2nd Ethernet Port

The business models (e.g., pro) use similar hardware, but have firmware support for ethernet teaming. There is a third-party add-on that provides this for your ultra as well.

In order to use teaming, you also need a switch that supports it. Normal consumer routers and unmanaged switches do not support it. You'd need something like the netgear GS108T, GS716T, or GS724T. These switches have management interfaces to set up the teaming (and many other advanced ethernet features), and generally cost quite a bit more than unmanaged switches.

As far as performance goes, teaming can improve performance if you have multiple users, especially if they are doing sequential file access. In most home setups it doesn't really help much.

Are you getting good performance now? Are you running a gigabit ethernet network, or just 100 mbit?

ReadyNAS NVX with 1G LAN 1+2 (in auto balancing mode) + TP-LINK Wireless N 1G Router WR1043N (with internal 4-port 1G switch) + NetGear GS605-300PES 5-port 1G switch + HP V1405-8G (3COM) 8-port 1G switch + Windows Server 2012 desktop with 1G LAN 1+2 (NIC teaming) + Windows 8 desktop & notebook * N pcs + Hyper-V VMs + ... = OK :lol:
What about the 10G LAN? :?

As for 10G, 10G Is available in some 12-bay rackmount models and it is planned to make an option available for the 516 to have 10G in the future. It is a high-end feature which at this stage would be mainly useful in business environments.

Another use for the 2nd port in a home/SOHO enviroment is to set a different IP on port number 2 and Connect to this With either iSCSI or for traffic-balancing (if you're not using NIC teaming).

I've set another IP on my 2nd port within the same subnet and use that port for iSCSI traffic to a ESXi server I run locally

I didn't even think about teaming. It brings me back to my network admin days with port trunks between switches.

Now, I am looking at the GS108T. I think it's quite affordable at under $100 considering its features. I assume that only the switch the NAS is attached to needs to support teaming? I am still running my network setup through my mind to think about how to do this. I'm quite interested in everyone's ideas.

Here's the deal.

I have three locations in the house that have wired access - Office, Basement, Living Room.

As far as wired LAN goes, the basement is where my FiOS ONT AND Router are. The Office (2nd floor) and Living Room (1st floor) both have wired runs to this location. These runs were NOT easy to do. The hardest was basement to attic, back down to the office. To further complicate things, the basement is all finished with sheetrock. Ugh. The Office has a Netgear WNDR4500 router, which is connected to the FiOS Router LAN-LAN as an AP. The FiOS Router is the DHCP and gateway, it's WiFi radio is OFF.

Do you think I will get better LAN performance if I do not use the switches built into thee Netgear and FiOS router, and add a GS108T to both the Office and the Basement? Then, the FiOS router would attach to the GS108T there and the WNDR4500 would attach to another GS108T.

I do a lot of large file transfers so I'm thinking teaming may indeed help.

Thanks for the input.

NIC teaming will only help if you either do one of these Things:

* Use NIC teaming on a 100Mbit switch, getting 200Mbit of Maximum bandwith, and getting that output through a 1Gbit port (or 2 100Mbit ports set in NIC teaming themselves)

* Use NIC teaming on a 1Gbit/s switch, and get the Maximum output of 2Gbit/s. You will only get this output to a single computer if you NIC team on that one as well or use a 10G card (which tbh isnt that common in a household) You will get better output if you transfer large files to several computers at once though.

It will also depend on how the trunking works on the switch, whether it just simply balances the traffic 50/50 or if it bases itself on sessions (like ESXi does)

If you dont NIC team you could also use DNS round robin if your internal DNS server allows for that configuration.

To the question on how to trunk the connections I'd do as follows:

If you are supposed to get the extra bandwith between your floors then you'd have to trunk the 2 ports going to the NAS, and then 2 ports going to the next switch to get the total bandwith out on a Device (or multiple Devices) connected to the desired switch

muzicman82 wrote:

...I have three locations in the house that have wired access - Office, Basement, Living Room. As far as wired LAN goes, the basement is where my FiOS ONT AND Router are. The Office (2nd floor) and Living Room (1st floor) both have wired runs to this location. These runs were NOT easy to do. The hardest was basement to attic, back down to the office. To further complicate things, the basement is all finished with sheetrock. Ugh. The Office has a Netgear WNDR4500 router, which is connected to the FiOS Router LAN-LAN as an AP. The FiOS Router is the DHCP and gateway, it's WiFi radio is OFF. Do you think I will get better LAN performance if I do not use the switches built into thee Netgear and FiOS router, and add a GS108T to both the Office and the Basement? Then, the FiOS router would attach to the GS108T there and the WNDR4500 would attach to another GS108T. I do a lot of large file transfers so I'm thinking teaming may indeed help...

Is your Fios actiontec router gigabit or fast ethernet? If gigabit, you will certainly get see faster speeds if add a gigabit switch right behind the router. Trunking between two switches of course requires two cables between your office and the basement.

Teaming with IEEE LACP will not increase the speed of a file transfer. LACP requires preservation of the original ethernet framing order. The easiest way to ensure this happens is to send all the frames for a session on the same interface. One might choose an interface simply based on mac address, or one might also look at layer 3 - I'm not sure what the switch does [it is not configurable], but the NAS gives you a couple of options [that is the Netgear version, I've never used the add-on]. But none of them will increase the throughput of a single session, because all the frames for that session use the same physical interface. LACP is intended to increase capacity, not individual user.

So whether teaming speeds things up for you [or not] depends on the number of users you have. Of course it does no harm (other than tying up ports).

BTW, jumbo frames and teaming don't mix well on Netgear switches. So if you are using jumbo frames, it is best not to team [or research/select a switch that doesn't have that issue].

Can the 2nd Ethernet port be used to connect another NAS and support backups of data via Rsync? In this arrangement there is a primary NAS connected to the switch (so it is accessible by all) but the second NAS is only connected to the primary NAS (and presumable only visible to it).

No time yet to try this - still trying to recover from a crashed NVX. Just looking for options for *local* backup via rsync (which I have yet to try). Are there other (low cost) backup strategies with two NASs that are recommended?

Earl0101 wrote:
Can the 2nd Ethernet port be used to connect another NAS and support backups of data via Rsync? In this arrangement there is a primary NAS connected to the switch (so it is accessible by all) but the second NAS is only connected to the primary NAS (and presumable only visible to it)...

I wouldn't use the second Ethernet port that way. That is because the NAS would only be visible to the primary NAS. That means you can't monitor its disks, check on the backup status, basically you have no idea of whether the backup is in good shape.

There's no particular benefit I can see of attempting to conceal the backup NAS from the rest of the network, and I see lots of disadvantages.

Thanks, that is a very good point. Certainly would want to check on the backups.