Recommended NIC PCIe Cards

[Teamnoodle]

Can someone recommend a good NIC Card for my setup? My onboard Ethernet isn't compatable and I tried loading up the drivers in the shell command but i got a read only issue with my CF Card.....

So I'm looking for a decent Card to fit into my system.
I tried looking for the compatability list but can't seem to get it...
I live in the UK so any vendor links would be helpful
Any advice would be appreciated..

Nick

 

[Milhouse]

Hard to go wrong with any drop-in Intel NIC, particularly the "CT" desktop cards (GigE) as they are well supported by FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

They're also reasonably priced, about £25, which is a good price for peace of mind and trouble free networking. Example vendor link: dabs.com.

 

[leeleatherwood]

HP NC380T. Support Jumbo Frames, its completely hardware based and can be found on ebay for like $25. I am able to use 99.65% of my gigabit link transferring files over my network with these adapters.

Works flawlessly in FreeNAS, better than my Intel Pro 1000MT.

 

[Teamnoodle]

Thanks for the recommendations, but I managed to get it working. I managed to fix it by changing the OS Media from a Compact flash card to a USB stick, it booted up first time with an IP address, so very happy to be playing around with it tonight, rather than have to wait for a NIC.
However, I'm getting speeds of a max 3mps from my mac to the NAS. Do you think a NIC is gonna be much better? Is it worth it? I want to get the best performance I can out of my machine so £25 won't be an issue, but not if I'm gonna get the same performance.

 

[leeleatherwood]

Thanks for the recommendations, but I managed to get it working. I managed to fix it by changing the OS Media from a Compact flash card to a USB stick, it booted up first time with an IP address, so very happy to be playing around with it tonight, rather than have to wait for a NIC.
However, I'm getting speeds of a max 3mps from my mac to the NAS. Do you think a NIC is gonna be much better? Is it worth it? I want to get the best performance I can out of my machine so £25 won't be an issue, but not if I'm gonna get the same performance.

You should be getting more than 3MB/sec even on 100BaseT.

Its possible your SATA ports and your onboard ethernet both use the Southbridge (essentially using the PCI bus) and thus when using both at the same time is causing a bottleneck, this has happened to me on a test setup.

On the otherhand, most modern motherboard have the onboard SATA ports running through a PCIe bus.

Then again, it could be a completely different issue. Since you haven't posted hardware specs I cant really help you troubleshoot anymore.

 

[Teamnoodle]

Ok, I'm currently trying to transfer 294gb of media over from an Mybookworld Network drive to my FreeNAS. I am currently getting 2.75mps running on my LAN. It's going to take 1 day and 9 hours according to my Office computer.

My Spec :

Biostar H61 MLC Mobo (onboard graphics and sound and a REALTEK LAN)
Intel G530 Celeron
2GB 1333mhz ram (Just waiting for more ram to be delivered tomorrow to make it 4gb)
Western Digital 2TB SATA 6Gbps Power Saving Internal Hard Drives running ZFS RAIDz
USB Stick for Freenas software. I tried using a CF card before but it didn't create an IP address for me, not sure why because I would like to use the card in future rather than my 16gb USB stick.

I just tried to log into my server from my mac and it isn't responding but the office PC is still copying files over, could that be why? I was able to log in and check things last night whilst copying files.......

 

[survive]

Hi Teamnoodle,

A couple of thoughts...

First, I wouldn't stress to much till you have the rest of your memory installed. 2GB is really pushing it with on-board video & ZFS.

One thing I would check is that you are allocating the smallest amount of RAM you can to the video in the BIOS. You don't need to give it any more than the minimum as the console display requires very little RAM.

Once you have the RAM you should see much better performance. Despite my huge personal bias against all things Realtek, I can't really advise you to get another NIC yet. If you decide to do so you can find Broadcom 1x cards on ebay all day long for about $15.00 US, if you want new you can't go wrong with an Intel "CT" 1x card for about $30.00 US but at that point you are spending about half what the board cost just to pick up the slack!

leeleatherwood: That's a hell of a NIC...I see them for $37.00. I'll have to keep them in mind!

-Will

 

[iorifly]

Rl8139d,

Also does not support my network cards and this onbord: RL8139D, can not solve so buying another?

 

[leeleatherwood]

leeleatherwood: That's a hell of a NIC...I see them for $37.00. I'll have to keep them in mind!

-Will

I had store credit with an Ebay store and just grabbed 2 of them for LACP, i got them for like $20 each. They are working great so far in both FreeNAS and Windows 7.