To perform effective intrusion analysis in higher bandwidth network, this paper studies the data collecting techniques and proposes a scalable efficient intrusion monitoring architecture (SEIMA) for network intrusion detection system (NIDS). In the architecture of SEIMA, scaling network intrusion detection to high network speeds can be achieved using multiple sensors operating in parallel coupled with a suitable load balancing traffic splitter. High-performance data transfer is achieved through asynchronous DMA without OS's intervention by using efficient address translation technique and buffer management mechanism. Multi-rule packet filter based on finite state machine technique is implemented at user layer to eliminate overhead for processing redundant packets. The simulative and actual experiment results indicate that SEIMA is capable of reducing the using rate of CPU while improving the efficiency of data collection in NIDS, so as to save much more system resources for complex data analysis in NIDS. The method of SEIMA is very practical for network security.