Broadcomm 5720 with unraid

[tucansam]

Anyone running a Broadcomm 5720?  I would like a dual gig card that fits PCIe1x (I know), and its one of the only ones I can find.  The intent is to bond the interfaces.  

 

Anyone doing this in unraid?  

 

I almost always go Intel, but all of their dual gig NICs are PCIe4x, and even if I remove the end of the socket on the motherboard, I'm not sure it will work.

[JonathanM]

35 minutes ago, tucansam said:

The intent is to bond the interfaces. 

Why? If you are looking for point to point speed increase, I don't think you will see any.

[tucansam]

Hoping for load balancing.

[HellDiverUK]

1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

Why? If you are looking for point to point speed increase, I don't think you will see any.

 

Not the question he asked.  He ask if it would work, not for your opinion on whether he should do it or not. 

 

Op, it'll work fine.  Those Broadcom chips are pretty common in servers from the likes of Dell, so good linux support.

[JonathanM]

Just now, HellDiverUK said:

He ask if it would work, not for your opinion on whether he should do it or not.

If he's going to go through the time, trouble and expense to follow through, it would be helpful for him to have an idea beforehand whether or not it will achieve his goals. He didn't state his goal in the OP, so I was asking for clarification on what he expected. Too many people on here assume that if you bond 2 Gb NICs, you will get double the network speed.

 

Your attitude is not appreciated.

[tucansam]

My intended goal is load balancing.  Most of my devices connect via 802.11ac, and although that will never saturate a gig port, I have a couple of devices that are connected via a switch to the unraid server.  I have noticed that if the wife is watching something via Plex (wired client), and I am upstairs transferring a large file via wifi, my transfer slows a bit and/or her stream buffers from time to time.  Nothing major, but considering I can get one of these Broadcomm cards for $20 on fleabay, and my onboard is Realtek (garbage), I was hoping to cheaply mitigate the network issue by allowing unraid to pass traffic over two interfaces, albeit in only a 1x slot.

 

I do have an Intel (my preferred brand) gig card, but its only a single port.  May try this anyway just to bypass the Realtek and see if it makes a difference before I purchase a dual-port.

 

Given this requested task, will bonding still give me some benefit?  I have a low-end DLink switch that only includes a web-gui option for "bonding."  Have to check the spec, but I am hoping this will allow me to use the dual-port NIC in some fashion of load balancing.

 

Thanks again to all.