Link Aggregation (802.3ad) on EX4100

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX4
1

Hi all,

Since I couldn’t find any information around about link aggregation on the forums I would like to provide my experience and also ask for others to share their own experience on this subject.

My setup is the following:

NAS1: EX4100 (6x4TB) RAID5
NAS2: EX4100 (3x3TB) RAID5
SWITCH: NETGEAR GS108T
ROUTER: ASUS RT-N66U (although this doesn’t matter since it doesn’t support LAG with standard fw).
PC MB: ASUS P9X79 Deluxe (with 2 lans Realtek and Intel).

Ok so I have both nas setup with Link Aggregation set to 802.3ad and my PC (windows 10) setup with Teaming using the intel lan driver. I’ve set the configuration to “Static” so I get a detected connection of 2gbps (1+1).

All 3 devices (PC, NAS1 and NAS2) are connected to the aforementioned switch that supports link aggregation. On the switch I can configure the LAG type to Static or LACP. The PC link is configured to Static and both NAS are configured to LACP. When I tried to configure the NAS as Static in the switch I wasn’t able to access the shares correctly (random disconnects, no access at all from other devices, etc) which led me to believe that EX4100 on supports LACP and not Static.

I didn’t do any extensive testing before I had this setup but I realized that I can get speeds of ~800-900mbps with copying from the PC to the NAS (I don’t know if I could get these speeds before).
Another thing I’ve noticed was that when copying to both NAS simultaneous from my PC I could get a network usage of around 1.6gbps that would make sense assuming each NAS was doing ~800-900mbps. And these was something that I was hoping for: being able to use both NAS simultaneously with loss of network performance.

Did any of you guys have any experience with this?

The other questions I have are:

  1. Does the EX4100 support Static link aggregation? Meaning it will behave as a 2gbps connection overall? If so how can I configure it? (via ssh perhaps?)
  2. Assuming is possible to have static link aggregation on the NAS would that increase the performance (2 computers accessing at the same time)? I will assume not due to disk speed reads / memory constraints on the nas… (unless the disks are SSD or something)

Thank you :slight_smile: