Faster connection to Unraid server?

[bremen1874]

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.

Oh and 6.8.3 onwards supports RTL8125 from what I read.

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.

 

[jokerguv]

Unless it’s the 90’s still, MDI-X is a thing and you can use any cable.

The problem with Realtek is they’re the soft modem of the NIC world, the drivers are closed source and they don’t use things like hardware offloading to make hitting stated numbers easy. For it to be perfectly fine I would expect IPerf to show maximum throughput consistently and not significantly increase CPU usage, that’s not happening.

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.

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.

Spoiler: iperf screenshot

Avalon's right, it doesn't hit the full 2.5Gb throughput, but still at 2.3Gb its good enough to saturate bandwidth from mechanical disks.

Anyways, good luck with your purchase OP.

 

[bremen1874]

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).

 

[Avalon]

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).

Yay! Someone else who now knows first hand that 5e will do 10Gb, prepare to be tagged in future ‘Oh no it won’t’ threads

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

Hopefully bremen1874 won't mind me resurrecting this thread!

I am looking to increase the connection speed between my desktop PC and my Unraid server, both are in the same room so looking at a comfortably less than 5m distance between them. My existing network is using cat 6 cabling (sorry @Avalon , but it was a new setup with quite a few POE devices in the house, so went with cat 6). My switch is a Draytek P2121, which only supports SFP and not SFP+, so I would be going with a direct connection between the two computers and give the 10GB NICs static IP address on a unique subnet.

Been looking online at X520-DA1 SFP+ cards, which are using the Intel 82599ES chipset - not genuine Intel cards, but are using the Intel controller. Also looking at the same company's X540-T1 cards as an alternative with a benefit of using existing cabling, but the SFP+ card is quite a bit cheaper than the RJ45 card. If I was going to buy from the manufacturer, rather than a big online retailer, then the X520-10G-1S-X8 is £48.86 per card!

Anyone know if the X520-DA1 with the Intel 82599ES chipset will work on Unraid 6.9.1 (not done the 6.9.2 upgrade yet)?