Title. Just curious why NICs are so expensive considering manages switches seem to have much more responsibility and many more ports.
Me a network engineer confused why were comparing a NIC to a switch. Am I missing something.
This is /r/homenetworking, where the average level of intelligence is lower than an intoxicated mouse.
The NIC has to deal with drivers and passing information up the network stack to an OS, which could be Windows, Linux, MacOS, some weird esoteric device, etc. It has to assign a MAC address to those ports, an IP address, and all kinds of other overhead and data management. Also has to have a connector; PCI, USB, some other type of interface to the system.
The switch can keep everything in happy Layer 2 / 3 land, and never has to deal with an OS, just shuffling packets around. Scaling this to multiple ports is far more simple.
There are a LOT of old PCI-E 2.0 10Gbps cards out there. Keep an eye on what cards have what specs when buying.
Those are very different things. A switch is not just a bunch of NICs put together. Probably it’s some asic with specialized logic to inspect and route layer 2 packets. A nic has way more functionality than that in it since it needs to integrate with the os and serialize and deserialize from the physical layer.
An intel Nic will last forever and a day. It’s good kit. Stuff you would sleep well knowing it was in your enterprise servers.
Small managed switch can be had for small managed switch prices. If you wanted a nic of comparable quality then you could get one for under $50.
NIC’s create and disassemble network packets which requires more compute power
Switch ports just pass them from one to another which requires less
The physical port(s) you plug the RJ45 into is not what is driving the cost, it’s the brains behind that.Just curious why NICs are so expensive considering manages switches seem to have much more responsibility and many more ports.
Price has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with costs or abilities. Price is simply the how much money the manufacturer figures the consumer will shell out for the product. Intel figures people will buy their two port NIC for $100.
Well for starters, Intel doesnt sell NICs at retail.
So if you’re buying a NIC directly from an OEM, well there’s one answer.
But you’re probably looking at aome sketchy chinese knock off, or clone of an OEM part that has to be imported and resold through a third paety markerplace.