Intel NIC choice

Networking Networking Hardware
1

I'll keep this short and sweet,

 

I'm building a home server and needed a network card, I scoured kijiji, craigslist, all online retailers and finally found something on ebay, it's a brand new Intel i340-t2 server network card ( http://ark.intel.com...Adapter-I340-T2 ) for 65ish $. The issue is: there isn't anything online that explains or reviews this card, the only thing I've found is that it is made for IBM by intel.... I don't know what that means for me. Will it work with windows 7 pro/ultimate? are there drivers? etc. the only drivers i've found are for the i340-t4. Would they work? intel's site does not list it as a compatible device for that driver.

 

need your collective expertise

 

thanks

 

Edit: if all is well, do you think it's a good choice for the money? comes to around 80 with shipping.

2

From what I've read/heard, you're better off paying the extra $$$ and getting a legitimate Intel NIC, as opposed to something else, for it will save you hours of grief in the end.

3

I'll be completely honest with you. It doesn't matter what you get for home use. Pay a few extra bucks to get an Intel NIC if you really want to or if you need some special features (teaming, 802.1x, etc. ) but frankly, anything should do the job. I strongly recommend this one (cheap, Intel, lifetime warranty).

4

I'll be teaming them for increased bandwidth. I'll be using it as a backup pc to backup 3 laptops and 2 desktops and as a raid 5 server (hardware raid) for streaming music and movies so I was wanting to get as much bandwidth as i can get.

5

Oh right, my bad. Make sure your switch supports teaming as well, because not all of them do. It seems like the NIC you found is at a nice price point then. It most likely comes from IBM servers and you can find drivers here for windows server 2008. I couldn't find any other drivers anywhere though.

6

why do you want teaming anyways? It gives more problems than benefits and really 5 client backup is easily done with a gbit network card. You are better off with assigning good QoS rules than with a teamed line.

For instance if you stream 5 Blu-rays (not just encodes the actual Blu-ray itself) and 5 separate DTS-HDMA tracks at once you won't even be halfway of what a gbit line can handle. And I really doubt you will backup such a huge amount of data that you can't make the daily syncs running after each other with a 50 MB/s cap.

Besides the initial backup I doubt that you will dump a few hundred GB on the server daily that you would need a teamed line. The 50 MB/sec I mentioned above means you can sync 3 GB per minute or roughly 1,8 TB each hour. I don't know how insanely huge your home server is but I think you could fill that within a day and that's just using HALF of a gbit line.