Cheap 10GbE cards

[joelmusicman]

Hello all,

I've been away for awhile, and my FreeNAS box has been powered off for awhile. Anyway, I'm thinking about getting a high speed pipe from my NAS to my main PC, and I noticed that there's some pretty cheap 10Gb cards out on Ebay now...

View: http://www.ebay.com/itm/671798-001-HP-MELLANOX-CONNECTX-2-PCIe-10GBe-ETHERNET-NIC-SERVER-ADAPTER-/131247460614?pt=US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item1e8ef55106


View: http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Emulex-Dual-Port-10GbE-PCIe-Fibre-HBA-49Y4202-Low-Profile-/121451346879?pt=US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item1c47107bbf


Does anyone have experience with these in a FreeNAS box? What kind of cable do they need?

 

[joelmusicman]

Wow, I have no idea what happened with the formatting...

 

[ljw1]

All of the 10Gb cards I have tried in FreeNas don't work. These are SFP+ cards which definitely don't work as I have some of them. I have given up on FreeNas for 10GBe and have moved on to other solutions. It may get better once they move to FreeBSD 10 but probably not as they have removed drivers from the kernel to support the 10GBe cards.

 

[c32767a]

10G is expensive. That's just a fact of life..
An additional challenge, the NIC chipsets are still evolving, so FreeBSD's use of an older BSD kernel is going to make it challenging to find support for newer (e.g. cheaper) NICs.

Having said that and feeling a case of Deja Vu, the Solarflare SFN5162 and other 5xxx generation 10G NICs work fine for us. Your mileage may vary. It's about $300 on Amazon.

 

[mattlach]

Usually Brocade 1020's are reasonable on eBay, and when used with a direct attach copper cable, you don't need to buy the expensive transducers. (though range with direct attach copper is very limited. 10m I think? Will ahve to revisit the spec.)

Now, if it works with FreeNAS I couldn't say, I haven't tried yet.

The Brocade 1020 is some sort of combined ethernet and HBA adapter for storage. It is listed as supported hardware in the BSD compatibility list, but only under storage controllers, not under ethernet.

I'm not sure if this means the ethernet portion doesn't work, or if it just means they didn't put the same device in two places in the list.

It would be nice to know if anyone has successfully used the Brocade 1020's as ethernet adapters under BSD/FreeNAS, as down the line when I need to break out my storage and ESXi boxes into separate machines, I am going to need 10gig...