double ethernet ports

[JustWannaKnow]

I am running win7ultimate. Buddy gave me a gigabit nic card. If I plug it in, can I setup a way to use on board lan for incoming and the new nic for outgoing? Would there be any advantage if it is possible to set up?

 

[ggadrian]

That doesn't work that way.

With 1 nic you have 1Gbps (if you're using gigabit capable hardware) for incoming data and 1Gbps for outgoing data, so you already have what you want to do.

What you're asking is NIC teaming which would give you 2 out/2 in, but I don't know if it's possible with Windows 7. Maybe a quick google search about W7 nic teaming will give you an anwser.

 

[Zargon]

There is support inside windows 7, but the NICS have to support it as well. its way easier if you have 2 identical NICS of course

 

[imagoon]

There is support inside windows 7, but the NICS have to support it as well. its way easier if you have 2 identical NICS of course

You are talking teaming, the one for inbound and one for outbound thing he requested is not supported nor would make any sense since the connection would be full duplex. IE 1 NIC running in full duplex already would have the exact same bandwidth as the inbound / outbound configuration mentioned.

Further more you need switch support for the teaming and typically in a 1 to 1 connection, you won't be able to use a 2gb team for moving 2gb of data anyway.

 

[JackMDS]

There is some creative capacities in Expensive Professional Hardware with multiple connections, and or high level fiber optic connections to deal with augmented Networks.

However, that has nothing to do with a Regular client* computers regardless of its OS.

On regular client computer there is No Miracle beyond using one Good NIC.

*Client computer are the one that we use as oppose to computers that run real Server OSs.



😎

 

[88keys]

If you want to increase speed on a gig network, your only option without actually installing better hardware (i.e. a 2gbps or 10gbps switch) is to get a dual gigabit card.

The better ones start at around $90, the cheap ones are mostly garbage and have a tendency to overheat from what I have read.

These Rosewill cards, are the exception to the rule. I installed them on my server and my Main PC and I get around 70 or so mbs (actual) which isn't exactly double the speed vs a single gigabit NIC, but still a decent increase and worth the $70 or so that I spent on both.

But of course just as with anything that is good and cheap they just had to stop making them 🙂. So if you're interested you can check eBay and hope you can find someone who doens't want too much for them. Last I checked the going rate was $50 a piece which is about $20 over the original price.


And FWIW, at 70mbs you're approaching the data transfer limits of most single HDDs which is about 90mbps (or so) IIRC.

EDIT: MBS (megabytes per second) NOT MBPS (Megabits per second)

 

[VirtualLarry]

70mbits/sec is easily handled by 100Mbit NICs. If you meant 70MBytes/sec, that's easily handled by a single gigabit NIC. Even "lowly" Realtek cards can manage that.

 

[Zargon]

You are talking teaming, the one for inbound and one for outbound thing he requested is not supported nor would make any sense since the connection would be full duplex. IE 1 NIC running in full duplex already would have the exact same bandwidth as the inbound / outbound configuration mentioned.

Further more you need switch support for the teaming and typically in a 1 to 1 connection, you won't be able to use a 2gb team for moving 2gb of data anyway.

I was replying to ggadrian 😛

 

[imagoon]

I was replying to ggadrian 😛

That makes more sense lol.

 

[imagoon]

If you want to increase speed on a gig network, your only option without actually installing better hardware (i.e. a 2gbps or 10gbps switch) is to get a dual gigabit card.

The better ones start at around $90, the cheap ones are mostly garbage and have a tendency to overheat from what I have read.

These Rosewill cards, are the exception to the rule. I installed them on my server and my Main PC and I get around 70 or so mbps (actual) which isn't exactly double the speed vs a single gigabit NIC, but still a decent increase and worth the $70 or so that I spent on both.

But of course just as with anything that is good and cheap they just had to stop making them 🙂. So if you're interested you can check eBay and hope you can find someone who doens't want too much for them. Last I checked the going rate was $50 a piece which is about $20 over the original price.


And FWIW, at 70mbps you're approaching the data transfer limits of most single HDDs which is about 90mbps (or so) IIRC.

You are still not doing it without a managed switch that supports teaming. Add in the fact that a team cannot exceed the speed of a single team member from a single device to another single device. The only exception being a multipath protocol which isn't that common in the home.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

No point unless you already have other devices that are using 10GbE or nic teaming. If your PC is as fast as everything else, and you upgrade it, the rest of your network will just hold it back.

 

[88keys]

You are still not doing it without a managed switch that supports teaming. Add in the fact that a team cannot exceed the speed of a single team member from a single device to another single device. The only exception being a multipath protocol which isn't that common in the home.

Well the cards that I refer to don't actually require managed switches, and don't actually support LACP. The reviews of these products express this to certain extent. These cards are essentially a half measure to get a small boost in LAN speeds without having to actually upgrade the rest of your infrastructure. In otherwords, they're not a professional solution in any way shape or form.

