I've got two F740's on order, whose sole task will be to providestorage for a couple of Sun E450 Oracle boxes. I plan to have each filer attached to both E450's via crossover full-duplex 100baseT, plus a third 100baseT on the filer to the rest of the LAN. Is there any reason to go with the QFE board besides port density (which I don't really need?)
At the risk of being beaten up again for trying to be helpful, there might be a small advantage to *not* using the quad card. Back when the F630 was new, I did some NetBench runs with a quad card versus four separate 10/100 NICs. The quad card was in the unbridged PCI slot, but it has an on-board bridge. Only one of the 10/100 cards could be in the unbridged slot, but that did give us one pipe which was not behind a bridge, unlike the quad card. We therefore expected that we might see some advantage with the individual cards.
In fact, we did -- as I recall, the curve for the config with the quad card was about 5% lower than with individual 10/100 cards. I thought this was published in one of the NetBench tech reports, but I don't see it. There has been a lot of tuning on the bridge parameters and other features since then, so I'd expect the effect to be reduced if it's even still measureable. (Those tests were run on the very first production F630 -- I watched 'em hand build parts of it because they weren't really ready yet. We try to make sure our products work correctly when they first ship, with fine-tuning of performance later, rather than going as fast as possible even if it means data loss.)
Before someone asks, putting a quad card in a bridged slot, therefore having two bridges in the way instead of one, didn't seem to compound the slight performance shortfall.
Bottom line: A single 10/100 card in an unbridged probably still has a slight performance advantage over a quad card, but you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless you're trying to drive the system to its limits in a lab environment.
-- Karl