Two Gigabit home network

kayomani · 7 Dec 2014 at 10:14

On my home network I have a Netgear GS724T switch with two PCs with intel nics setup for static link aggregation using the ANS software rather than windows teaming and it seems I can't get any bandwidth greater than I could get with a single link. With static link aggregation I thought the MAC addresses were shared between the two adapters so I should be able to get greater throughput than i would with a single link. Is the software unable to balance the traffic as there is only two pcs or am I missing something? Unfortunatly the switch doesn't support LACP but I think the end result would be the same.

http://i.imgur.com/TqTfyQN.jpg

Uhtred · 7 Dec 2014 at 12:15

If the switch doesn't support it you're out of luck

DJMK4 · 7 Dec 2014 at 13:34

You maybe able to balance the load, but thats it, you wouldnt be able to team up and get double the bandwidth. For the reason pretty much in the post above

kayomani · 7 Dec 2014 at 14:14

Its set for trunking on the switch, I always thought static aggregation was the same as lacp apart from lacp could gracefully degrade but I guess not xD. I'll get hold a switch that supports lacp and report back ;D

bledd · 7 Dec 2014 at 15:01

I think.. If it's only one file transfer, you'll be limited to 1g. But if you started a second file transfer to another machine then it would use the extra bandwidth

ChrisD. · 7 Dec 2014 at 15:06

You can get a HP Procurve switch that supports LACP for around £150 IIRC.

blueboy2001 · 7 Dec 2014 at 18:55

LACP won't make any difference.

The link aggregation will probably be using a hash of the source and destination MAC addresses to decide which physical link to take, it won't use both links. To do what you want to do you would have to use iSCSI and set up multipathing.

kayomani · 27 Dec 2014 at 19:45

Annoying it seems I shot myself in the foot when I tried to do any sort of link aggregation. SMB 3 has multichannel enabled by default and isn't to different from ISCSI multipathing.

Disabled all the special network config and it just started doing its thing (Granted i'll only see the benefit for SMB but thats all I wanted anyhow!)