What is the best NIC Teaming protocol to use for a novice

[linustouchtips]

Okay I'm not a network admin or anything and i mainly using it at home hoping to get some kind of network going with NAS and stuff. But after looking into the properties of my network adapters i found a way to setup the teaming so i used the ieee802.3 something with full duplex @ 1 gb/s. I want performance and redundancy improvements i don't have a cisco switch or anything but i think i selected the wrong protocol any suggestions and direction would be great thanks.

specs for the lan.

 

Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
2 x GigaLAN Intel^® I211AT

 

[samcool55]

If you want to team NIC's and connect them to a switch, you need to somehow tell the switch which physical connections are teamed. The protocol that's usually used is LACP. That's the one you need to configure.

[Lurick]

LACP is great for redundancy but won't do anything to improve performance for single client access however if you need multiple clients to access then it will help

[Windows7ge]

When you say performance and redundancy, is your objective to see speeds beyond 1Gbit? If you're fine with gigabit then setting up fail over or link aggregation will take care of the redundancy (fail over is a better option because link aggregation will require a managed switch which can be expensive). Though I have to say for a do it yourself at home job, redundancy isn't really a concern you should have unless your operations are mission critical. Just keep a spare NIC around in the event one fails. If this isn't sufficient then like I said before there's fail over but your OS has to support it.

[netts]

You will never achieve true bandwidth over 1 Gbs using NIC teaming, LACP, or Ethernet bonding. The application itself must be able to perform multiple sessions via multiple interfaces (like SMBv3). Teaming is just for load balancing different sessions across NICS using different methods. The easiest method is round robin. Things can get a bit more complex when using IP hashing and such things like that.

 

If you need the redundancy linux and windows will perform link aggregation without a special switch.