I'm speaking a little outside of my comfort zone, but based on my understanding, LACP (802.3ad) generally doesn't provide any increase in throughput for a single stream. The idea is to provide fault tolerance, and provide more bandwidth for multiple streams over multiple hosts--but any single stream is usually going to be using only one link. My understanding is that most switches select which link in the bundle to use based on some math on source MAC address.
If your goal is to provide more bandwidth for a single stream (or even multiple streams between the same two systems), 10Gb is going to be your best bet--but it will be pricey. If you're only interested in speed between your desktop and the fileserver, you could consider running a dedicated link between those two, and use some HOSTS trickery to ensure your traffic goes down that dedicated link. If you're running Windows, you're also going to want to make sure that both sides are SMB2 capable--ie: Vista/Server 2008 or newer. Whereas speeds over about 50 or 60MB/s are uncommon (but not unseen) over SMB1, I regularly get north of 115MB/s between SMB2-capable boxes, even over crummy home grade switches and Realtek NICs. Most non-Windows SMB implementations are still running SMB1, with SMB2 support still immature in projects such as SAMBA. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:hardware- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Jason Chue > Sent: Monday, November 15, 2010 4:00 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [H] Faster than Gigabit? > > I'm actually planning on building a fast trunking home network between my > existing desktop and my existing NAS / file server and would appreciate > suggestions on how best to build it cheaply. > > I have a few options. One would be to team 2x Gigabit connections. That > would require dual port network cards for the server and one for the > desktop. I was thinking HP NC360T. I would need a managed switch too. > Something like an 8 port Procurve 1810-8G to handle the link aggregation > connections. > > The other option that I have been looking is Infiniband, 10GBe or fibre > channel connections. But from what I have seen on ebay, their switches get > pretty unaffordable or am I incorrect? > > Has anybody done something like this? Perhaps networking gurus here can > give more insight on the hardware. > > Jason
