On Network bonding/teaming

FYI, max SATA II speed is 3 gbps (300 MB/s), which is still much faster than any mechanical disk.  Speeds were boosted for SSDs (and even SATA III isn't fast enough to keep up with them - so the industry is shifting to PCIe). 

Speed also depends on whether you doing sequential large transfers (copying large files for example), or something more random (like copying a lot of small files or browsing a large folder).  Going with SSDs in the NAS can increase performance substantially for a lot of use cases - even with only gigabit connections.  The puzzle is to figure out how to deploy them.  ReadyTier is one option (essentially creating an SSD cache); you can also go with flexraid and create a small SSD volume for specific content (like documents and photos).

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tony359 wrote:

I was just trying to get something better (200MB/s?) with what I have already. 

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The various modes work differently, but in general their goal is to increase the overall capacity, but not the max speed of a connection.  For instance, if you had 10 clients accessing the NAS simultaneously, you'd be limited to 10 mbps each with normal gigabit, but teaming would give you 20 mbps each.  Each connection is still far slower than the gigabit max.

LACP wouldn't improve your max speed at all, and generally static LAG won't either.  Each data flow is mapped to a NIC, and the throughput of each data flow remains capped at the speed of that NIC (1 gigabit in your case).  The reason is to prevent ethernet overrun (since most of the time the client only has one ethernet connection).  Note this is a transmit strategy - and with teaming, the transmit strategy is the choice of the sender, and it often is different for both ends of the LAG.  

Round-robin is the one transmit strategy that will increase max speed, since it just splits the transmit traffic between the NICs (sending packet 1 on NIC 1, packet 2 on NIC 2, etc).  But since it is a transmit strategy for the NAS, it only affects read speeds.  Write speed to the NAS depends on the transmit strategy in the PC (and in general the switches between them if they are set up for bonding). 

Netgear managed switches don't give you the option of Round-robin in their static LAG configuration - other vendors might I guess.

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tony359 wrote:

 I've gained approx. 20MB/s in writing by just using the 2.5Gbit port!  

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I'm a little unclear on this.  You must be talking about a PC port, since the NAS and the GS108E are gigabit only.

The physical speed would end up 1 gigabit, since that is being negotiated with the switch.  It could be that the 2.5 NIC is doing a better job of off-loading the PC. 

But you might want to check the MTU (maximum transmission unit) that is configured on the PC (and the NAS for that matter).  Increasing the MTU is one way to get a bit more throughput, because it reduces the processing overhead on the clients (processing overhead mostly scales with the number of packets per second, and bigger packets means fewer packets per second). 

Going over 1500 (the standard ethernet MTU) can sometimes create connectivity problems, so if you try changing this setting you do want to be on the lookout for those.  Also, you do want to make sure you look at the settings for all your ethernet clients (including your router), and set the MTU to something they can all handle.