Who makes the best 10gb NIC that connects to the m.2 slot instead of a normal pcie expansion slot?
My system has one PCIe 3.0 x4 m.2 slot.
My system has one PCIe 3.0 x4 m.2 slot.
10gb M.2 NIC
- Thread starter macrules34
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Just in case space matters AND 5Gb will do, I've personally used this one in a mATX Supermicro running TrueNAS.
Apparently they have a 10Gb m.2 option as well.
Apparently they have a 10Gb m.2 option as well.
So what I was planning was to have a 10 node ProxMox cluster with VMs and Containers and also have some nodes have external storage (SAS). I would be using the 10gb interfaces for VM & Container transfer between nodes, also for the storage (ceph) traffic.
Those 2 cards offer a 10GbE connection but they do it in different ways.
The Odroid one has the 10G chip on the M.2 card, close to the PCIe socket and then a cable to the RJ45 socket that gets mounted on the back of your machine and has to route 10Gbps over the cable they supply. The chip it uses is made by Realtek - which some might see as a disadvantage - but uses 3-4W power.
The Ebay one routes the entire PCIe x4 socket available on the M.2 socket to a separate daughter card containing the 10G chip and has to route the entire PCIe x4 32Gbps lanes over the cable they use. The chip is made by Intel and is quite old and uses ~10W. It uses an SFP+ socket not an RJ45.
The Odroid one has the 10G chip on the M.2 card, close to the PCIe socket and then a cable to the RJ45 socket that gets mounted on the back of your machine and has to route 10Gbps over the cable they supply. The chip it uses is made by Realtek - which some might see as a disadvantage - but uses 3-4W power.
The Ebay one routes the entire PCIe x4 socket available on the M.2 socket to a separate daughter card containing the 10G chip and has to route the entire PCIe x4 32Gbps lanes over the cable they use. The chip is made by Intel and is quite old and uses ~10W. It uses an SFP+ socket not an RJ45.
Both chipsets are supported by the linux kernel. Never having used proxmox I cannot tell you if the modules needed to support them are present or not. The Intel card is so old that it's very likely supported, the Realtek is newer but also a lot cheaper and modern and is supported by the r8169 driver.
I'll also add that Odroid may be an unfamiliar name but they've been around for quite a long time. I have an Odroid HC1 octocore arm box that's been running 24x7x365 since 2017 being one half of my DNS/DHCP etc infra. They make interesting things though this is the first time I've been aware of them branching out to network adapters.