian]

New motherboards (Sandy Bridge) don't even come with PCI slots any more. Couldn't get that one on account of running an Intel Sandy Bridge based motherboard.

And as stated, better to get PCI-express.

Actually, a number of Sandy Bridge motherboards do include PCI slots. Gigabyte still include them on some of their newest Z68 boards, though typically only in the more expensive models.

 

[Gnome]

Actually, a number of Sandy Bridge motherboards do include PCI slots. Gigabyte still include them on some of their newest Z68 boards, though typically only in the more expensive models.

Haha, yeah I noticed on mine when I opened it. I've sold quite a few that didn't have and for some reason got confused that mine didn't. Regardless I want to avoid PCI. If you buy anything PCI now it's probably going to be unusable in the next generation.