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Having acquired a MacMini 2018 with a 10G network card, I was wondering if I could do the following to increase the bandwith between the 2120 and the Mac. Basically I wanted to buy a GS110EMX switch that allows LACP to connect to the NAS, and use one of the two 10GE ports of the switch to connect, via a Cat6 cable of around 10m, to the MacMini in my office.
Would the bandwith be effectively increased thanks to the dual connection switch/NAS? My disks are HDDs Enterprise grade, the NAS is not the fastest one: Will I notice any difference when backing up or accesing the NAS from the Mac, or the bottleneck is elsewhere?
One simple question: Is there a good way of milking a bit more of throughput to my NAS, used by a single user which is me, from my MacMini 2018 with 10GbE port, just by updating one component of my setup?
Does the Mac have a 10GBASE-T port? Do you know if it's NIC supports MultiGiG? There are several 10 GbE physical layers, so you do need to be careful on that.
You need a managed switch with a 10 gig port. You set up a static LAG in that switch that uses the two connections to the NAS. On the NAS side, you select "round robin" as the aggregation method. This will double the bandwidth from the NAS to the switch. Bandwidth to the NAS will likely double, but that depends on the packet scheduling mechanism in the switch (which is never clearly stated in the data sheet). Of course the bandwidth is only one constraint, there might be other bottlenecks (processor limits, etc).
One consequence of allowing flows from the NAS to exceed 1 gigabit is that you will potentially overrun clients that don't have 10 Gig. But if you connect with WiFi, you likely are already doing that now. In any event, one option to prevent buffer overun is to enable flow control in the switch (and check to see if it is enabled in the clients). The other is to depend on TCP retransmission/rate control.
The net here is that the switch you are considering can be used to do what you want (as long as it will connect at 10 gigabits with the Mac).
Link aggregation does little to help a single connections' speed. It helps when there are multiple uses by spreading their use between the ports.
Does the 2120 have a PCIe 8x or bigger expansion slot? If so, I believe you can put the same 10GBe card in it as ships with the 4220X. (Intel X540-T2).
Link aggregation does little to help a single connections' speed. It helps when there are multiple uses by spreading their use between the ports.
That does depend on the mode though. If you set up a static LAG to the switch, and configure the NAS to use round-robin, then you would see faster download speeds on the 10 gb connection. The upload depends on what the switch does (which usually isn't configurable).
One simple question: Is there a good way of milking a bit more of throughput to my NAS, used by a single user which is me, from my MacMini 2018 with 10GbE port, just by updating one component of my setup? If I can increase the speed by 50% through the acquisition of a 200 EUR/USD switch to help me wait a couple of years more until 10Gb switchs and NAS are more ubiquitous I would be set.
One simple question: Is there a good way of milking a bit more of throughput to my NAS, used by a single user which is me, from my MacMini 2018 with 10GbE port, just by updating one component of my setup?
Does the Mac have a 10GBASE-T port? Do you know if it's NIC supports MultiGiG? There are several 10 GbE physical layers, so you do need to be careful on that.
You need a managed switch with a 10 gig port. You set up a static LAG in that switch that uses the two connections to the NAS. On the NAS side, you select "round robin" as the aggregation method. This will double the bandwidth from the NAS to the switch. Bandwidth to the NAS will likely double, but that depends on the packet scheduling mechanism in the switch (which is never clearly stated in the data sheet). Of course the bandwidth is only one constraint, there might be other bottlenecks (processor limits, etc).
One consequence of allowing flows from the NAS to exceed 1 gigabit is that you will potentially overrun clients that don't have 10 Gig. But if you connect with WiFi, you likely are already doing that now. In any event, one option to prevent buffer overun is to enable flow control in the switch (and check to see if it is enabled in the clients). The other is to depend on TCP retransmission/rate control.
The net here is that the switch you are considering can be used to do what you want (as long as it will connect at 10 gigabits with the Mac).
