2 Ethernet cables

[rain in july]

Is there a benefit to plugging in 2 ethernet cables into my pc, will it make any difference? 

 

Also, will this alone improve anything? Even if I just used one of the ports? 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Failover. So if one port or cable fails, the other can kick in. If you have a local share and systems that support SMB3 Multichannel, you can get improved bandwidth if the destination device has enough bandwidth as well. 

 

Hard to say if that will improve anything without knowing what it is and what you already have. 

[rain in july]

3 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Failover. So if one port or cable fails, the other can kick in. If you have a local share and systems that support SMB3 Multichannel, you can get improved bandwidth if the destination device has enough bandwidth as well. 

 

Hard to say if that will improve anything without knowing what it is and what you already have. 

I have some spare cash left over, was mostly just looking to buy something else, I'm using the ethernet port on my mobo, which is nothing special, getting one of these cards wouldn't improve the speed of the internet alone but maybe it would be a little more reliable? 

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, AshesoftheWake1 said:

I have some spare cash left over, was mostly just looking to buy something else, I'm using the ethernet port on my mobo, which is nothing special, getting one of these cards wouldn't improve the speed of the internet alone but maybe it would be a little more reliable? 

Again, hard to say without knowing what you already have and what that card is. Just because it's not unboard doesn't make it any more reliable, it would depend on the model of the card, the model of the board. Probably most important is how recent the drivers are for it. 

 

In general, it's not going to be any different from onboard if you're just using one port. As far as Gigabit (assuming both your onboard and that card are Gigabit) NICs go, there's few that are actually unreliable. It's such a common interface and standard that it's hard to actually get something bad now days. 

 

Unless you have a managed switch you want to setup something like LACP on or SMB3 Multichannel compatible shares, there's not going to be a whole lot of reason to buy it. Better saving the money or spending it elsewhere. 

[rain in july]

5 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Again, hard to say without knowing what you already have and what that card is. Just because it's not unboard doesn't make it any more reliable, it would depend on the model of the card, the model of the board. Probably most important is how recent the drivers are for it. 

 

In general, it's not going to be any different from onboard if you're just using one port. As far as Gigabit (assuming both your onboard and that card are Gigabit) NICs go, there's few that are actually unreliable. It's such a common interface and standard that it's hard to actually get something bad now days. 

 

Unless you have a managed switch you want to setup something like LACP on or SMB3 Multichannel compatible shares, there's not going to be a whole lot of reason to buy it. Better saving the money or spending it elsewhere. 

makes sense, thanks for your reply!

[Mornincupofhate]

2 hours ago, AshesoftheWake1 said:

I have some spare cash left over, was mostly just looking to buy something else, I'm using the ethernet port on my mobo, which is nothing special, getting one of these cards wouldn't improve the speed of the internet alone but maybe it would be a little more reliable? 

No, you can't just magically get a faster internet speed by adding another cable.

I've personally never had a nic or wireless card fail ever in my life, so failover is pretty useless unless you own a datacenter.

 

In the event you do get internet speeds faster than 1gbps, what you're looking for is called link aggregation, and all it does is just basically combines nics on your pc to max out the transfer speeds. This can also be used for extremely fast file transfer over local networks, but your disk has to be capable of reading and writing that speed otherwise it's gonna be a bottleneck.