I need some networking advice. I move a lot of media files between my NAS and my PC (i7 in my sig and the NAS is an i3 QNAP). I have an 8 port gigabit switch. I think its a Dlink dgs008. I currently get 117mbs transfer, but I have heard port trunking could double this? If so, how do I do it? What kit will I need? The NAS supports port trunking and has 2 network cards. My PC only has one network connection, do I need to add a second? What switch will I need and do I need more than one? Or do I connect the pc and nas direct and then connect the nas and pc through a switch using their second connections? Any help/advice you can give is appreciated as I don't know much about this and would prefer not to have to spend a fortune.
You would ideally want 2 x NICs in your host that are the same, create an etherchannel, then attatch that to the switch to give you 2gb.... Do the same for your NAS and there you go.... You will need a switch that will allow you do bind ports together to form the etherchannel though and support it... At a consumer level I don't know what to recommend in this space... Your NAS would need to be able to write at 230MB a sec though to really make this worth it....
Firstly you need a switch that supports link aggregation, as this feature is enabled specifically per port. If your current switch cannot be managed (via serial/terminal or web interface) it's unlikely to support it. It's not just a case of having two network ports for the PC, you will need a network card that supports also aggregation. Some onboard NICs do support this but you'll likely need a new dual port card that does. Then both NAS & PC will have two wired connections to the switch, each port-pair is then setup with aggregation and will act like one big link with double the bandwidth. I had the exact same thing setup when I migrated data from PC-NAS, and the transfer speeds went up considerably. I've got a managed switch going, but not any twin network cards: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=275747 edit: too slow at typing!
I agree not worth pursuing unless your disks are faster than the network limit. HDD are still probably going to be the bottleneck at somewhere around 120-160MB/s. I had a play with it on my set up since both a server and my main pc have dual nics that support aggregation and it didn't make much of difference due to hard drives. Maybe it was a few seconds quicker on occasion. I ended up switching it to teaming balancing on my server though since it can occasionally be useful to keep speeds up when multiple access.
