Price on 10G Nic

[Nelson]

Saw this posting on amazon,

 

MNPA19-XTR-Mellanox Connect x-2

 

Price is about 60-70.

 

Is this too good to be true?

 

Would be looking to get 2 of them

[1812]

shop eBay, they are half or less and many include cables

[Nelson]

 

1 hour ago, 1812 said:

shop eBay, they are half or less and many include cables

ok, thanks

[opentoe]

What are people using 10Gb NICs for? If you have an Unraid server with mechanical drives would a 10Gb card even help?

 

[1812]

10 minutes ago, opentoe said:

What are people using 10Gb NICs for? If you have an Unraid server with mechanical drives would a 10Gb card even help?

 

Transfers from a work station to ssd cache, bigger pipe out of the server to serve data to multiple clients from a single simpler connection, reads from the array that would normally saturate gigabit lan.... to name a few reasons why I have it. There are probably more.

[Zonediver]

4 hours ago, Nelson said:

Saw this posting on amazon,

 

MNPA19-XTR-Mellanox Connect x-2

 

Price is about 60-70.

 

Is this too good to be true?

 

Would be looking to get 2 of them

Be carefull with this cards - they are all used. I ordered two of them and one was broken. So i ordered two new Asus XG-C100C and all is working fine, but more expensive.

[Zonediver]

1 hour ago, opentoe said:

What are people using 10Gb NICs for? If you have an Unraid server with mechanical drives would a 10Gb card even help?

 

Have you ever tried to move more then 400GB over a 1GB-LAN to your server? Good luck and take 10-20 coffee's 😉

And yes, all is going to the Cache-SSD and not directly to the HDDs.

Edited November 3, 2019 by Zonediver

[opentoe]

Ok, so it really only benefits users with SSD drives. Ok.

 

[Vr2Io]

11 minutes ago, opentoe said:

Ok, so it really only benefits users with SSD drives. Ok.

 

Not all true, even transfer to a single mechanical drives array disk still have benefit.

 

[bonienl]

1 hour ago, Benson said:

Not all true, even transfer to a single mechanical drives array disk still have benefit.

 

Indeed, my HDDs in the array can reach 250 MBps (2 Gbps) and do benefit from the 10G connection.

Another use case is concurrency when multiple clients do read access to different disks on the array.

 

[Nelson]

23 hours ago, Zonediver said:

Be carefull with this cards - they are all used. I ordered two of them and one was broken. So i ordered two new Asus XG-C100C and all is working fine, but more expensive.

Im fine with used, Im just trying to save costs at every turn right now, just to get it running at max speed. Ill get a nicer nic later on if i need to.

[Carlos Talbot]

29 minutes ago, Nelson said:

Im fine with used, Im just trying to save costs at every turn right now, just to get it running at max speed. Ill get a nicer nic later on if i need to.

I bought a pair of ConnectX 2 cards with a 3m DAC cable on ebay from this seller: https://www.ebay.com/itm/273916866741 His price though has gone up since I purchased it earlier this year. I paid about 57 bucks.

 

I'm using the two cards between my Unraid server (Supermicro X9SCL) and an HP DL380 G7 that's running ESXi. Unraid is hosting the VMs via NFS datastores. I've attached a screenshot of a storage vMotion session. Note, I've not been able to go over 7Gb/sec, possibly because of my PCIe slots and the limited lanes. For 10Gb cards you need to make sure your servers can address the bandwidth. lspci will help with this: https://community.mellanox.com/s/article/understanding-pcie-configuration-for-maximum-performance

 

 

Edited November 4, 2019 by Carlos Talbot

[opentoe]

This sounds pretty nice and good information. I have an Unraid server and a few network clients connected through a 1Gb switch. For me to benefit the most with this would I need to switch all my workstations and switch and Unraid box to 10G? 

 

Nice looking plugin. What's that one called?