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Forum Discussion
jimk1963
May 09, 2020Luminary
SMB over RN528X not working
Setup: - Core i7 PC, Win10 Home x64, with Intel X550-T2 dual 10GbE NIC card, and EVO 970 Plus SSD hard drive - XS716E 10GbE switch - RN528X with dual 10GbE ports - RN212 with dual 1GbE ports - Q...
Sandshark
May 09, 2020Sensei - Experienced User
If you just have two independent ports from your PC connected to your router/switch, that's the way it works. Your PC is only initiating the exchange on one port, so the NAS can only respond on that one. And, of course, all connections from the NAS to the PC must be capable of the speed you are wanting.
If you do have the two PC ports joined with link aggregation and all links in the pathway are capable of the faster speed, what aggregation method are you using?
- jimk1963May 09, 2020Luminary
Sandshark wrote:If you just have two independent ports from your PC connected to your router/switch, that's the way it works. Your PC is only initiating the exchange on one port, so the NAS can only respond on that one. And, of course, all connections from the NAS to the PC must be capable of the speed you are wanting.
If you do have the two PC ports joined with link aggregation and all links in the pathway are capable of the faster speed, what aggregation method are you using?
Thanks Sandshark. Already went down the Link Aggregation path - resulted in zero speed improvement. Link aggregation only helps when you're dealing with multiple clients. My goal here is different - just want faster NAS reads/writes to one PC. Since you asked, for Link Aggregation I did the following: (1) configured X550-T2 for StaticLinkAggregation using Powershell, and verified the combined link was listed by Windows as 20 Gbps, (2) set up the XS716E for static LAG (it doesn't support LACP), with LAG1 on Ports 1&2 (RN528X), LAG2 on ports 3&4 (RN212), and LAG3 on ports 7&8 (PC), and (3) configured NAS NIC's as Bonded using RoundRobin option. Transfers were identical to just one ETH port, as expected since I only have one PC running.
The promise of SMB multichannel is much different. When properly configured, Windows automatically bonds DHCP-assigned ports between devices and automatically shares bandwidth over those ports, whether 2, 3, 4 or more (in my case, 2 ports on each device). I've watched numerous YouTube demos of this working between a single PC and a NAS, and have read multiple articles explaining same. In most cases, the PC used by these guys is running a Windows Server flavor (2012 or higher). Windows Server is "plug and play" for SMB multichannel - you can literally just plug in two cables into the NAS and get double the bandwidth instantly (again, only limited by your PC's and NAS's HW). But there's precious little info out there for Windows 10 users. I've confirmed through Powershell that SMB2.0 is "True" and so is SMB Multichannel. So in theory Windows is set up and should just "work". I'm looking for examples from anyone who has actually made this work over pedestrial Windows, as opposed to Windows Server.
- StephenBMay 09, 2020Guru - Experienced User
jimk1963 wrote:
The promise of SMB multichannel is much different.
AFAIK SMB multichannel isn't enabled on the NAS.
- jimk1963May 10, 2020Luminary
StephenB wrote:
jimk1963 wrote:The promise of SMB multichannel is much different.
AFAIK SMB multichannel isn't enabled on the NAS.
Thanks Stephen, thought I read that it was supported somewhere but am looking again and all I see is SMB3 support, but SMB Multichannel is "experimental" per Samba and not enabled on the NAS. This is same story as QNAP NAS. With QNAP, there are several good videos showing how to SSH into the NAS and change the Multichannel to "True". Do you know if that's possible on ReadyNAS? I've used Putty to SSH into the RN528X but don't know the syntax once I'm in there and don't want to mess anything up.
I did run Powershell's "get-smbserverconfiguration" command on my PC and "EnableMultiChannel" is True in the list, as are EnableSMB1Protocol and EnableSMB2Protocol. There's no entry for SMB3 in the list. I don't know run the equivalent command with Putty on the NAS.
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