So I’m using an mITX board with two gigabit NIC’s:
Intel 82583V
Intel 82579LM
Both are connected through a TP-LINK TL-SG1005D switch, which is where my PC is also connected to.
I’m trying to combine their speeds so that I can reach a 2 Gbps throughput, but I can’t seem to be getting this process to work. IT also doesn’t help that I can’t fidn a lot of answers when it comes to what the differences are between Round-Robin, Load-Balancer, and LACP link aggregation methods.
When I use just one of the NIC’s, I get the full 1 Gbps bandwidth. If I create a Round-Robin or Load-Balancer link-aggregation, I get roughly 0.5 Gbps, and if I try to use LACP the connection does not work whatsoever.
I read up that LACP needs specific hardware support from the NIC’s and the switches, but supposedly most NIC’s & switches have this support since early 2000’s, and I can’t seem to be able to find documentation that says if the hardware supports it.
What can I try doing to get the NIC’s to team together through FreeNAS?
So first, none of the above options will give you 2gbs on a single connection. Lacp will let you net 2gb across at least two connections, but as you’ve found, you will need to configure both the host/server and the switch.
If you want to get higher speeds on single connections or transfers, look into multichannel smb.
Common since then, maybe, but definitely not in all switches.
Managed switches do but normal desktop unmanaged switches don’t. However as previously stated LACP will not increase the bandwidth between two hosts, each device is limited to the speed of a single link but the multiple links can be divided between multiple devices, increasing the aggregate bandwidth but not the individual link bandwidth.
Round robin can be used to connect two devices directly and will increase the bandwidth above a single link speed as it sort of works like raid0, however as you’ve discovered it can also lower the speed because it is very likely to cause collisions and is generally not recommended.