X520-DA2 2X 10GbE SFP+ Fiber Ports Converged Ethernet Adapter for Servers, NAS and Desktop PCs. Intel 82599ES 10Gbps Ethernet Controller, PCIE X8 to 2X 10GbE SFP+ NIC Card (X520-DA2)

After installing in a TrueNAS system, it was recognized upon boot with no additional effort from me. It did recognize both ports as well, though I am only using one.

I set this card up in my workstation in order to connect it to a 10G NAS device for transferring large video files for my video editing projects. Once configured, I was able to transfer files as blazing speeds. The limitation is now based on the hard drives I’m using on my workstation and the speed of my NAS. Using this NIC, I’m now able to leave the RAW video files on the NAS during editing since the connection between my workstation and the NAS is so quick. This has saved me hours of copying files back and forth while working on different projects. The device was really easy to install in my workstation - just about anyone can install PCI cards these days. Windows 11 immediately recognized the device and installed the latest driver for me. Great NIC.

I installed this card in my HP ProLiant blade server which is running ESXi 6.7U3. The card was recognized on the first boot.For me, this card card recognized both 1G and 10G copper modules. In fact, right now I am only using 1G copper. I also tested this card using a SFP+ DAC Twinax 10G Direct Attach Copper Passive Cable which worked great as well.I have not used any fiber modules in this card but I have confidence they will work just as good as the copper modules.This card for sure delivers as advertised.My only complaint, and the reason for four stars is the price. At the time of this review this LinksTek 10G duel port card was selling for $69.99. This seems like a high price considering other cards with more modern chip sets can be purchased for less.

I've been building a 10GbE network for my video production and this card has made my jump from 2.5Gbps to full 10G so easy. It was basically plug and play and I only had to insert my own SFP+ 10GbE adapters and with some Cat 6 cabling I'm rocking an amazing 10Gbps thanks to this card.I put this one in my NAS server so I've got one channel set up for Internet access and one port set up for local access so I get the full 10GbE on each port. And it is so freaking awesome. I can't believe how fast 10Gbps networking is. It's actually faster than some of my older Linux servers' drive subsystems (they're using physical HDDs).I could not be happier with this great adapter.

This is a great, affordable card for adding 10Gb network working to a high powered desktop or supporting server. Windows Server 2019 picked up up with no issues, and it "Should" be flawless when i convert he server to ESXi as the X520 chip is on the ESXi HAL.Some things to point out to the uninitiated:-This card REQUIRES a SFP+ module, which can be fiber or copper but is an added cost not included with this card.- Your Home Network switches need to have 10GB connectivity, access port and uplinks and your destination or source computer also need to be connected via 10GB. Additionally, both source and destination computers/servers storage drives need to be fast enough to read/write at 10Gb in order to really utilize this car.- Another thing i want to point out is that this a Legacy Card, it uses PCI-e 2.0 (we are up to 4.0 and 5.0 now) which brings me to the 1 drawback, it requires a 8x PCI-e slot. Newer PCI_e 3.0 cards only need a 4x slot.Overall, i swapped out my 10Gb NIC in my server for this card, added my 10Gb SFP+ and connected fiber to my switch. Running data transfer tests i am achieving 750MB/s (Windows) transfer rate which is the max my server can push so the card works flawlessly. While i know my m/2 NVmE server is faster, i only have 1 so i cannot saturate 10gbFor context:10Gb connection = 10,000 megaBITS (network speed) = 1250 megaBYTES (Windows transfer speed)My max sustained server speed with 16 spinning enterprise SATA HDDs:6000 Mb/s (network speed) = 750MB/s (windows transfer speed)

Picked this along with some other 10GB NICs up in order to upgrade some servers in my home environment (file server, 2 VM hosts, media server) doing native 10GB instead of bundling multiple 1G connections via LACP.This card has been rock solid thus far! Supports all the SFPs I’ve tried, links with no issues. Haven’t had any challenges with drivers and all worked well on Windows Server 2016 and 2019.In this case, I dropped 2 links across 2 switches using MLAG for increased resiliency and throughput, and it worked great, linking my file server up at a blazing 20Gb (though you’ll never really see that from any single stream/source due to the limits of LACP).

The Intel X520 chipset is really old and actually pretty power hungry. That is evident just in the amount of heat that the card outputs. I would recommend having a dedicated fan for this card.For $70, that is a lot of money for such an old chipset that is so readily available on the reseller market. You can get Genuine INTEL cards that are used, but still reliable and less than half the cost.

Update: Managed to see 9.4Gbps highs with this card in some highly parallel iperf3 runs over a DAC. However, very unstable rates(5-9Gbps range). Likely, the older machine is needing some tuning or a more modern Linux, but 10Gbe numbers nonetheless.Only tested one SFP+ slot at 2.5Gbps so far, but works without a hitch on an older linux distribution. Remember to explicitly "up" the interface in order to get a carrier.Might be overpriced, but if cheaper alternatives are to be considered, note that some chipsets are specified to only support 1G and 10G modes.