Starting to do some research on this, so I thought a sticky and or some help from this community might help. Im new to it so ill have some newb questions at first as I start reading. (only 2 threads on here about Link aggregation LAG LACP Bonding 802.3ad )
Doc in the manual is pretty non existant to how to achieve and or requirements aside from just enableing.
Newb questions:
Can I just enable on the EX4 and the router will pick it up? (as in the manual)
Do I need a specific rounter. (the othe thread leads me to believe, but searching my router, I dont see any of these buzzwords) Router is an ASUS RT-N66.
I didnt see anything in my router to support this, but as it its a high end router I am sure it should. (Am I missing a search buzz work i have not found yet?)
While I appreciate your candidness, because I am often on that side as well, its not helpful. I didn’t say, I don’t know what it is, and I definitely want to see its benefits. I said I have never set it up, and am seeking help from the experts or at least those with experience of it.
Im going to figure out how to do it either way. It can’t be that difficult, so its just between the easy or hard road. I figured I would kill 2 birds here, and try to help those others who may be interested and looking. So pardon my skepticism if I continue looking for “more” expert help. ;]
I do hope you are incorrect about the router statement though… hate to have to purchase another piece of equipment to make this thing do what it should be able to do in the first place… (throughput wise) (speaking for all the other NASs in the 100MBs relm)
"First, I’m going to be on the side the says if you don’t know what LACP is or why it’s used, don’t use it. "
I find that statement stupid and close minded.
Please feel free to experiment, learn, and apply some of the advanced feature sets of your EX4 including LACP.
I enabled 802.3ad & LACP protocol in a simple NetGear 8-port Gigabit Smart Switch GS108T. That model and several others supports 802.3ad plus can switch 2000 Mbps of throughput.
The setup of channel bonding was easy in both the switch and EX4. I also used a a spare Thunderbolt port to adapt a second gigabit connection on my iMac then bonded those two interfaces on my iMac to a virtual LACP enabled port.
so essentially I have a switch w/ 2 connections in LACP to iMac and 2 connections LACP to EX4. Then a single upstream connection to router and rest of network.
So far the ONLY real limitation I have ran into is foolishly thinking Microsoft Windows software is remotely as advanced or configurable as Mac OSX. On the Mac it was a breeze to channel bond multiple connections into virtual connections. On the same computer running Windows 8.1 in boothcamp Windows doesn’t support LACP w/o buying the server edition.
Thanks sgallant04. Exactly my point. I am under M$ window$, so I am already prepared for a fiasco. Couple of my machines run Enterprise versions, so ill have to look at if that is supported too.
Looks like that switch is going to drop me around another $80-$100 which then brings me only within $50 of just buying a top (in fact the top) ranked competor 4 bay NAS. (which if bonded will yield 183-205MBs…)
Interesting… Really starting to make me wonder if I should return this within its return policy…
Honestly at that point I would look towards Synology or whoever your looking at. The 50MB/s on single gigabit when other NAS boxes can do 100 is just amost a tear jerker.
I would say the EX4 is doing what I want network storage w/ the hardware & software features which I hope will improve.
After playing around with PCI-i attached storage ( Thunderbolt ) DAS it’s just BEYOND any speed function of the NAS even if the kinks get ironed out.
Currently I’m using DAS as my main external storage/scratch backing up daily to NAS/RAID and then moving upto Amazon Glacier for long term off-site YMMV
I would love for the bugs to be worked out of OSX SMB2 and upgraded speeds from EX4 to start seeing 183~205 speeds. I’ll wait it out a bit.
I appologize… i didnt mean it as any sort of insult. I guaged your experience based on your questions…
And i based my answer on 20+ years of designing datacenter networks where even server admins dont have a clue on hkw things work and wind up creating disasters. :)
