Apologies in advance if the answer is really simple I am just very new to this. I recently got 2.5Gb nics for my unraid machine and my main desktop to increase file transfer speeds. Right now they are both plugged directly into each other from nic to nic, the onboard gigabit ports of each machine go into the router. The problem is I don't know what I need to do to tell it to transfer files between each machine using the 2.5Gb nic and not to go through the router and the onboard 1Gb. Any help would be very appreciated, assume I know very little to nothing about networking

Set both end in different static IP segment, i.e. 192.168.x.y netmask 255.255.255.0

 

Then access smb by IP \\192.168.x.y

You also add the 2.5GbE IP the the Windows hosts file, if that's the OS you're using.

14 hours ago, Vr2Io said:

Set both end in different static IP segment, i.e. 192.168.x.y netmask 255.255.255.0

 

Then access smb by IP \\192.168.x.y

So once I set the static IP for that specific nic I can just map a network drive using that IP?

11 hours ago, thedangerine said:

So once I set the static IP for that specific nic I can just map a network drive using that IP?

Yes, and if you add that IP to the hosts file you can still use the server name.

Got it working, I was just being dumb and had only set an IP for one of the nic's and not the other. Once I did that I added a route in unraid under network settings and was able to write to my array at around 270-80 megbytes a second so very pleased with that. Thanks for all the advice everyone