perhaps support for dual nic's teaming/bonding could be added in the future.  Since my supermicro mobo has dual gbit intal nics, it would be nice to get full utilization of the hardware

I would love multple NIC support as well and had been looking at a motherboard with 4 1Gbps NICs.  However, after looking into it, I decided the issue was more about the marketing of multi-NIC boards and my desire to have it rather than an absolute need for it for several reasons:

 

1.) Your router/switch must support the IEEE 802.3ad standard for link aggregation. (Most consumer routers and switches do not.)

2.) Your router/switch must actually have the hardware to deal with that amount of traffic. (Once again, low end consumer level equipment usually does not have the hardware specs to actually handle a full 1Gbps connection much less multiple connections. )

3.) With gigabit NICs being standard these days, the need for multi-NIC setups truly is not as important as it was back in the 10/100Mbps days when the NIC was truly a limiting factor.

4.) With an approximate effective throughput of 70-80MBps, you'd run into a bottleneck when it comes to writing to your array and, depending upon the drive used, even your cache drive .

 

 

The bottom line is that there are so many other potential bottlenecks in the system, that multi-NIC support would be of limited benefit at the present time.  Maybe I've overlooked something, but right now, I can understand why unRAID has not spent time integrating link aggregation support into the unRAID distribution.

 

 

Few, if any, users of unRAID have a disk subsystem (disks, controller, mobo) that could saturate even a single 1GB link.... so why bother?

 

If you have enough RAM, create a 1GB ramdisk on your client and on unRAID.  Copy from RAMdisk to RAMdisk over the network, and try it both directions.  If it is faster than when using hard drives, then a faster network stream won't help you.