TP-LINK TG-3468: A $12 Linux PCI-E Gigabit Network Adapter

[pdffs]

Intel or bust, seriously.

[zeroepoch]

Intel or bust, seriously.

I agree.

[Ericg]

I agree.

Unfortunately Amazon doesnt seem to have many (ex: they have 1) Intel based PCI-E wireless cards. Many mini-PCIE cards, for laptops and such, but nothing desktop size. So, for now, its TP-Link and Atheros chipsets for me

[Brane215]

I am kind of a noob when it comes to networking stuff, but I want to know something.

In what ways can such a fast port could be used for things other than connecting to the Internet. I mean, is there any use on the normal home PC.

I am sorry if it sounds stupid, but I really want to know.

It might be. Pretty soon you might discover that it would be really nice to have one box as a say fileserver and/or firewall and/or http proxy or email server or asterisk swithcpoint for home VoIP, and/or WiFi acess point and/or whatever else ( video surveillance etc etc).

And you might decide to use some old box or even new AM1 based Athlons for this ( low power, really cheap),

Also, you might want some redundancy. Your hard disk might fail at any time. But if you have several of them in RAID-1 or RAID-5 or even RAID-6, one or couple might fail and your data will still be fine.

And since you might want to access those from sevral locations within premisses and since hard disks dislike turn-on and off cycles, having them on such server might be logical choice.

With such setup you might use your local hard disk just to boot the machine or not even that ( it can be booted through network from server or from USB key or mix of both).

In such situations it's not insignificant how your local LAN performs. If you have decent Ethernet cards, you might feel just as if you had been working from your disk directly.

You can also have more than one NIC on the server for local traffic so that macdhines in separate branches do not choke each other's available bandwidth etc.

If you need more than 100MB/s each way, you can also "team-up" two or more cards in a setup, similar to RAID-0/1 etc with disks. That one I haven't tried myself, though.

[mha42]

http://www.dx.com/p/winyao-wy574t-intel-wg82574l-chipset-pci-e-x1-server-gigabit-network-card-adapter-green-280966

Intel OEM at $20.99 incl S&H.

[ultimA]

Actually, this post from Michael only supports my very favorable experiences with TP-LINK. They are frowned upon by many just because they are Chinese and cheap, but I find again and again that they really work well: fast, reliably, and feature-rich. No matter if it was a USB WiFi card, a WiFi/ADSL-router, a switch or network card, they worked for me much better than other brands I have tried, and have lots of features without the usual hickups like freezes, over-heating, spurious restarts, and unstable connections. So I like TP-LINK because "cheap" here means not cheap quality-wise, but cheap for your pocket. For home-use, I definetely recommend their products.

[GreatEmerald]

Yeap, I have a TP-Link PCIe wireless card (Atheros chip). It works without any problems whatsoever (I use that box as a wireless access point).

[GraysonPeddie]

Have anyone seen the speed tests for Intel versus Realtek NIC? The speeds are very much the same -- just a little speed difference.

I had to do some research and vote with my money. I like to have a dual network interface card: one for HDHomeRun and one for home networking.

• Rosewill RNG-407-Dual PCI-Express Gigabit NIC
• Intel EXPI9402PTBLK Two Gigabit Copper Server Connections Gigabit NIC

"Copper server connection..." Unless an Intel NIC is a lot faster compared to a Rosewill with a Realtek chipset, I could save more than a hundred dollars with the Rosewill dual NIC.

[Brane215]

Have anyone seen the speed tests for Intel versus Realtek NIC? The speeds are very much the same -- just a little speed difference.

I had to do some research and vote with my money. I like to have a dual network interface card: one for HDHomeRun and one for home networking.

Ferrari is no faster than a pedestrian if its tank is empty and you have to push it down the road.

[Brane215]

Have anyone seen the speed tests for Intel versus Realtek NIC? The speeds are very much the same -- just a little speed difference.

"Copper server connection..." Unless an Intel NIC is a lot faster compared to a Rosewill with a Realtek chipset, I could save more than a hundred dollars with the Rosewill dual NIC.

BTW, I have just redone the test by dding 2.5GiB iso image from the nfs4 share on the box 5m from me in similar manney as within the tests you have linked.

2.5GiB worth of data came through the cable in 22,89s with average tr4ansver speed of 110MiB/s.