Link Aggregation

Rensin

Rensin

Rensin

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Joined
15 Feb 2008
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1,323
Ok probably going to sound stupid here

Am I right in thinking I could aggregate 2xNIC's on a pc which would enable me to upload on 1 port and transfer files on the other port at the full Gigabit speed on each port?

I've aggregated 2 ports on my switch and also created a VLAN on my pc for both ports (802.3ad) uplink speed is 2Gbps and I'm able to pull 1 cable without losing connection.

Problem is if I transfer files from 2 different pc's simultaneously to the main PC only 1 port is being used so only 50MB/s transfer speeds. Same when downloading/uploading on the main pc and transfering files to it.

I've followed guides on youtube so probably gone wrong somewhere.

Switch = USW-Lite-16
NIC cards = l350-t2


 
Armageus said:
A mechanical drive won't keep up with 2 connections writing to it
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By simultaneous transfers I meant to 2 different drives but yes they are still mechanical drives. I'll install a 2nd SSD and give them a try.
ChrisD. said:
Link aggregation doesn't magically give you 2 Gbps, there is a lot more to it than that.
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Shoudln't I still be able to access the main pc at reasonable speeds for example downloading from gdrive (approx 350Mbps) and capable of a 1Gbps LAN transfer?
I know by aggregating 2 ports doesn't mean it doubles your speed ect

Guess I mis-understood the meaning of Link Aggregation




Single Transfer (PC1 to Main PC)
 
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I've got three PCs plus my router all using link aggregation via Unifi switching and it all works as expected. On the Windows PCs I've used Windows NIC teaming and provided you appreciate many types of traffic cannot be split over the two links it works fine. Another caveat is that its impossible to predict how much data a single connection will use so the choice of link isn't always optimum.

That said a suitable test should between devices that can serve/receive a high load on a couple of connections should be able to get not far short of the maximum (I see 1.9Gbps when multiple PCs are backing up to my file server). If you can never exceed 1 Gbps then I would look at how you've configured the NICs in Windows.
 
If you are using more than one NIC, have a look into SMB Multichannel. If configured correctly that can increase throughput.
 
WJA96 said:
I wasn’t aware of that. Very handy. Thanks.
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I did some performance testing at work for SMB Multichannel after comparing SMB3 and SMB2.1 quite a few years back now. It worked well but most of our software was server based and had such a mix of protocols and Windows/Linux VMs plus very fast networking that it didn't get used much. For heavier SMB3 workloads and more average speed networking it's worth using though.

As an aside SMB3.x in performs a lot better than 2.x, although there can be some file sharing issues on read/write loads if not configured correctly (same was true for 2.x but less frequent).
 
Simon42 said:
I did some performance testing at work for SMB Multichannel after comparing SMB3 and SMB2.1 quite a few years back now. It worked well but most of our software was server based and had such a mix of protocols and Windows/Linux VMs plus very fast networking that it didn't get used much. For heavier SMB3 workloads and more average speed networking it's worth using though.

As an aside SMB3.x in performs a lot better than 2.x, although there can be some file sharing issues on read/write loads if not configured correctly (same was true for 2.x but less frequent).
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I totally accept it might not be the silver bullet on every NAS share but it’s something I was completely unaware of and now it’s another tool in the box.
 
If using SSD, you'll be able to transfer from two pcs to 1 if the 1 has LACP / LAG / Trunk setup on it, as long as the switch and NIC have matching settings. I've tested the same myself.
 
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