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Ah yiiiiisssss giveaway !!

Good day all! First of all, here is my current configuration: CPU: FX-8350 (not overclocked) Mobo: MSI 970A-G46 Ram: 8GB 1866MHz DDR3 OS Drive: Samsung 940 EVO 250GB connected through a cheap PCI-E sata controller Storage Drives: 6x 2TB Seagate baracuda connected to the Sata III ports on the motherboard OS: Windows Server 2012 R2 Essential Here is my problem. Regardless of the software raid type i choose, i always have a slow write speed issue. Right now it set up in Raid 0+5 (3x 2hdd in raid 0 via the mobo raid and the 3 array in raid 5 in windows) I get an average of 300MBps read and a shy 30MBps write. I tried a simple raid 5 and also a raid 10 and still get the same results. The raid and sata drivers are up-to-date as well as windows. The write caching is enabled. I know that onboard raid is not the best but i cant understand the huge difference between the reads and writes. Next thing i want to try is install Ubuntu server and create a ZFS Raidz array to see if it would improve speeds. Thanks for all you help

Thank you for confirming exactly what I said since the begining !

In computer networking, the term link aggregation applies to various methods of combining (aggregating) multiple network connections in parallel in order to increase throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain, and to provide redundancy in case one of the links should fail. Regardless of the layer on which aggregation occurs, it balances the network load across all links. Most methods provide failover as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation Yes you are right with the definition of load balancing BUT AGAIN INTEL VERSION OF ADAPTATIVE LOAD BALANCING INTEL VERSION INTEL VERSION I dont care how wikipedia defines load balancing its not how intel version does it. Several carrier pay per LINK which means they will use one link at full capacity before switching to another one (BECAUSE COSTS)

Well i guess you can't read because this is exactly what I wrote BUT THE INTEL version of adaptative load balancing is using one link until full then switch over to the second link. Also read the whole page of your own source ... you might need it

Yes a firewall by default will block everything coming from the WAN to go to the LAN. A rule is when you allow a protocol / port to be open. So if you have 100 rules, the router will have to go through all of them until it finds a match. So a slower firewall will take a while to go through multiple rules. As far as i know owncloud is not a VPN service but more like a dropbox (cloud storage) that its hosted on your private server. If you can describe your workload / internet usage (try the best you can) it will help us to give you a better answer.

If you have an old computer with 2 NIC you could use PFSense Unfortunatelly there is no best router for "flashing for openVPN" The question is more: Which router i can flash with a 3rd party firmware to use openVPN on it. LOL The "power" of the router will all depend on your internet speed, which type of encryption you will use and the amount of connection that will use that VPN

I would buy a TP-Link archer C7 v2 . Its cheaper than pretty much all the other AC1750 and can be used as access point only. Its not the fastest router out there BUT as wireless access point only it will extremely good Note that you will pay way more for a real AC WAP

Both are technically the same thing Link aggregation will send half of the traffic on one link and the other half on the other (Use both link at the same time). The Intel adaptive load balancing will use one link at its full capacity before starting to use the 2nd one.

Technically, PFsense shouldn't block anything from the LAN to WAN ... unless you specified otherwise in the firewall rules. Pretty much any Gigabit router will be able to handle your 120Mbps connection. (BTW its full duplex which means 120 Download and 120 upload does not equal to 250Mbps) BUT !!! It will all depends on 1) How many firewall rules you have 2) If you are using a VPN (IP sec and stuff can require a powerful CPU) 3) How many devices are connecting to the internet at the same time (maximum simultaneous connection)

Have you checked in WIndows disk management if you have a non-initialized disk ?

Or once windows is installed download this : http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows+8.1+-+64 It will work with WIndows 7 and 8/8.1 64Bit ... and then you should be able to see your raid drive into the windows disk management. You will probably have to initialise and format the drive

Sounds like PFSense doesn't like your NIC Could be a broken driver. You could try adding a 3rd nic into the PCI slot to see if it does the same thing. Maybe you should read this: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=73518.0

You need to give Windows the AMD raid drivers either at install OR once the os is installed Pretty much what this guy does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L--ByVvXqw#t=298

If windows fail, you simply have to reinstall windows and then in disk management you will have to import a foreign config (aka dynamic disk) and technically you should be good to go. Mobo raid.... if the mobo breaks you will have to buy the same brand and model to MAYBE get your raid back. You might have more raid options via the motherboard like raid 10. WIndows software can sometime suffer from resyncing issue which will slow down you whole system performance.