I’m adding a second wired NIC to my Gen5 NUC. Unfortunately, the Gen5 NUCs only have M.2 slots, not mPCIe slots like the Gen4 NUC had so I had to buy an adapter that converts an M.2 slot into a mPCIe. This is because there are no M.2 wired NICs available.
If you are wondering why I wanted a second wired NIC in my NUC, it is because I am running VMware on my NUC and I want to separate out some different traffic types. I am running a virtual firewall so USB passthrough to a USB NIC is not an option in this instance. If I was running a Windows or standard Linux VM I could probably have gotten away with that.
The only real disadvantage of this is that I loose both M.2 slots because of the size of the converter card and where the cable lands. This doesn’t bother me too much because I was using a 2.5″ laptop SSD for storage anyways.