A friend of mine is building a video editing PC and the motherboard he is using has two network cards built in. One a 2.5Gbps card and one a 10Gbps card.
They have a NAS (network attached storage) which has a 10Gbps card in it and they also have a switch which has 10Gbps ports. All fine so far.
Their question is if they can tell the PC to use the 2.5Gbps card for internet browsing/Netflix and have the faster 10Gbps card only for the NAS?
I admit I am kinda stymied on this one. While I am almost sure it is possible it seems a big hassle and I am not sure if there are noticeable benefits. But, he has the equipment and if there is an easy way to do it then why not? His router and switch are mostly dumb consumer stuff.
There are two basic approaches, but both assume you can put your NAS and your outbound Internet gateway on separate subnets.
One of which adjusts the routing tables so all traffic directed at the NAS subnet goes to one NIC and everything else goes to the other NIC.
The other method changes the priority so the (in your case) 2.5gbps NIC has high priority for taking all the traffic while the 10gpbs NIC is set to low priority. Then you bind the 10gpbs card only to the subnet where the NAS is. The net effect is the 10gbps card is the only way to reach the NAS and the slow 2.5gbps card greedily hogs all the other traffic that could go either way.
If you can’t subnet them separately then you probably need to go with the routing table approach. I recall doing something similar a few years back to outsmart an attempt by Corporate to route all outbound traffic from my remote machine through their VPN and their spies and filters. So of course I just routed all my traffic around that speedbump but left all their traffic going the way they expected.
If all this is total Greek to you both, I’m out of the business too long to give click-by-click instructions. But I’m sure somebody here could do exactly that or nearly that fairly easily.
At a minimum you’ve now got some new terms and ideas to google for more.
My concern is his NAS can be accessed remotely from outside his local network. This is an important feature to him. I am not sure if setting up different subnets breaks that outside access. Again, I am sure most things are possible with enough effort…just not sure how much effort this is worth. Just use the 10Gb interface and be done with it.
Unless the NAS itself, and the PC, are able to routinely generate traffic in either direction at >10gbps rates and sustain that for a meaningful continuous period and also over a meaningful fraction of the long-term duty cycle, all this is masturbation, not performance tuning.
That would be even more so if there are a lot of other clients accessing the NAS or running through the same switch.
He works from home. I think his NAS is capable of occasionally hitting >10Gbps but only in some ideal moments. Most times it is less.
But, he has a PLEX server running and his two kids and wife may each be streaming 4k video and he wants to watch YouTube (or whatever) while transferring a big video file. It is not about whomping on the storage 24/7 but doing it after dinner and everyone in the home is hitting it at once.
I have not tested it all to see how the overall traffic is though so I really cannot say.
Make sure he gets his Plex server updated. And for those software developers out there that work on security tools, don’t install Plex and other non-essential software on your development machine. Lastpass learned the hard way…
As is usually the case, I can speak to a variation on the situation, but not the specific situation.
I have four desktops and four NAS units sitting in a room on their own router. The router WAN gateway is set to my primary household LAN, so there are two different networks (192.168.1.XXX and 192.168.0.XXX). I did this to keep the video and file transfers off the LAN my wife and I use for everything else in the house. I remote desktop into the desktop machines to run them (doing video conversions, etc.)
Do I see an overall improvement in speed? Maybe…but I doubt it. It became obvious that the NAS and desktop R/W was my limiting factor. And I hit that pretty quick, even with all SSDs.