Every server has at least one network interface card (NIC), and picking the wrong speed is a common, expensive mistake — either you overpay for bandwidth nobody uses, or you bottleneck a storage/virtualization workload on a link that's too slow. Here's what each speed tier is actually for.
| Speed | Typical use | Cabling |
|---|---|---|
| 1GbE | General office servers, domain controllers, print/file servers with light load | Cat5e/Cat6 copper |
| 10GbE | Virtualization hosts, database servers, small-to-mid NAS/SAN uplinks | Cat6a copper or SFP+ fiber/DAC |
| 25GbE | Higher-density virtualization, faster storage traffic, modern hyperconverged nodes | SFP28 fiber/DAC |
| 40GbE | Storage-heavy clusters, backup targets moving large volumes fast | QSFP+ fiber/DAC |
| 100GbE | All-flash SAN backbones, AI/ML training clusters, spine-leaf data-center fabric | QSFP28 fiber/DAC |
Match the NIC to your bottleneck, not to what sounds impressive. A single file server serving 20 office users has no real use for 25GbE — the disks themselves can't push that much data. On the other hand, a virtualization host running a dozen VMs against a shared NAS, or a backup server pulling nightly full backups from multiple hosts, genuinely saturates 1GbE and benefits from 10GbE or higher. Rule of thumb: size the NIC to the storage backend it talks to, not to the number of users on the LAN.
Server-grade NICs from Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel and Lenovo/IBM are widely available refurbished at a fraction of new pricing, and — unlike CPUs or drives — a tested NIC has no wear-related failure mode to worry about; it either passes loopback/link tests or it doesn't. We stock 1GbE through 100GbE cards from all major OEMs, boot-tested before shipping, with a 3-year warranty.
Browse current stock: Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel and Lenovo/IBM network interface cards, or see the full live catalogue.