Do you have a windows 10 box there? Could you try the Chelsio S310E-CR NIC in that box? I would love to know if its possible to get it up and running in W10.
I'll contribute to this :)
I took Pherans 10Gb experiment here and did it for myself. I did this config for both Win7 and Win10. Check it:
Windows 7
I put the Chelsio S310E card and put it in my Win7 machine. Sure enough, I had that weird sleep issue as well. Not as big of a deal for me, I need to keep my computer NOT sleeping all the time :)
Also, FWIW, I took two FTLX8511D3 transceivers and connect fiber between my FreeNAS box and Win7 machine. ONE NOTE: I had to manually/physically crossover the fiber cable to make it work. Maybe that Chelsio card is too old to do it automatically?
And regarding Pheran's speed issue. I saw something similar. The transfer started off at about 500MB/sec, then quick dove down to about 200-220 MB/sec - sustained...
... But, it seems this may be attributed to SMB2... Read on.
Windows 10
I decided to give Windows 10 a try with the same setup. In addition to the Chelsio card, I have some more older hardware. So I created a dual boot just in case.
The Chelsio drivers installed without issue! I was able to connect to my FreeNAS box using the same fiber setup. After changing the max connection type in FreeNAS, I used the Get-SmbConnection
command in powershell to see how Windows was connecting to FreeNAS. It automatically switched to SMB3! Sweet!
I tried some transfers, and I was getting SUSTAINED 500 MB/sec! Awesome!
I tried to sleep and the computer... Unfortunately, I got a BSOD with the error being DPC_Watchdog_Violation
After reading a bunch, it sounds like this error can come from a slew of things. I'm going to do a bit more testing, but I think we might be SOL with this sleeping bug. But whatever, it's super super old hardware.
As always, user beware. I know Cyberjock has mentioned there are some problems with SMB3. So only further testing will prove if I can move to Windows 10 permanently with this setup.
UPDATE:
I've got some other strange BSOD errors from time to time. I don't yet know if this is related to the card or not. One interesting one is as follows - when I have the computer off for an extended period of time, and turn it back on, I'll get a DRIVER_POWER_FAILURE_STATE error. It will automatically restart, and it boots up just fine.
Next UPDATE:
I've changed my Win10 10Gb cards to a Mellanox ConnectX-2 card. I can connect to my FreeNAS Chelsio card perfectly. The sustained transfer speeds seem to be a bit slower though. Now, I am getting a different error upon sleep, but it actually might be my raid card... Not the Connectx-2. Does anyone have any experience with ConnectX-2 cards in Windows 10?