Any advantage (or disadvantages) to using two NICs, paired or not?

[SwisherSweet]

I have a Mac Pro FreeNAS server with two 1GB ethernet ports. I am currently just using one of the two, but wanted to know if there would be any advantages to connecting both to my network, either as a paired set or just having two different IPs on the network.

My uses are very light, except I do use iSCSI targets from multiple machines. Perhaps having a second network connection would allow me to improve performance and reliability of my iSCSI sessions via MCS?

I read in other topics that pairing is often not worth it, and performance increases are legible and you need a switch that supports it.

Any thoughts if I'd benefit from adding a second connection to my network?

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Meh.

What is your current, single-NIC utilization? Are you solving a problem that doesn't exist?

Cheers,
Matt

 

[SwisherSweet]

Meh.

What is your current, single-NIC utilization? Are you solving a problem that doesn't exist?

Cheers,
Matt

Not trying to solve any problems, other than getting as much throughput between my iSCSI clients and the server as possible.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Have you checked your current network utilization, @SwisherSweet? Are you at 100%? 80%?

My guess is you won't see any performance improvement by turning up a second NIC.

Cheers,
Mat

 

[styno]

Well,I actually active-passive pair them as apparently I never seem to be able to plug to cable in correctly from the first try. Pairing them like this makes sure it will always work ;-)

 

[BigDave]

I read in other topics that pairing is often not worth it, and performance increases are legible and you need a switch that supports it.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-aggregation.html