Port bonding

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robothunter

Limp Gawd
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Jan 19, 2008
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Newegg sent me a coupon for 20% off select NAS's. I have been wanting the Synology DS1812+ for a while now and $879 was to good a price to pass up. The DS1812+ has 2 gigabit LAN ports. My router is a Netgear WNDR3700 running dd-wrt.

The Synology supports port bonding but I'm not sure if I can enable port bonding on my router with dd-wrt or if it is even worth it. If I can enable port bonding for speed not redundancy would there be any benefit or is my speed limited by the speed of my NAS? If I cant transfer data to or from my NAS faster then a single gigabit connection what is the point? I probably wouldn't have more then 2 or 3 users connected at a time.

I'm not sure if my math is right for what I'm thinking. If a Gigabit LAN transfers data at 1Gb/sec that would be 125MB/sec. If I am copying data to/from a conventional hard drive I would be lucky to get 80 or 90 MB/sec from that drive which would be the limiting factor. Is that correct?
 
robothunter said:
I'm not sure if my math is right for what I'm thinking. If a Gigabit LAN transfers data at 1Gb/sec that would be 125MB/sec. If I am copying data to/from a conventional hard drive I would be lucky to get 80 or 90 MB/sec from that drive which would be the limiting factor. Is that correct?
Click to expand...

125MB/sec is a theoretical limit which you will never reach due to protocol overhead, etc. 100-110MB/sec is closer to the real-world maximum.

Never used a Synology unit, but I'd assume there would be some sort of benchmarking tools available. Why don't you see how your drive array is performing, and go from there.
 
most consumer routers actually support LACP on 2 ports under dd-wrt, at least the Broadcom ones (I think the Broadcom ones), but that would basically only let 2 devices on the other 2 ports get theoretically full bandwidth each at the same time it wouldn't make any single transfer any faster
 
Thanks for the info. It is going to take some time for the parity check on the Synology. I have done a little more research based on your posts. I found Intel's NAS performance toolkit. I currently have the NAS connected with 1 LAN port. When the parity check is done I will run the NASPT. In the meantime I will be looking into how to set up port bonding on my router though dd-wrt. It will probably take a few days to get it all done but I will report whatever I find in case someone else is wondering the same thing.

If anyone needs the NASPT here is the link.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-nas-performance-toolkit/
 
When you are bonding the ports like that you will only be able to get 1Gb per connection. An example would be you have two client access the NAS each client would be able to use the whole 1Gb link. It is not like you get 2Gb when you bond them.

You would do this for redundancy or increase throughput to many client at once.

If you are just connecting 2 or 3 users at a time you most likely will not see any difference.

I'm not an expert on networking but I have picked up a lot from reading this forum and working at home. Correct me if I am wrong.
 
artbird309 said:
When you are bonding the ports like that you will only be able to get 1Gb per connection. An example would be you have two client access the NAS each client would be able to use the whole 1Gb link. It is not like you get 2Gb when you bond them.

You would do this for redundancy or increase throughput to many client at once.

If you are just connecting 2 or 3 users at a time you most likely will not see any difference.

I'm not an expert on networking but I have picked up a lot from reading this forum and working at home. Correct me if I am wrong.
Click to expand...

Unless you are using layer 4 determination on the link then you are correct, the fastest you will be able two transfer between two hosts across an aggregated link will be just one of the links.
 
robothunter said:
Newegg sent me a coupon for 20% off select NAS's. I have been wanting the Synology DS1812+ for a while now and $879 was to good a price to pass up. The DS1812+ has 2 gigabit LAN ports. My router is a Netgear WNDR3700 running dd-wrt.

The Synology supports port bonding but I'm not sure if I can enable port bonding on my router with dd-wrt or if it is even worth it. If I can enable port bonding for speed not redundancy would there be any benefit or is my speed limited by the speed of my NAS? If I cant transfer data to or from my NAS faster then a single gigabit connection what is the point? I probably wouldn't have more then 2 or 3 users connected at a time.

I'm not sure if my math is right for what I'm thinking. If a Gigabit LAN transfers data at 1Gb/sec that would be 125MB/sec. If I am copying data to/from a conventional hard drive I would be lucky to get 80 or 90 MB/sec from that drive which would be the limiting factor. Is that correct?
Click to expand...

It's not the gigabit port of your synology that will be the limiting factor but your netgear wndr3700. I've copied files from a synology 1812 with speeds faster then 100MB/sec.(connected on a cisco 3750g)
 
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