Twin LAN on Gigabyte H Mini ITX board

[PhilCollins]

I have just grabbed a Gigabyte HN87N –Wifi (v2).

Is there any use for the 2 LAN ports on this board other than redundancy?

Teaming is not supported as one is an Atheros chip and the other an Intel.

Can't find any particular answers as to why. I guess if I need to ask I don’t need it but it would be good to know.

Cheers

[Bonebreaker777]

One is ESD protected and the second is advertised as a Intel 1Gb socket for gaming (?)

[PhilCollins]

Thanks for that.

I've been looking into it a bit more and it seems that maybe the boards are occasionally used in home server setups so there is the possibility for load balancing, fault tolerance and active backup in fail situations, I guess why maybe one has ESD.

What I know is I have 2 LAN ports should the on board wifi die.

[liammcd]

Could also be useful if you use the board to build a firewall device...

[Bonebreaker777]

What I know is I have 2 LAN ports should the on board wifi die.

Well, having two LAN and no WiFi don't always have to be a win. I miss my LAN to the NAS but I don't miss the nagging about the cable...

[machapman]

Seems a strange design choice. I suppose if you were to make it into a portable device (e.g. for lan parties) you could set up one port for when you were at home and the other for when you were plugged in elsewhere. Perhaps that is why the reference to having a gaming port.
I'd have thought the money would have been better spent elsewhere though - but perhaps the chips used meant the extra port could be added without significantly increasing the production cost. So their marketing team had to come up with a reason why it was there to make it seem like you were getting something special.

[Dareos]

so you can connect to 2 networks simultaneously. Very useful if you have a network independent of the internet at home, or at work, or college.

[shaithis]

Server 2012 and R2 might even allow you to team them now that it happens at the OS-level and not the driver-level.

Most useful thing I can think of for 99.9999% of home users is: If one dies.