Adapter network cards

Any network delay can cost time, nerves, or lost packets – there's no room for chance. That's why at Hardware Direct, you'll only find proven network cards and adapters designed from the ground up for production environments: servers, workstations, NAS systems, and storage solutions. Whether you need a simple 1GbE adapter for backup or 100/200 GbE ports for a spine-leaf cluster, everything here is ready to go. Every card undergoes pre-shipment testing, and all hardware comes with a warranty.

For many office and administrative applications, 1GbE and 10GbE are still the standard – and rightly so. If you need something affordable yet robust, check out the Hitachi GQ-CN7741-R with 4x RJ45 on PCIe 2.0 or the Dell BCM95722 with a single 11GbE RJ45 port. These are ideal solutions for classic file servers, backup points, pfSense routers, or NAS devices. Low-profile versions allow for installation even in compact enclosures, and low power consumption means less heat and less noise. If you're looking for something inconspicuous but stable for everyday traffic, this is the category for you.

When your environment consists of more than one server and virtualization is commonplace, there's no point limiting yourself to 1 or 10 gigabits. This is where Intel E810 25GbE SFP28, Dell XXV710-DA2, and Mellanox ConnectX-4 EN 50GbE QSFP28 come into play – cards built to support Hyper-V, VMware, and KVM with SR-IOV, DirectPath I/O, and QoS. These models significantly offload the processor during heavy traffic and operate reliably in systems with a large number of virtual machines. If your needs exceed 10 Gb/s and your servers need to share bandwidth with disks and VMs, this segment of cards should be your first choice.

If your infrastructure is more than just a single rack server and you prioritize minimal latency with maximum throughput, it's time to look at models like the Mellanox MCX653105A-EFAT (200GbE QSFP56). They support PCIe 4.0, are compliant with SDN, NVMe over Fabrics, RDMA, and are fully adapted for use in data centers or AI/ML clusters. This isn't equipment you buy for testing; these are adapters you integrate into a mission-critical network. Also worth noting are hybrid models, like the IBM Broadcom 2×RJ45 + 2×SFP+, which allow for flexible management of different connection types without adding more cards.

If your task is to connect a disk array to servers in SAN mode, Fibre Channel (FC) cards are a must-have. Our offering includes the Qlogic QLE2672 (16Gb FC, PCIe 3.0 x4) – ideal for fast storage connections in production environments, especially where strict SLAs apply and there's no room for data bottlenecks. Thanks to low-profile versions, they can also be installed in small enclosures, and compatibility with Dell, HPE, IBM, and AX Node platforms allows for quick deployment without driver issues. This is equipment you choose once and then leave alone because it simply works.