Onboard NIC - What interface?

[mgbolts]

I am a photographer with many many thousands of photos. Given the performance requirements, I have been disappointed with NAS performance to date. Congratulations on a great site, so much so, I have decided to give NAS another go, this time the DIY approach.

I currently have P5N32-E SLI MoBo that I can use. It has a two gigabit lan ports but I cant work out what the interface is ie. is it PCI, PCIe etc.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

 

[thiggins]

Easiest thing is to look at the driver properties. Sometimes it names the chipset. Then you can Google for info on it.
If the info isn't in the driver, then look in the mobo manual for the block diagram or on the board itself for the Ethernet chip(s). They are often near the Ethernet connector.

 

[Dennis Wood]

That board has dual gigabit PCIe ports, which in our tests have sustained 93MB/s transfer rates. If you're planning on using this board for a DIY NAS, don't use the onboard RAID5. RAID 0 and RAID 10 is fine. The Nvidia 680i chipset does not do a good job at all with RAID5 with write speeds under 10 MB/s in our testing. The Intel ICHR series chipsets do much better. The LAN ports do support teaming (doesn't work with link aggregation enabled switch ports), which will help with multiple workstation loads...but do nothing to speed up individual connections.

 

[mgbolts]

Thank you for that. Much appreciated. Apologies for not thanking you earlier.

 

[Madwand]

nVIDIA chipsets have native gigabit, which is akin to PCIe in that it doesn't impose the PCI bus bandwidth limitation, but isn't actually PCIe. As noted, those NICs can perform very well.

Sometimes motherboard vendors do strange things such as adding a PCI-bridged "name brand" NIC and even sometimes disabling the native NIC, but the ASUS seems to be fine, keeping the native NICs.