Transmission efficiency is an interesting topic for data link layer developers. The overhead of protocols and coding should be reduced to a minimum. This maximizes a link throughput. This is especially important for high-speed networks, where a small degradation of efficiency will degrade the throughput by several Gbps. We describe a redundancy balancing algorithm for an adaptive hybrid automatic repeat request with Reed-Solomon coding. We introduce a testing environment, most important technical issues, and results generated on a field programmable gate array. The hybrid automatic repeat request and Reed-Solomon algorithms are explained. We provide a mathematical description, and a block diagram of the adaptation algorithm. All necessary algorithm simplifications are explained in details. The algorithm can be represented by basic operations in hardware. In most cases, it finds the optimal coding for a predefined bit error rate.