Hp N54L with 2.5Gb ethernet

TrueNAS General
1

I have upgraded my internet to 2Gb. As part of that I am also upgrading my switch to 2.5Gb and already have some 2.5Gb adaptors for a couple of my machines.
Does anyone know if I can add a 2.5gh Ethernet card into an HP N54L microserver? I started with freenas on this, so it has been running a long time.

I have just added a card based on RTL8125B, but although the link lights come on I cannot see it in truenas. Before I dig out an old usb keyboard and find something to connect the vga port to so I check the BIOS, does anyone know if it will even work or if there is a different card I can use that will?

Thanks.

2

If you’re using core and that is a realtek Chip it’s very likely that it won’t work because the realtek driver has been disabled by default. There were Problems with data corruption on certain workloads with the 2.5Gb realtek nics

3

Really, 2.5 GbE isn’t a very good solution; the preferred upgrade from 1 GbE is to 10 GbE. But cards based on the Intel 226 chip should work as well as can be expected.

4

Thanks. Ordered an intel 2.5gb card. Will try this one in one of my esxi servers.

5

Fitted and intel based 2.5gb card and all working. Thanks.
Now to try and fish the Ethernet cable from behind the filing cabinet and place then as back in it’s correct location rather than in the middle of the floor. Think that will be the most difficult task I have to perform.

6

I came across your post mentioning that you installed an Intel network card on your HP n54l. I’m currently considering a similar upgrade and was curious, could you share which specific Intel card model you chose?

Also, I’d love to hear about your experience with the installation process and how it’s been performing so far (e.g., driver compatibility, throughput, stability, etc.). Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

7

This should be close to the card. I don’t know if you need low profile bracket or full height

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/ethernet/gigabit-network-adapters/i226-network-adapters/products.html

8

This is the card I have fitted and it works well.

It comes with a low profile bracket which you will need to use.
The first card I got was a Realtek one and it wasn’t even recognised.
About to rebuild that machine and probably upgrade to scale and swap the old disks around a bit. I have a couple of 3tb in there and a couple of smaller disks. I’ve got a spare 4tb and 3tb from an old VMware server that I’ll put in and use that to just backup vms.

Just finished the replacement truenas scale build with 5 10tb drives in a zfsr2 setup. All new hardware to me apart from the 10tb disks which I got cheap on eBay. Spent some of the weekend copying data over and now just need to get IDrive installed in a docker container to back the important stuff up to cloud.

1 Like