I was having a debate with another UNRAID user about using the on-board NIC for connecting your UNRAID server, I think the modern on-board NICs came a long way to be as good or might be even better than old expensive muli-NIC cards.

SFP+ is still super rare onboard, so pcie it is - and even onboard 10Gbe is rare and pricier (comparing same board, one with onboard 10Gb, one without) than pcie. I do also use onboard on my backup server, but for WoL.

I have a Mobo with  a 10G and a 2,5G Nic (both Twisted Pair).

I do not use any of them, instead I have put a 2 port SFP+ card in the slot an go with fiber instead.

CAT cables at high speeds are risky, so I better play it safe.

And yeah, there are very few (and usually very dumb) Mobos with SFP+ or QSFP cages out there in the wild. Dunno why.

I once had a 4 NIC intel card & played around with LAGG & load balancing, then downgraded to dual NIC intel, then a single onboard and been that ways since, I don't have the extreme need for speed or data transfer for a simple NAS and a homelab.

Edited October 6, 20241 yr by PSYCHOPATHiO

I used my onboard 10G x2. The only time I've chosen not to use onboard is when there was a driver issue in one of the unRAID v6.xx updates. Then I switched to a 10G PCIe card.