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> Most of it second hand from eBay for half the usual retail price.

You were scammed. X520 is old enough to drive a car, the shop should pay you to get it off their hands.

Ha. I meant the rest of the equipment (USW-Aggregation, Unifi Pro Max 16, UNAS Pro, Unifi Express 7) was somewhere around half retail price.

I think I paid ~$15 for each X520-DA2 including postage.

I've started buying E810s even for 10G links. PCIe Gen4, lower power draw, RDMA support, generally backward-compatible with SFP+ DACs and transceivers, and relatively inexpensive. Not nearly as dirt-cheap as the X520s but not crazy expensive (last I looked, at least). As I gradually replace switches over the next few years I can start taking advantage of 25G.

This is the way. The 10G cards are ancient and hog all the PCIe lanes.

I’ve had the best luck with Mellanox ConnectX 4 or 5 cards. The 5 can happily run 25G on a modern lane constrained system.

I've seen lots of pretty terrible experiences with the i40e and newer Intel drivers.

For newer NICs than the X520s I'd probably grab a Connect-X card.

They've been stable for me but I'd be lying if I said I'd only heard good things.

Looks like prices on the E810-XXVDA2 have come up since the last time I looked while prices on the ConnectX-6 Lx have come down, so that'd be a good option!

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