Going 2Gbit on home network, does this sound right?

darknite

darknite

darknite

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Ok so going 2Gbit at home. I'm confident this is all right and will work, but as i'm extremely low on funds at the minute I thought it best to confirm with someone else first. In this case, all the wonderful people on the OcUK forum!

Ok so, plan is. . .

Room Bed4 4x Cat5e ports installed.
2 ports - room Liv1
2 ports - room Off1

3x Netgear GS108T-200 switches 1 in each room. Trunked ports to give 2Gbit link to each location.

Virgin Hub linked to Bed4 GS108T switch on 1gbit link. Also ps3.

NAS/HTPC in Liv1 connected to the second GS108T using teamed 1gbit links 2gbit total. Also connected BluRay player, and TV.

Main pc (see sig) in Off1 connected to the last GS108T using a Intel dual port gig card.

So
Bed4 - Liv1 2x 1gbit links trunked 2gbit bandwidth
Bed4 - Off1 2x 1gbit links trunked 2gbit bandwidth

This will all work yes? Nothing to complex, the switch supports link aggression, trunked links etc.

Can someone confirm before I spend £240 on cabling and switches!

Cheers :-)
 
The only question i have is; Will you actually benefit from a LACP at home?
A single gbit connection is more than enough for streaming blu-ray rips, so unless you're running a very fast RAID setup on each system that will benefit from the extra throughput in transferring large files then i would say it's a bit of a waste.

I suppose for "future proofing", it's not such a bad idea maybe?
 
Its more a case of transferring large files, iso's etc. Current data store is around 4.6Tb. The drives in my NAS/HTC say 180mb/s, my main machine is SSD's. So transferring at nearly 200MB/s is just better. Recently backed up a mates NAS onto mine, he had around 5.5TB of data. So 15 hours ish backup on a gig link.

Its more future proof and shear amount of data. I actually keep photo and video backups for friends and family :-)

2gbit is going to be as fast as I can go for a long while. Can't see 10gbit coming down to home use prices for a long long time.
 
What hashing mechanism to the switches use for LACP? If your going between two hosts only then don't expect to get anywhere near 2Gb - you'll probably not see any more than 1Gb

- GP
 
Why wont I see more than 1gb? My intent is to trunk links together to each switch for 2GBit. Then a pc each end running teamed links for 2GBit. Other ports on the switches will link to kit running 1gbit. These netgear switch have 16Gbit bandwidth capacity.

What am I missing?
 
Trunking doesn't work like that. Just adding multiple physical connections to a logical channel (in your case LACP) provides a larger total capacity over that (virtual) link, HOWEVER, the traffic is load balanced depending on a hashing function. Generally this is src/dst port and ip address in various combinations. If it's balancing, for example, on src/dst IP address between the two hosts on your network then the hash will always come out the same and therefore always traverse the same link therefore even though the logical connection has a maximum throughput of 2Gb, your host will only every use 1 physical link and therefore be limited to 1Gb.

If you had 2 hosts accessing the server then the hash could (but not guaranteed) put one session from each host on each physical link. Therefore each host will get 1Gb (potentially, depending on the rest of the setup) but you could have 2Gb total throughput, so rather than each host contend the single 1Gb, it has it's "own".

Load balancing over a trunk of any sort is more effective like this when you have more hosts and more sessions.

Note - some boxes may use a round-robin to "load balance" over but this will be form the host to switch, not between switches

- GP
 
Ok so you're saying there is no way for me to have a faster link than 1Gbit over multiple switches? So my only option is to wait for 10gbit gear to become cheaper?
 
Ok so looking into this, what this allows is to send 2 files at 1gbit each, or 1 file at 1gbit. It will not allow 2Gbit send on 1 file. Which, sucks. Would allow me to do 2 copy jobs at 1gbit each. So still having the time of TB copy jobs. But allowing for the cost and setup hassle I wont bother. 1gbit limit it is.
 
darknite said:
Ok so looking into this, what this allows is to send 2 files at 1gbit each, or 1 file at 1gbit. It will not allow 2Gbit send on 1 file. Which, sucks. Would allow me to do 2 copy jobs at 1gbit each. So still having the time of TB copy jobs. But allowing for the cost and setup hassle I wont bother. 1gbit limit it is.
Click to expand...

Potentially yes - as before it would depend on the load balancing mechanism. But yeah, don't bother for the moment for home. If you had a server and multiple people connecting to it then sure why not, you would probably see some benefit

- GP
 
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