You said RAID5? I don't think that you can increase write speed - RAID5 writes are inherently quite slow (creating and writing reduntant recovery sectors uses CPU and increases writable data volume); SSD (cache) writes depend on SSD controller and hardware, but usually you can't hold sustained write speed long at the maximum limit.
About read speed - depend on RAID controller it can read from 3 or 4 HDD in parallel (in RAID5) and optimise seeks between 4 HDD-s; on your current data I guess you don't get higher read speed either - but this needs experimenting, current value can be limited by network after all.
Read speed also depends on what you read - continous data (less seeks) or small data chunks from different tracks (causes more seeking, which is slowest operation for HDDs); also depends on caching (reading same data twice does use cache).
Thanks.
I have decided to try the port trunking method to see what happens, but I'm aware that it probably won't help me much :-(
e.g.
-if I make a backup of my PC to the NAS it writes just one big single image file onto the NAS. So that one file will all "go through" just one cable and so I'm assuming that the backup won't run any faster at all using port trunking.
-If there were two users using the NAS at the same time it would help "speed up" both, but that will only be quite rare in my case.
-not sure what happens if I use windows to copy say 1000 smaller files to the NAS.
I'm assuming that windows will make such a "copy" one file at a time, and this will not be speeded up by port trunking?
but maybe it does help if I split the copy of all these files into two copies of 500 files each and let the two copies run at the same time ?
As soon as I find time, I'll try it out and see for myself
In the meantime a month has gone by and I 've learned quite a bit more than before, and can say the answer to your question is "no" .
You also need 2 cables from the switch to a Dual 2.5G NIC in the computer to gain speed.
You can also forget link aggregation the better way is to instead enable SMB 3.0 Multichannel. This works perfectly without a managed switch and allows you to vastly increase the speed above 2.5G for transferring even a single file between the 2 devices.
I did some more experimenting and found a solution that fits well for me.
I now have 6 x 8T HDD's connected in a RAID10 config in the QNAP NAS
RAID10 has a faster write speed and is more reliable with more redundancy compared to RAID5, of course this comes at a cost, you "lose" 50% of the total storage space with RAID10.
With the network connected like this, I have a "5G" max speed between the PC and NAS.
Important to note that a single cable connected with 10G between the PC's NIC and 10G in the SFP port of the switch is not as fast as using 2 cables both connected with 2.5G !!!!
The max speed of both read and write is now the same at about 4400Mbps with read speed being limited by the "5G" network speed.
This is fine for me for file transfers.
A backup from the PC to NAS runs at only 1700mbps because it's limited by the speed that my Acronis backup software can work, a bit disappointing but it now runs automatically and there's still enough network capacity in parallel while it's working when needed.
Also installed a new faster WiFi6 access point and 3 more 2.5G switches in the rest of the home network. A new 2.5G router with a faster WiFi7 is also waiting in its unopened box to be installed sometime soon. Then my network upgrade is finished :-)
That is good news as far as your speed goes. For me, I would need to rewire a lot of my house as my router sits quite a way from my office and is only connected using a 1gb/sec cable and goes via 3 or 4 switches before it gets to my PC & NAS boxes. I'd also need to upgrade my PC network connections.
sure it doesn't come for free, quite a bit of time and effort is needed but if you already have CAT5e cables they are good enough for 2.5G speeds and everytime it goes through a switch (I think) the signal "starts again" in terms of how long the cable can be. Sort of like a booster along the way for the signal. But you would need to replace the 1G switches with 2.5G versions so the costs do start to add up.
A dual 2.5G NIC for the PC would be needed as well. My QNAP NAS came with dual 2.5G LAN connectors already installed.
For cabled connections, the "G" stands for "Gigabits per second" (Gbps) - ie. the actual speed you get. For example 2.5G is 2,500,000,000 bits per second (2.5Gbps)
For mobile, the "G" stands for "generation". So, if your lucky enough the get 5G, your on the 5th generation of mobile protocols/products. The actual speed you'll get will depend on many things. The theoretical maximum speed is 10 - 50 Gbps, but reality is very different. In 2023 the reported max speed in the UK was just shy of 1 Gbps
Hi Alan
I just read your original question again and I can now see a cheap and easy way to double your current transfer rate between PC & NAS if you want to ,...
No new cables needed, no new switches, just a new dual NIC for the PC (costs about 30 Euro) and one extra cable.
The connection would be like this :
and you'd then just need to enable SMB 3.0 multichannel on the NAS, I assume that is possible with a Synology?, (with my QNAP NAS it is just one "tick" by that option), The switches do not need to be managed, no link aggregation or trunking needs to be set up.
Another nice feature about the SMB3.0 is that if (admittedly in some unlikely rare case) one of the cables should get broken, then the LAN connection still runs without any interruption through the other cable :-)
...not sure about that, Maybe?
I had the same situation, but thought before I buy a single NIC, I might as well just buy a dual NIC to be sure that it works.
(cheapest dual 1G NIC I saw on Amazon was less that 15 pounds)
