# Recommendation for network card



## TaHu (Jan 14, 2013)

Greetings,

Can someone provide me a PCI network card 4 ports which is known to be reliable under FreeBSD 9.1 ?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,


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## wblock@ (Jan 14, 2013)

Intel is preferred.  But I have not used a four-port version; they are expensive.  Why four ports rather than one port and a switch?


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## phoenix (Jan 14, 2013)

PCI, PCI-X, or PCIe?

You won't find a PCI-based 4-port gigabit NIC.  There's not enough bandwidth in a single 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI slot (132 MBps or ~ 1 Gbps) to run more than a single gigabit NIC.

We used Intel 4-port PCI-X and PCIe NICs with FreeBSD and Linux with great success.

In the Linux boxes, they're combined via LACP to provide more than 1 Gbps of throughput for NFS and fail-over support (mainly to support 100+ diskless clients in each school).

In the FreeBSD boxes, they're used to provide separate DMZs and networks (router/firewalls).

They're fully supported by the em(4) and igb(4) drivers in FreeBSD.


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## throAU (Jan 15, 2013)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> Intel is preferred.  But I have not used a four-port version; they are expensive.  Why four ports rather than one port and a switch?



I'm guessing either a multi-legged firewall (e.g, Management, DMZ, Internet, Inside), Jail/VM host, network sniffer, or a storage server.


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## wblock@ (Jan 15, 2013)

The answer is probably related to not enough slots one way or another.  Otherwise, four individual cards or two two-port cards would be cheaper and more versatile.  Easier to label, too.


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