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?
not the cheapest, but I’ve been using this qnap dual 2.5g card for my PFSense box (just an old optiplex 7050) and its been rock solid https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0923FL2K3/