Adding a Dual Port NIC into a Windows 7 machine

Virdi

Virdi

Virdi

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Hi all.

So if I was to add a dual Port NIC into my Windows 7 machine ...once the drivers are installed ...How would I setup Link Aggregation etc..?

Does Windows 7 have this built in? or will I need the software from NIC vendor?

Thanks
 
Does your switch support it?

Do you know that you'll be limited to 1Gbps for each single transfer?

Get an Intel card that has drivers for your OS and the OS you plan to upgrade to.
 
Hi,

I was looking at a 'HP NC360T' which has Intel Chipset.

Windows 7 is supported and I have Netgear Smart Switch which supports LACP.

Thanks
 
Virdi said:
Does Windows 7 have this built in? or will I need the software from NIC vendor?
Click to expand...

Virdi said:
I was looking at a 'HP NC360T' which has Intel Chipset.

Windows 7 is supported and I have Netgear Smart Switch which supports LACP.
Click to expand...

All you have to do is set up an LACP group on the switch, install the Intel drivers for the card, and pick the LACP teaming option.

What are you hoping to achieve with this though - as bledd alluded to, it won't magically give you a speed up except under certain circumstances
 
Thanks! -I will try this.

I am trying to build a super fast network so that I can tranfer multiple large size files to and from my NAS.
 
Virdi said:
Thanks! -I will try this.

I am trying to build a super fast network so that I can tranfer multiple large size files to and from my NAS.
Click to expand...

In which case:
- what NAS and what drives, how many network connections from the NAS?
- what drives / in your PC
- you will need to perform 2 file copies at the same time, to see any benefit (i.e. you can transfer twice as many files in the same time, rather than the same amount of files in half the time)


kayomani said:
The lastest versions of smb will use more than one card if you do not aggregate them automatically.
Click to expand...

That only applies to Windows 8 / 2012 onwards though - OP is using Windows 7.
 
I have two NAS boxes both have Dual LAN Ports for LACP.

PC has WD Black drives and NAS has WD REDs in RAID 0.
 
Virdi said:
I have two NAS boxes both have Dual LAN Ports for LACP.

PC has WD Black drives and NAS has WD REDs in RAID 0.
Click to expand...

You are not going to gain anything with Dual LAN in this case.

As soon as you start pulling files from two different places and the hard drives have to seek, performance is going to be lower even than a single gigabit connection would need. You only need multiple lan connections if you are using either SSDs, or you have enterprise level disk arrays (e.g. with a large cache and high rpm/lots of spindles) that can deal with both transfer rate and random access.
 
^^This.

As someone who has setup LACP at home, besides being able to backup multiple machines at the same time, there's very little advantage, you'll run into the limits of the hard drive speed, it's very unlikely the NAS can handle 2x 112MB/s writes to the hard drives.

If you have an SSD array in the NAS, then you might well see a benefit, or if you have 8+ hard drives in the NAS.

But at that level, you should be looking at 10Gbps adapters / switches, which at the moment is £££
 
bledd. said:
^^This.

As someone who has setup LACP at home, besides being able to backup multiple machines at the same time, there's very little advantage, you'll run into the limits of the hard drive speed, it's very unlikely the NAS can handle 2x 112MB/s writes to the hard drives.

If you have an SSD array in the NAS, then you might well see a benefit, or if you have 8+ hard drives in the NAS.

But at that level, you should be looking at 10Gbps adapters / switches, which at the moment is £££
Click to expand...


ok Thanks

Would I better better off trying FREENAS on a HP Micro Server? Would that give me more performance?

Thanks
 
Steveocee said:
Why do you need so much performance? Are you constantly pulling large files off and back onto the NAS units?

Gigabit is plenty.
Click to expand...

It's not plenty, but it's VERY costly to go above gigabit for single file transfers.

Gigabit network speed has been maxed out by hard drives for years.

Now we have ssds that are almost 20x the speed of gigabit NICs
 
bledd. said:
It's not plenty, but it's VERY costly to go above gigabit for single file transfers.

Gigabit network speed has been maxed out by hard drives for years.

Now we have ssds that are almost 20x the speed of gigabit NICs
Click to expand...

Acknowledged but realistically on a LAN why would you need that speed?
 
Same reason you need 32GB :p

Backing up machines / copying files to multiple machines. We should be in a position where drive speed is the limiting factor, but they have caught up and overtaken, big time.

For something so vital, it's a shame it's taking so long to jump above 1Gbps
 
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