I just had a question in relation to a while back in Pistols PC feature you mentioned that Pistol runs dual gbit NICs and it was implied if I have heard it right, that this increased throughput back to some network storage you have.
I have a Synology running through a managed HP Procurve with LACP dual gbit to the switch. When testing I pulled data down to 3 different machines and the Synology was able to upload at around 170mbps which in my eyes is close enough to 2gbps right?
Well, as I do a lot of batch extracting it is very slow, reading about 24mbps down and then around 17mbps back to the NAS obviously this is a traffic negotiation issue down a single 1gbps connection to my PC. I was going to installed a dual Intel gbit NIC with LACP to try and get a bit more bandwidth but I have been advised this wont work as 1 source to another will not run at "2gbps"
Batch extracting is the only time this annoys me...
if anyone could shed some light on this that'd be tops.
I can't really help you with the slow speed but adding a second nic won't help. With link aggregation the speed between two computers will only be as fast as a single link speed (so 1gbps), it allows you to increase the bandwidth for multiple links to multiple machines. So if you had 4 computers accessing the NAS then between them they would have 2gbps bandwidth but each computer would not be able to exceed 1gbps.
I think there is a way to do it in linux, but I'm not 100% sure. I think it works by striping the data in a similar way to how RAID0 works, but there can be problems with packets arriving out of order.
Dual Gigabit NIC's are designed for running 2 networks side by side. Like having a dedicated internet connection and then a render farm (Cluster) without ether interfearing with each other. I havent done much with dual NIC's but my mobo has them and from my tests (I never really tried) I found it impossible (With very little effort) to run 1 network through to nics.
Also HDD's mostly dont even reach gigabit speeds. One or 2 of them may just but unless your running SSD's or a RAID setup, there is no point in faster than gigabit. But if you do have storage systems that supports faster than gigabit then your best best is to get a 10gigabit network card. You also have to remember that the network you are using also has to meet the speeds you require.
Well a regular network card will handle 1gbps in both directions simultaneously, so adding another shouldn't really make much of a difference. But it's not that expensive to pick up a dual port card so if you want to give it a try there's nothing wrong with it
In linux you can run any two nics in a link aggregation setup but in windows I'm pretty sure they have to be the same type and the driver has to support it. There are lots of used for multiple nics, I have a computer with 5 nics which i use for virtual machines. If you already had a managed switch then I would use link aggregation for what you describe (rather than having a separate interface for internet and the render farm). It would give you the same benefit (not having the internet and render traffic competing with each other on the one interface) but it would be more flexible and would allow you to share the internet with the cluster without needing to have the computer in the middle turned on. But yeah, there are lots of uses for multiple nics, not just link aggregation, and it really doesn't work the way people assume it does.
Also, most modern mechanical hard drive will do above 150MB/s which is more than a gigabit network interface can handle, not to mention that unless you have good network hardware you probably won't get much higher than 80MB/s on a gigabit network. I recently overhauled my network and now i can get data transfers between 110 and 120 MB/s, I'd love to run a 10gbps network but the cost is too high for what I'm using it for.
yea your correct, Very tired so miss calced. A good HDD should manage 120 to 150MB/s which is at the ballpark of 1.2gigabit. However that is transfering a continues stream of data and only in such cases where you need to constantly save and transfer high volumes of data. However in real world performance its a lot lower.
Anyway, Most people will not have much of a use for more than 1 NIC. People like logan and Pistol obviously have a lot of recordings that they need to save on the fly and so having a NAS with a 10gigabit network. However in an average network with a NAS and an internet connection running on a single gigabit NIC, I doubt you would see any performance hit on transfers or internet speeds unless you have gigabit internet.
In reality you have to worry about the HDD's first. Search times and transfer speeds depending on the size of the files you are transfering will bottleneck a network connection before a gigabit NIC would. Only in a professional environment where you specifically need high speed networking for recording of video, rendering 3D scenes or Video. Data processing. would you really Need more than 1 NIC. Sure they have their uses and having your virtual machines each having their own dedicate NIC is nice but your not going to see much actual performance gain.
Once back in NZ, I hope to setup a NAS along with a 10gigabit network for "Future proofing" But again, OP wont see any gain with link aggregation as his data flow is less than 1 gigabit. Im a bit confused with OP's question but a Dual NIC system seams to be un-needed.
I'm assuming you have a managed switch that has LACP as well otherwise you cant team the 2x ports. I'm getting the card anyway as it wont cost me anything. Its out of a HP DL380 Server so will support teaming of the ports no problems. Windows 7 64bit drivers could be where I run into issues.
I run 2 sets of SSD's in RAID-0 on my desktop so no issues with speed here.
My point is she has a dual gigabit NIC in her PC not a 10gbe NIC. If its for redundancy that's fine but it was implied it was for speed. I'd like to know how.
If I extract something on my SSDs it rips through obviously. If I extract something on a USB3 external disk its decent but pulling the .rar down the pipe, extracting it and sending it back up the pipe is slow. This is what i'm trying to improve. If she has configured a dual NIC for speed. I'd like to know how. That is the question i'm asking.
A 10 gigabit network would be awesome, but all the gear I've been looking at on ebay is too expensive. It'd be cool to see a post about it if you do set it up though.
I think your problem might be with the NAS, if you are extracting files from the NAS back to the NAS then the hard drive is having to read and write at the same time, this will slow it right down. 24mbps seems really slow though but I think this is where the problem is, and I don't think there's much you can do about it. It could be faster to extract the files to your computer then transfer them back across.
It's not the NAS. Its a 10 drive unit that WILL upload at about 170mbps right now when sending data to different machines and pull down about 80mbps while writing back to it at about 60mbps when I test reading/writing at the same time from different machines. It's to do with the network pulling data down and sending it back to the source at the same time on a single link.