Link aggregation... with USB adapters?

Syntaxvgm · October 27, 2015

Is this possible?

I just found out the laptop I just switched to has 100Mb ethernet. What the fuck. It's only a few years old, and the old dell dual core laptop from several years before this laptop that has a gigabit NIC. I have no words....(other than "what the fuck HP?")

Make matters worse, it has not USB 3 ports. Thought that wouldn't matter...but now that means the option of throwing a usb 3 nic on there is out the window.

A USB 2.0 adapter will give me ~480Mb/s best case scenario, and while that's an improvement frankly that's not enough for the size of file transfers I want to do. I'm hoping to near saturate the mechanical hard drive. With files anywhere from 100GiB to approaching 500GiB territory, 12.5 MB/s is not acceptable, and 60MB/s is certainly less than the hard drive is capable of.

This is kind of crazy, but do you think link aggregation is possible with 2 usb adapters? On windows??

On windows, I've only ever used built in driver functions for multi-port gigabit NICs. I've done it on linux with 2 mismatched gigabit NICs, but only like once or twice.

brwainer · October 27, 2015

In Windows, you either have to do teaming from the NIC drivers (like if your motherboard has two Intel NICs, or an Intel NIC and then you add an Intel addin card - the point being that they have to be compatible with each other) or you have to be running a Server OS variant of Windows in order to get access to Microsoft's teaming functionality. A possible third option, although I don't think it works the way you would like, is software like cFosSpeed, which doesn't combine multiple NICs but rather prioritizes and assigns traffic between your various NICs. It sounds to me link you want to maximize individual transfers though, which third party software wouldn't help with.

Your best bet, although it is a long shot, is to buy two USB adaptors of the same model and hope their drivers support teaming (Hint: the standard Windows drivers will not, so it has to be something with custom drivers available from the maunfacturer). Good luck!

Syntaxvgm · October 27, 2015

In Windows, you either have to do teaming from the NIC drivers (like if your motherboard has two Intel NICs, or an Intel NIC and then you add an Intel addin card - the point being that they have to be compatible with each other) or you have to be running a Server OS variant of Windows in order to get access to Microsoft's teaming functionality. A possible third option, although I don't think it works the way you would like, is software like cFosSpeed, which doesn't combine multiple NICs but rather prioritizes and assigns traffic between your various NICs. It sounds to me link you want to maximize individual transfers though, which third party software wouldn't help with.

Your best bet, although it is a long shot, is to buy two USB adaptors of the same model and hope their drivers support teaming (Hint: the standard Windows drivers will not, so it has to be something with custom drivers available from the maunfacturer). Good luck!

Thanks for the response

That's the problem- I doubt any trinket usb 2.0 adapter would support an advanced feature like that. I was hoping for a software solution, but what this is sounds basically like load balancing. I'm looking to spit single piece large files, and I'm ok with having to open software for that becuase all other cases I can make do with one.

I really don't want to put server windows on here. I have 2012, but I don't really think it's worth using a server os.

My other option is to get a hard drive caddy and remove the drive. Not ideal, but I may have to settle for that.

But at least I've confirmed that, on the windows side of this, it's reserved for server windows, and intentionally not a feature. Maybe not I can focus my search for software, if I can find any.