To Bond or Not to Bond. 1Gb/10GbE and Multiple Ethernet Wired Connections (SOLVED)

[CodeEngie]

Hola,

 

I upgraded my Unraid server to 10GbE GTek NIC card and its been working perfectly. But it requires me to have two wired connections running to it. One is going to the onboard NIC and the other to the 10GbE NIC. So here are my questions:

 

1. Will changing the network settings to bond eliminate the need for two wired connections?

2. Is it preferable to have the networks connections separate and not bonded?

3. If I bond them will it affect Plex streaming when I copy files to the array?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Hoopster]

1 hour ago, CodeEngie said:

1. Will changing the network settings to bond eliminate the need for two wired connections?

No, in a bond, you still need a cable going to both connections.  A bond just treats the two NICs and the bandwith as if it were one connection.  This is oversimplified as there are various different bonding types, but you still need them both wired.

 

Your switch also needs to support bonding.

 

1 hour ago, CodeEngie said:

2. Is it preferable to have the networks connections separate and not bonded?

If what you are really trying to accomplish is to make the 10Gb your default connection for unRAID, you need to make sure it is eth0.  unRAID will always use eth0.

 

Under Settings --> Network Settings you can set which NIC is eth0

 

1 hour ago, CodeEngie said:

3. If I bond them will it affect Plex streaming when I copy files to the array?

You will never see 10Gb speeds unless you are copying from NVMe to NVMe (or something similarly fast) and you have a 10Gb NIC in your PC.  Copying to the array to hard drives you are usually fine with just Gigabit Ethernet, especially in a parity protected array.

 

Unless you are streaming very high bitrate content, I doubt you will see much impact on Plex streaming. Still, I am not sure bonding is really what you want to do unless you are doing it for failover/redundancy.

 

 

Edited February 2, 2021 by Hoopster