~$300 retail card

 

I'm, erm, frugal, so I set out for a quad NIC which was Intel only.  After doing a great deal of reading, I concluded that the I350-T4 really was the "only" choice to fit my needs.  A genuine server grade NIC card with four gigabit copper ports, on ESXi's list of compatible products and can be pass-through'ed by individual ports (keep one, two, or three as virtual NIC's if you want).  I know there are a few that are VM'ing unraid as well as, say, pfSense.  You may be in the market for one of these.

 

I offered $140 and it was accepted.  Maybe it was just a good day for me, or for the seller, so whether or not such an offer (or lower) would be accepted, I cannot say of course.  $179.99 (the buy it now price) isn't really bad though, but, again, I wanted it a little cheaper if I could.

 

Just a heads up for a seller that did right by me and received a good pull with all ports working wonderfully (benchmarked all four under various settings, with and without Direct Path I/O).

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/380952837015

There is a Chinese brand with the same chipset that sells on ebay for about $100 for a 4 port card.  I have a 2 port and 4 port version and they work well.  I'm not sure how well they work in unRAID.

how would one of these differ from say an Intel Pro 1000 like this for example

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/39Y6138-IBM-INTEL-PRO-1000-PT-QUAD-PORT-PCIe-GIGABIT-ETHERNET-NIC-SERVER-ADAPTER-/131233334080?pt=US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item1e8e1dc340

The T4 is much newer.  The flip side of course is that you need to make sure the card will be supported for your OS (generally speaking - not actually specific to unRAID here).

 

As a user of PT cards, I learned the hard way there is a caveat with them - there is a model number that had forward compatibility problems with PCIe 2.0 and a later model that fixed that.  So if you're buying used you need to check on that: Intel notice.

 

thanks for the info