Intel i225 PCIe with Netgate 7100 1u
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Has anyone had success getting the Netgate 7100 1u hardware to recognize and negotiate with a i225 dual or quad nic at 2.5Gb duplex? Is there a 2.5 Gb dual or quad nic that netgate or freebsd has drivers for? I thought to ask since we are looking at an os and pfsense update soon and guess I was hoping this is part of the upgrade offerings.
I have a new fiber ISP with a 2GB synchronous tier available, but no way for me to get the full speed with the 7100, and unfortunately the 7100 Denverton SOC does not support copper over SFP+.
Wish I knew how/why Intel developed this cpu without supporting copper SFP+ modules.
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Looks like the other possible option is a 10 Gbe intel x540 that shows it has 2.5Gb backward compatibility. Thoughts?
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Hello jpvonhemel
rcoleman-netgate has posted a reply to: Intel i225 PCIe with Netgate 7100 1u@jpvonhemel The limitation is ONLY on the SFP+ ports on the board, you can add a PCIe card to the system that has this on it's chipset.
@rcoleman-netgate I can run SFP+ from PCIe and use copper? I thought this was a CPU limitation. Thanks.
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@jpvonhemel The SFPs on board are tied to the SOC. The ones on a PCI NIC are tied to their PCIe's IC.
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If you don't need multiple 2.5Gbps ports then you can install one of these cards based on the intel I225v chipset. I've installed these in two different 7100's and they work great. I connect my cable modem's 2.5Gbps port to the I225v NIC on the 7100 then connect the 7100 to my switch with the 10Gbps SFP+ port.
FYI.. You'll need to purchase the PCI riser adaptor from Netgate to install the NIC.
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@mael Thank you for responding. I see this has the i225 chipset, but is only a single port. Now that I know SFP+ on a PCIe card will support copper, I would likely go with that nic.
But then I really need to have my head examined for even considering paying an extra 50 bucks a month or $600 per year above 1 gig for a synchronous 2 gig connection when I rarely come close to saturating the 1 gig I am blessed to have. It would be wasted cash much better spent on a backup modest speed cable wan.