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User profile for user: Doctorcomputer
Doctorcomputer Author
User level: Level 1
10 points

Airport Extreme Gigabit Ethernet & Jumbo Frames

Hi all.


Can somebody kindly support me regarding Gigabit Ethernet & Jumbo Frames with Airport Express?


I currently have and use a 5th generation Airport Express and wanna buy the TS-453S Pro QNAP NAS. In any NAS storage implementation, Gigabit Ethernet, Jumbo Frames as well Ethernet Card pairing, are all together very important to reach high throughput performance, so my questions are:


5th generation Airport Express

  • Are the Ethernet NIC's Gigabit NIC's?
  • Do they work also with Jumbo Frames (QNAP NAS supports 4074, 7418, and 9000 bytes for MTU)?
  • QNAP can trunk NIC's (if more then one) with the following options:
    • IEEE 802.3ad (Dynamic Link Aggregation)
    • Balance-tlb (Adaptive Transmit Load Balancing)
    • Balance-alb (Adaptive Load Balancing)
    • others (basically for failover)


Is 5th generation Airport Express enough or should I think to move to 6th generation?


Thanks.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Jan 24, 2016 2:50 PM

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6 replies
User profile for user: LaPastenague
LaPastenague
User level: Level 9
67,226 points

Jan 24, 2016 4:53 PM in response to Doctorcomputer

So, finally Airport Extreme, even if I move to 6th generation, is really not the best choice or better, is not the choice !

I run a Synology hack job.. (much more powerful processor than standard).


As is typical of any decent NAS now.. with good drives and depending on your raid setup you will be hitting the gigabit limit.. in theory that is 125MByte/s


In real world no ethernet system is 100% efficient so around 110MB/s is really a good speed.


Using jumbo frames slightly increases efficiency.. but the difference is not that great..


Some tests I know show dramatic improvement but there is some issue going on usually before that is a cure.


For multiple gigabit access.. this is not something I have done.. since my network is far from saturating gigabit at this point..


Rather than run some sort of pairing system, which will never give you 2Gbps speed.. and the disks in the NAS are not capable of it anyway.. Think about using a dual IP system..


This is particularly for say your media streaming.. while doing backups.


Use one of the gigabit ports plugged into the AE.. for general network use.. and then plug a switch into the AE.. and also plug the second NAS gigabit port to that.. and use static IP system. Use 192.168.2.1 on the NAS say and all the clients can either be just 192.168.2.x or dual homed.. so they carry both IP ranges.. admittedly the AE still doesn't lend itself to dual homed system.. I will think about it. But it is a great method of keeping your streaming (time sensitive disk access) separate from your bulk backups etc.


Rather than just trying to push the system to the greatest speed on one IP.. which often works less than great and after a fair amount of expense.. for home use the fact is gigabit is usually enough.. but the dual homed system is what I would try if I run into streaming issues.. a long way down the track for me at this point.

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User profile for user: Doctorcomputer
Doctorcomputer Author
User level: Level 1
10 points

Jan 24, 2016 6:15 PM in response to LaPastenague

Yes, I was evaluating Sinology and QNAP, but my final my decision come to QNAP TS-453S Pro basically because it is really small (only 2,5 trays), low power consuming, Intel Quad Core 24 Ghz, 8 GB Ram, bla, bla, bla


It's true that Jumbo Frames doesn't anytime and everywhere increase performance, but for what concerns NIC aggregation, it can improve. On QNAP, NIC's are not paired, but trunked, which basically doesn't serve the sum of 2 x 1Gbps. It is something you suggest later when you recommend to use 2 multi homed NIC's, but in QNAP you do it with a single IP address. QNAP balance traffic among this 2 NIC's, which again can be configured by priority, setting low priorities against higher one.


I agree also with your statement about high expense, but in my case, I really need high speed cause heavy media streaming for a lot of users. Many of them via Ethernet, some others via Wi-Fi (1,3 Gbps).


I will investigate again a little bit before buying.


Many thanks for your help.


Regards,

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Airport Extreme Gigabit Ethernet & Jumbo Frames

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