I dont know if it has always been this way or as I have jyst upgraded case and OS that I am just noticing, but I have a tenuos connection from pc to bridge. I have a 10/100/1000 bridge as are all the nic connections supposedly. The other pc I have on this bridge connects at 1GB /s straigt away - while the nic in the unraid unit takes forever to connect  - and will do so either at 100 mb/s or at 10 mb/s -

I have tried changing the port it is connecting to - I have changed the cable as well - from std patch cable with seems to do best - up to cat 5, 5e and 6 - which will only connect at 10 mb/s if at all. 

 

My thought is that there are some bad connections at the motherboard nic so I may need to replace it . I have a biostar ta760g m2+  board with a 1x pci-e and 2 pci slots free -  am I losing much by getting a pci based card? as I would like to add in another sata controller to the pci-e slot .

 

any advice gratefully accepted - thanks

syslog-2014-03-19.txt

...for a single GBit NIC, a PCI card will be OK.

Try and get an Intel based chipset, like: http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/adapters/pro1000gt/pro1000gt-overview.htm

thanks

You can also just ebay something like this:

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1000-XT-Server-Adapter-PCI-X-Gigabit-Network-NIC-Card-A51580-015-/190987176497?pt=US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item2c77b90a31

 

Its pci-x, but it fits in a PCI slot. Just make sure you  have space for the rest of the card to hang off the back. (like thats not where your sata ports are, or something else).

 

Here is more info on using a PCI-X card in a regular pci slot (this guy actually is putting in a dual port GB card):

 

http://thehomeserverblog.com/esxi/intel-pro1000-dual-gigabit-nic-pci-x-card-in-pci-slot/

 

I just did this to replace my realtec card, doesn't seem any faster, but the copy speeds do seem more consistent (they don't jump all around like they used to).

 

unfortunately that is exactly where my sata ports are, thanks for the info though