3COM NIC's

[Guest]

After reviewing your new article "We Take The Lid Off NICs From 3Com, Intel, And SMC" I hoped to pass on some interesting items/issues for the editors to look into!
I have run into many issues using 3COM NIC,s and Ghosting under Ghost Enterprise 6.51, unfortunatly your article did not discover those issues( I believe the image size you used is too small which increases the odds of the image being successful).
Number one is if you are ghosting with the high compression option when creating images using 3COM 905C-TX or the PCMCIA 575 cards you will run into errors when you try to restore the images, these errors are random but frequent expecially if you test with real world images of a Gig or more! Symantec site had the answer to overcome my many issues with a number of different systems. Change the setting to Fast Compression and you will avoid known issues while ghosting with 3COM NIC's. I have never run into the issue with Intel NIC's! This is not the only problem I have encountered with 3COM, when the 3C905B cards came out I had a number of cards that would lose connectivity on the TCPIP side no matter what driver version I used. The speed differences between the brands is ever so slight, I just have had much better experiences using the Intel cards. I have seen that many system manufactures are putting the 3com 905c-tx on-board.

 

[Guest]

The 3C905c is a notoriously flaky card. I'm surprised and disappointed in that they did not review any Netgear cards, especially since they use them in a lot of their benchmark systems.

 

[upec]

I am working an computer facility in my school. The facility have 60 computer with 3C905B NIC. Did not have any problem with any of them. We just use the driver build in Windows 2000.

 

[Guest]

Notice I specified the 'C' model.

 

[dstell]

I have not encountered the problems that you have seemed to have with Ghost 6.51 and the 3Com cards. I have images that are over 2GB with HIGH compression and I have never had a problem.

I have seen some of the connectivity issues that you suggest in our corporate enviorment, but we were able to resolve those issues with either a driver upgrade or a flash of the Cisco firmware. These issues were related to the PHY chips on the 905 series cards. We were able to resolve these issues so, I never really gave this a second thought.

Over all my experience over the last years with the 905 series cards as been very positive.

Thanks for your input!