70mbits/sec is easily handled by 100Mbit NICs. If you meant 70MBytes/sec, that's easily handled by a single gigabit NIC. Even "lowly" Realtek cards can manage that.

My speeds could be slow due to my aging switch. I got it back in '04/'05 right about the time that gigabit networking devices were starting to become affordable for consumers.
Another thing is that really didn't bother to configure my dual Ethernet card in Ubuntu like I'm supposed to. But I'm not well versed in Linux so that's going to take me a while and so I'll need to set aside the better part of a day to get around to doing that.

Not to mention that I decided to get myself a new 16 port switch which should be at my door in a week or so, so we'll see what speeds I get from that.

 

[imagoon]

Well the cards that I refer to don't actually require managed switches, and don't actually support LACP. The reviews of these products express this to certain extent. These cards are essentially a half measure to get a small boost in LAN speeds without having to actually upgrade the rest of your infrastructure. In otherwords, they're not a professional solution in any way shape or form.

Hate to say it but then they won't give you a performance boost. Teaming requires switch side support or the switch simply will not round robin the data. It will pick the first MAC address for the device and if it sees it twice, pick the lowest port number and send the data. Dual nics in a team on a computer without a managed switch can operate only in failover mode.

 

[88keys]

Well they did give me a small increase in my old setup running old decrepit hardware. Once I get my network up and running again (this weekend hopefully) I'll check and see the difference between between a single network port and these dual gig cards. I also should get this running correctly in Ubuntu. I hope I have time for that.

If all of this eliminates (or mostly eliminates) the performance gain I once had, I could always sell them on eBay.

 

[imagoon]

Well they did give me a small increase in my old setup running old decrepit hardware. Once I get my network up and running again (this weekend hopefully) I'll check and see the difference between between a single network port and these dual gig cards. I also should get this running correctly in Ubuntu. I hope I have time for that.

If all of this eliminates (or mostly eliminates) the performance gain I once had, I could always sell them on eBay.

If the increase was small I would guess they have a better NIC chip, more memory, TCP/IP offload or some other tech that helps. It could also help with transmit since you can flood frames to a switch but I can't see that really helping much if it floods a port else where. What are the cards?

 

[88keys]

I have These

However, I'm farily certain that these cards use the same chipset/drivers.


SYBA Dual Port Gigabit Card

 

[drebo]

Well the cards that I refer to don't actually require managed switches, and don't actually support LACP. The reviews of these products express this to certain extent. These cards are essentially a half measure to get a small boost in LAN speeds without having to actually upgrade the rest of your infrastructure. In otherwords, they're not a professional solution in any way shape or form.

The way teaming works when it's not LACP (or PAgP or straight aggregation) is that the NIC driver alternates the MAC address it responds to with ARP. Client A gets MAC A and client B gets MAC B. With two NICs, Client C would get MAC A. Etc. Etc.

Just as with LACP, however, you will not see transfer speeds beyond the capacity of the member links.

 

[imagoon]

The way teaming works when it's not LACP (or PAgP or straight aggregation) is that the NIC driver alternates the MAC address it responds to with ARP. Client A gets MAC A and client B gets MAC B. With two NICs, Client C would get MAC A. Etc. Etc.

Just as with LACP, however, you will not see transfer speeds beyond the capacity of the member links.

Which with ARP cache being around 4 seconds, unless I am missing something, wouldn't really do a lot and you would have a ton of devices changing their paths every few seconds. I guess that could speed up many:1 but it seems like a method that had a real possibility of "angering" switches and other devices that are caching and would have no effect on something that is routed since the layer 2 tricks wouldn't translate to a layer 3 tech etc. At least LACP can work over routed networks as long as you use IP hashing.

 

[imagoon]

I have These

However, I'm farily certain that these cards use the same chipset/drivers.


SYBA Dual Port Gigabit Card

Yeah that looks like a standard dual nic card. The "magic" must be in the drivers.

 

[drebo]

Which with ARP cache being around 4 seconds, unless I am missing something, wouldn't really do a lot and you would have a ton of devices changing their paths every few seconds. I guess that could speed up many:1 but it seems like a method that had a real possibility of "angering" switches and other devices that are caching and would have no effect on something that is routed since the layer 2 tricks wouldn't translate to a layer 3 tech etc. At least LACP can work over routed networks as long as you use IP hashing.

From what I understand, the drivers are intelligent enough to provide the same MAC to the same client for each request.

That said, I'd still never use it in a production server environment. LACP or nothing.

 

[88keys]

Well I got the switch running, and the results thus far are interesting....

To test out my stranded Cat5e connects vs my solid Cat5e connections, I decided to run the test using my NAS single onboard gigabit port to my recording PCs onboard gigabit port for the sake of consistency. (see thread)

The results for all of my solid connections hold very steady @ 74 MB/s across the board using standard single Ethernet ports. My old switch got me about 50 MB/s or so IIRC.

So I got the dual port card running on my nas again and ran the test on my main PC. This time around I get around 85 MB/s transfer speeds which is about a 13% increase as opposed to the 40% increase (albiet slower speeds) that I got with my old switch.
85 MB/s is a pretty nice transfer speed for a home network on an unmanaged switch, but that comes at a price....

