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?
I might be the oddity, but I have used i225 and i226 cards with NO trouble. Even Sabrent USB to 2.5gbe have worked great for me.
I will say though, I wish I would have skipped the 2.5gbe and went straight to fiber.
I am now in the process of migrating to all 10g fiber. It runs cooler, switches and NICs are abundant and cheap and it just works. And if I would have skipped the 2.5gbe entirely, It would have been similar in price. If not cheaper…
-Jay