Faster connection to Unraid server?

bremen1874

bremen1874

bremen1874

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I'd like to improve the transfer speed between my primary desktop and my Unraid server. No problem if it's done with a direct secondary connection.

Does anyone have 2.5/5/10GbE working with Unraid?

Because of distance (c.10m) and cable routing (external), I'd prefer an RJ45 copper solution.

I'd prefer to spend < £100 and definitely no more than £200.

I was going to go cheap and cheerful with a couple of 2.5GbE NICs but the common RTL8125 based adapters don't appear to be supported on Unraid (yet).

5GbE is pretty rare and it's unclear about Unraid compatibility.

10GbE is either old, expensive, or both (and a bewildering choice).

The desktop has an x4 Gen4 PCIe slot (AMD X570) available. The Unraid server (Dell T20) has an x16 Gen3 slot free.
 
My Unraid server has a pair of mirrored 1TB MX500 SATA SSDs, so there's bandwidth to be exploited.

I was looking at X540 adapters but wasn't sure how they'd manage in x4 slot (although I don't need anyway near full 10GbE bandwidth).

The only cheap X520 adapters I've seen are SPF. By the time you've added the transceivers, there's nothing saved.

I've got a few things to investigate now, including the Qnap adapters that I'd overlooked.
 
From a compatibility and cost point-of-view, Intel X540 is looking like the most sensible option at the moment. Unraid compatibility for both the Intel and Realtek 2.5GbE options appears to be lacking and they both have very mixed reviews.

The PCIe slots I'll be using are all x16 physical length. The x4 electrical limitation in the desktop shouldn't be a problem for my use-case as long as it'll work (if it follows the PCIe rules it should).

I was just trying to work out how much of a limitation an x4 slot would be. Four lanes of PCIe 2.1 is 16Gbit/s? Enough for my needs but still short of what an X540-T1 would need running at full rate in both directions? Having the full eight lanes available (32Gbit/s?) seems to fall short of what an X540-T2 could theoretically consume?

Are there any firmware gotchas I should be aware of with Dell/HP/etc. NICs?
 
I actually ordered a pair of X540-T2 NICs about 30 minutes ago. More than I really wanted to spend, but hopefully pretty much guaranteed to work.

They're Supermicro adapters which I'm hoping won't be a problem.

2.5GbE would really have been enough but there were too many unknowns. I want something that'll work now, not something to play with and diagnose.

Hopefully, my existing Cat5e cabling will handle it at the relatively low speeds I can really exploit. Adding some better cabling wouldn't be too much of an issue but it's cold outside and I'd rather not.

Avalon said:
Oh and 6.8.3 onwards supports RTL8125 from what I read.
Click to expand...
I've read that it does, that does but only at 1GbE, and that it doesn't and I need to wait for version 6.9 (no interest in running beta). Unraid is a great product but they really need to sort out their hardware compatibility information.
 
The Supermicro X540-T2 NICs arrived this morning.

A basic iPerf3 test (iperf3 -c <ipaddress>) gives me 3.65 Gbit/sec.

Running an iPerf3 test that was suggested in a different thread recently (iperf3 -c <ipaddress> -P 10 -t 60 -i 10) I'm getting 9.49 Gbit/sec.

I was previously getting 949 Mbit/sec on the Gigabit NICs.

This is using my external Cat5e cabling and Cat5e patch cables (roughly 10m).
 
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