2nd Ethernet Port

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].