The EGPL-T101 might be your best bet yet if you want to transfer data to and from your computer (or server or workstation or desktop replacement laptop) as fast as possible should you be without any available PCIe slots. This is a new card (but not a classic NIC) from network specialist Innovision that supports speed of up to 10GbE, 10 times faster than the usual Gigabit connector found on most computers.
Based on the Marvell AQtion Ethernet controller, it is physically an M2.2280 expansion card with a daughterboard tethered with a high speed shielding cable and comes with a 3-year warranty.
Innodisk hasn’t yet released the pricing for the card but we’d expect it to be cheaper than $100, which is what Asus and TP-Link charge for their 10G network adapters (although that’s in the traditional PCIe x4 format).
Switching to 10Gb
10G is ideal for industrial and embedded systems as well as surveillance (multiple 4K from business security systems can easily add up) and networking (e.g. streaming 8K footage from your NAS).
While 2.5Gb is slowly surfacing as the next iteration after 1Gb, it is the price of switches (or network switches) that is likely to determine how quickly a technology will be adopted.
While you can get a 1Gb switch with eight ports for about $15, you’d pay almost 10x that amount for 2.5Gb and 100x for 10Gb. And while 2.5Gb is slowly replacing the ubiquitous 1Gb Ethernet port on laptops and desktops, we predict that it won’t be before the end of this decade that 10Gb will start to become mainstream (assuming ports are still a thing in 2030).
If you still fancy something a bit exotic, then you can try to bond (AKA channel bonding) multiple Gigabit internet connections together to achieve a 10Gb broadband connection.