I found this NIC, can I make it work?

bigrex12 · March 7, 2019

I have a home media server, I'd love to add some extra connectivity to it. I found this PCIe NIC. On paper it sounds awesome, but I can't find much documentation or software to run it.

When i tried putting into my server, it didn't get recognized. My server is just a Dell desktop with windows server 2012 installed and a few drives for file sharing, and a Plex server installed, The Plex server runs off a NAS that I wish had a faster connection to the server. Thus the reason why I want to add some connectivity to the desktop.

Is there a way to get this work or is this just a piece of junk?

SupaKomputa · March 7, 2019

Install the drivers and see if its recognized.

bigrex12 · March 7, 2019

1 minute ago, SupaKomputa said:

Install the drivers and see if its recognized.

I can't seem to find the drivers for it, I installed a driver that I thought was it and I restarted the server but it wouldn't show up in the device manager.

SupaKomputa · March 7, 2019

install linux just to see if the card is still alive there.

or you can try this driver:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/id/en/idbsdt1/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=2p72g

Mikensan · March 7, 2019

Do you at least see an unknown device within Device Manager?

Jay Deah · March 7, 2019

it should show up in device manager even if no drivers as unknown device. drivers will be found on dell website or broadcom website.

why do you think you need a PCIe nic tho?

bigrex12 · March 8, 2019

5 hours ago, Jay Deah said:

it should show up in device manager even if no drivers as unknown device. drivers will be found on dell website or broadcom website.

why do you think you need a PCIe nic tho?

I was thinking that a direct connection from the Plex server to the NAS would be the fastest and work the best. Although, now that I think about it, I should invest in a USB 3.0 PCIe card instead and just connect them via USB at a faster rate.

My ingest station is a separate computer on the network with a bluray drive to rip movies from my backlog of movies. It's all connected via gigabit LAN. I went with a NAS for the redundancy because I can't fit very many physical drives in the case of the server, but the server has a more powerful cpu for transcoding so I have my Plex server pulling from a network shared drive from the NAS. I run into issues streaming at higher qualities which doesn't happen when I stream from a file that exists on the server HDD itself.