SMB Multichannel between Windows 10 and Unraid

[tk40]

I have read through all of the articles I could find on the forums regarding SMB multichannel, but haven't seen that anyone has accomplished it.

 

My goal is to increase file transfer speeds to shares between a couple windows 10 machines and my Unraid. I'd prefer to be able to do this without having to go the 10GBe route as it'll be much less expensive and less complicated.

 

I have purchased some quad port GB nics that have been installed in the Windows 10 machines and the Unraid server. All of the machines are wired to the same switch and I have confirmed that they are all getting IP addresses for each of their network cards. I have also setup the special SMB parameters on Unraid to enable SMB multichannel.

 

No extra configuration was necessary on the Windows 10 side.

 

Transfers between the Windows 10 machines are in excess of 1GB/s so I know they are working, but transfers to shares on Unraid (that are SSD cache enabled shares) are still stuck at 1GB/s.

 

Let me know if anyone else has been successful with this. I am sure this would be a valuable way for everyone to cheaply get some performance as you can use regular unmanaged switches and inexpensive quad port NIC's that can be obtained for $25 on ebay.

[JorgeB]

2 hours ago, tk40 said:

quad port NIC's that can be obtained for $25 on ebay.

You can also buy $25 10GbE NICs on ebay, and if peer-to-peer connection is possible it's also very cheap and IMO preferable, I spend some time in the past trying to make it work with Unraid and never could, then upgraded to 10GbE and didn't needed it anymore, since then I don't believe anyone else tried it successfully, but one thing I found out since is that FreeNAS for example, unlike Windows, requires all NICs to be on a different network/subnet, since Unraid also uses Samba it might be worth a try, so use for example:

 

PC NIC1: 192.168.0.10
PC NIC2: 192.168.1.1

Unraid NIC1: 192.168.0.254
Unraid NIC2: 192.168.1.2

 

 

[tk40]

4 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

You can also buy $25 10GbE NICs on ebay, and if peer-to-peer connection is possible it's also very cheap and IMO preferable, I spend some time in the past trying to make it work with Unraid and never could, then upgraded to 10GbE and didn't needed it anymore, since then I don't believe anyone else tried it successfully, but one thing I found out since is that FreeNAS for example, unlike Windows, requires all NICs to be on a different network/subnet, since Unraid also uses Samba it might be worth a try, so use for example:

 

PC NIC1: 192.168.0.10
PC NIC2: 192.168.1.1

Unraid NIC1: 192.168.0.254
Unraid NIC2: 192.168.1.2

 

 

Thanks, Johnnie. I am trying to avoid some of the manual configuration required to do a peer to peer 10GB connection, but I may be forced to go that route if nothing else works out. What process did you used to setup your peer to peer connection?

[JorgeB]

One other thing I forgot, since it's been disabled on Unraid for an unrelated issue, IIRC Samba asynchronous read needs to be enable for multichannel to work, you can do that with:

 

aio read size = 4096

 

12 hours ago, tk40 said:

What process did you used to setup your peer to peer connection?

Just choose IPs from a different network for the 10GbE NICs, then connect by IP or edit the Windows hosts files to make all connections to that host go to the 10GbE IP.

 

I'm not using peer-to-peer now, or not for most connections, still using some since my switch doesn't have enough ports, Microtik has release a couple of inexpensive 10GbE switchs, I have the 8 port model.

 

 

Edited August 10, 2019 by johnnie.black