I decided to run a transfer speed test using my recording PCs single ethernet port and instead of 74 MB/s, I was getting 55 MB/s..... So I decided to disable the dual port card in my main PC and switch over to it's onboard gig port..... And I got the same result; 55 MB/s. So I went down to my stranded cable runs and they gave me about 50 MB/s that would fluctuate a little more.

Granted 90% of what I do is between my main PC and my NAS, so the slight increase is useful in that regard, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade off lower speeds from everything else. Plus the fact that these cards do get hot which I don't like. I still haven't get the card configured properly in Ubuntu, but since I'm off I can hopefully do that today and see if that makes a difference.

The thing is that I'm probably more likely to notice a 30% drop in performance than I would a 13% increase in performance. If configuring doesn't make a difference in any significant way I'll most likely be selling these cards.

EDIT: before I waste the rest of my day muddling through SSH and conf files I think I'll just pop this in my recording PC which is running XP and just see how file transfers go with that.

 

[imagoon]

Well I got the switch running, and the results thus far are interesting....

To test out my stranded Cat5e connects vs my solid Cat5e connections, I decided to run the test using my NAS single onboard gigabit port to my recording PCs onboard gigabit port for the sake of consistency. (see thread)

The results for all of my solid connections hold very steady @ 74 MB/s across the board using standard single Ethernet ports. My old switch got me about 50 MB/s or so IIRC.

So I got the dual port card running on my nas again and ran the test on my main PC. This time around I get around 85 MB/s transfer speeds which is about a 13% increase as opposed to the 40% increase (albiet slower speeds) that I got with my old switch.
85 MB/s is a pretty nice transfer speed for a home network on an unmanaged switch, but that comes at a price....

I decided to run a transfer speed test using my recording PCs single ethernet port and instead of 74 MB/s, I was getting 55 MB/s..... So I decided to disable the dual port card in my main PC and switch over to it's onboard gig port..... And I got the same result; 55 MB/s. So I went down to my stranded cable runs and they gave me about 50 MB/s that would fluctuate a little more.

Granted 90% of what I do is between my main PC and my NAS, so the slight increase is useful in that regard, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade off lower speeds from everything else. Plus the fact that these cards do get hot which I don't like. I still haven't get the card configured properly in Ubuntu, but since I'm off I can hopefully do that today and see if that makes a difference.

The thing is that I'm probably more likely to notice a 30% drop in performance than I would a 13% increase in performance. If configuring doesn't make a difference in any significant way I'll most likely be selling these cards.

EDIT: before I waste the rest of my day muddling through SSH and conf files I think I'll just pop this in my recording PC which is running XP and just see how file transfers go with that.

How are you configuring those dual port cards? I would expect there to be some sort of application that makes it actually use both ports. Just pluging in a single port on a better 2 port card can get you better results than a single port card if the dual port card has tcp/ip off load, dedicated processor, better buffers etc.

 

[JackMDS]

The Dual Cards have nothing to do with improving "speed" on Client OSs running with consumer hardware.

On client OSs they can be used for iCS or similar arrangements.

On OSs that provide support for teaming from the inside they can help to control server loads and Network efficiency.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatec...d-load-balancing-to-your-cloud-workloads.aspx

----------------------

P.S. One of the most painful issue on the Internet is Marketeer taking advantage on the growing phenomenon of the public at large substituting technological knowledge with Verbal manipulations and Wishful thinking.

That said why not install 4 NICs? 4 is always better than 1 or 2. - :hmm: - :whiste:.



😎

 

[88keys]

How are you configuring those dual port cards? I would expect there to be some sort of application that makes it actually use both ports. Just pluging in a single port on a better 2 port card can get you better results than a single port card if the dual port card has tcp/ip off load, dedicated processor, better buffers etc.

You have to install Realtek Ethernet Utility which will team your NICs. I did that on my other Windows machine and I did see an increase from the Ubuntu server by a few MB/s. So I re enabled the single NIC on my Main PC and tested my other ports and it looks like I'm still getting around 55 Mb/s when transferring from a single Ethernet NIC to the dual Ethernet NIC. So it almost seems like the only way these things are really worth it is if you plan to use it on all of your devices which is just unfeasible and kind of expensive for %13 increase in speeds.

Well Like I said, it's just a half measure, and not a professional solution. You get what you pay for. It's useful to an extent, but it comes with obvious drawbacks.
It's odd how it was a much greater increase on my old (almost 10 year old) switch that was running my network rather slow, but with my new switch the increase in performance is so much less.

Not to mention the switch I bought is a bottom of the barrel Rosewill lol, so it's not exactly high end. But can't complain about 74 MB/s.

I hear alot of people scoff at Rosewill, but I look at them like I look at Honda. They don't make the most exciting products nor the best looking, but whatever you get from them, you can usually expect a pretty solid and reliable product that will do exactly what you wanted it to do.