Synology and link aggregation

[TAPtech]

Hi Guys,

Anyone have experience with Synology NAS units and link aggregation? I work with a colleague and we have a DS412+ in our office, the little box flies! We have a gigabit network setup, and I'm sure that the little Synology is bottlenecked by it. I can see the fire burning in it's eyes.

I have a spare Dell switch that supports link aggregation and think I'll try it out to see if it gives any boost in multi-user access. There's only 4 people in the office really, but often times we'll have two guys moving really big files across the network. I'm hoping this speeds it up.

I have not setup link aggregation before, so here's my good question: does the router need to support it too? Setup is Modem->Router->Switch->networked devices (including NAS)

 

[Martyn]

I've not done it myself but just found this in the Synology website

http://www.synology.com/en-global/support/tutorials/525

 

[trevm999]

I don't really have anything useful to add but the DS412+ has been fantastic where I have set one up.

 

[TAPtech]

Yeah, it totally rocks. The remote file-share is super-friggin-awesome for us to share files with clients.

Only complaint with Synology is that the backup client they have isn't up to par with the rest of their stuff. I immediately assumed it was a full blown image based backup solution because I was spoiled with all the other stuff

 

[Markverhyden]

I'm not sure that you will see any improvement in speed with aggregation. The raw specs on the NIC ports are 1000baseT. The read/write speeds are listed as 205.68 MB/sec Reading, 182.66 MB/sec Writing which I guess are computed in a system environment. Meaning a statistical computation based on an actual test set. And the machine is using an Atom processor.

At best I would think that if you setup separate IP's for the NIC's and used traffic shaping you might be able to get some improvement by "VLANing" the volume users.

 

[TAPtech]

Well, only one way to find out! I'll try this new switch tomorrow and report back. Basically I'll just initiate a very large file transfer from two machines to the NAS at the same time. Setup the second NIC and do the same.

 

[Frick]

How is the synology setup? Number of drives and raid level? You can determine the max r/w speed from that and use it to decide if link aggregation will improve your performance

 

[TAPtech]

It is a 4 bay unit but only has two drives using the SHR array. It saturates the gigabit connection, or at least I would assume, at a little above 100MB/s.

Keep in mind- I'm not trying to increase the transfer speed. I'm trying to increase the performance when multiple users are accessing the NAS.

 

[Frick]

Based on using a 2 drive shr array (2 drive raid 1) then your bottleneck is the drive and not the network adapter. Assuming you have 7200 rpm drive(s) then it can burst to approx 100MB/s, with sustained rates at around 75MB/s.

Add in the need for additional seeks and reading data from all over the drive due to multiple users accessing different data (I/O) and it is unlikely you are utilizing the max bandwidth of a single gigabit adapter (128MB/s before overhead).

 

[TAPtech]

Frick, your calcs are very close to my real-world results. We'll be adding two more disks to the array so we should be saturating that single gigabit port readily.

All this would be done already if my dang serial-USB adapter didn't poop itself. New one should be here soon, then I can configure the Dell switch!