cyberboblouth Posted October 5 Share Posted October 5 So I picked up a cheap N40L for spares in case my N36L develops a fault - currently working on issues with friends unit and felt it wise to get one. Also got him one. Cheap it sort of was, it did however come with a super small add-on 1GB NIC. After some testing (with this extra card removed), there is neither a PXE boot prompt nor do I see a NIC in W10 - even after checking it is enabled in BIOS. The green light of the NIC at the rear and that of the LED on front top are static green - no orange flashing light when plugging in a LAN cable. When I add a dual GB card I do get the PXE boot and a card in W10 which then works (stating it's dual port). This unit does have the BIOS with extra features enabled, so my thoughts are - 1) Has the onboard NIC died OR 2) A bad BIOS flash by previous owner has upset the NIC? Thoughts or previous experience please. With the dual Gigabit card installed and a single LAN plugged in I got full gigabit speed and everything else works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrf Posted October 6 Share Posted October 6 (edited) the existence of the add-on NIC is a good clue that the mobo NIC is probably bad but hard to be sure. you could try linux on a USB stick and see if it can work with the onboard NIC if it matters. brings back memories. dealing with those two pcie slots was always a challenge during reassembly. Edited October 6 by nrf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberboblouth Posted October 6 Author Share Posted October 6 Cheers, the NIC also failed to show up in Windows Server 2012 and I will try a Linux boot when home. I should have also asked - has anyone had experience using a dual gigabit NIC? I guess more importantly will I get an increase in data output from the unit? At Gigabit speed i typically get 110 MBytes/sec transfer rate on large files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrf Posted October 6 Share Posted October 6 the thing about dual NIC is that a given connection will only use one of them unless you do something pretty extreme with your setup. depending on your application they may have other benefits. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberboblouth Posted October 14 Author Share Posted October 14 Ah OK, anyone tried a 2.5GBe NIC? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schoondoggy Posted October 15 Share Posted October 15 On 10/14/2021 at 7:51 AM, cyberboblouth said: Ah OK, anyone tried a 2.5GBe NIC? I am running one in a MicroServer Gen10. Have not tried it in the N40l. The slot in a N40l is a x1 PCIe 2.0, most 2.5GbE NIC are x1 PCIe 2.0. Bus wise it should be fine. Realtek and Intel chips are available. Should work, but like everything else you will need to try it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberboblouth Posted Tuesday at 01:31 PM Author Share Posted Tuesday at 01:31 PM So before spending $80 AUD for a USB 2.5GBe and $65 AUD for a PCI-E one, I ran CrystalDisk - W10, x1 250GB 7200 RPM in Bay 1. It doesn't look like I would see a great performance increase, unless I am missing something Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schoondoggy Posted Tuesday at 04:55 PM Share Posted Tuesday at 04:55 PM It is always a question of where the bottleneck is? On average a 1GbE port supports 125MB/s throughput. Most new hard drives have sustained throughput around 200MB/s. Four of these in a RAID10 would be around 400MB/s, RAID5 around 600MB/s. SATA SSD's are over 500MB/s but you would need to upgrade the SATA controller to SATA III. NVMe drives are even faster. I would keep the x1 PCIe slot available incase you want to upgrade the NIC later. If you want to go with a 2.5GbE USB NIC you will need to use the x1 PCIe slot to add a USB 3.0 card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberboblouth Posted Wednesday at 01:04 AM Author Share Posted Wednesday at 01:04 AM My gut feeling is the N40L is at its limit, I have x6 HDD inside and get full Gigabit speed in RAID5 - avg 112 MB/s. I have a Gen8 (Xeon, etc) so I reckon at some point when I move to 8TB+ HDD (as it's 4 HDD vs 6) I will revisit he 2.5GBe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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