Bond ethernet connections without managed switch? Y/N

[Phone Guy]

Any reason to bond 2 lan ports if the lan is on an unmanaged consumer switch? (1gb lan). I saw a video that said enabling the load balancing without a managed switch just always floods your lan with req and stuff, making your whole network suffer in the end. Either LAG properly with managed switch or leave them separate with 2 ip's (which just seems wrong)

Advice?

 

[fredbert]

Nothing to stop you trying it!

You have four 1GbE LAN interfaces and if you can see options for either Adaptive Load-Balancing or Balance-SLB then you can try using two or more interfaces. If you want you can leave one LAN interface as an alternative way to access the NAS: it can be on the same subnet as the load-balanced interface.

 

[Rusty]

Advice

LAG properly would be my advice. I have multiple legacy LAGs (multiple 1Gs) and they never had any problems when configured correctly.

 

[RonV42]

I would give it a try I have tested both configurations one with a Netgear unmanaged switch and LAG with a Unfi managed switch. Both seems to work fine with no network degradation. I run with LAG for two years under the Unfi switch until I needed to dual home the Synology to simplify the needs of my IoT VLAN.

 

[Phone Guy]

On my current lan, which is only 1gb sadly, I have a managed Netgear switch and have a ds1621+ lag'd with all four 1gb ports. Seems to work fine? Obviously I can not test if connections are any faster, what I'm hoping happens at that point is if multiple people are accessing the Nas each user is getting a full 1gb port access of bandwidth (at least upto four users) am I understanding that correctly?

And also to be clear, if the buddy who is installing a new Nas, again standard 1gb lan, bonding them is pointless right? Just leave it get 2 different ips and that's it?

-- post merged: 1. Apr 2022 --

I would give it a try I have tested both configurations one with a Netgear unmanaged switch and LAG with a Unfi managed switch. Both seems to work fine with no network degradation. I run with LAG for two years under the Unfi switch until I needed to dual home the Synology to simplify the needs of my IoT VLAN.

So you simple bonded the 2(or more) lan ports inside dsm and selected auto load balance and used it on a standard non-managed switch and never had any network issues? Slow downs,failures,etc...?

 

[RonV42]

So you simple bonded the 2(or more) lan ports inside dsm and selected auto load balance and used it on a standard non-managed switch and never had any network issues? Slow downs,failures,etc...?

Yes this is the option I used before I got my Unifi switches. Just remember a client will only get 1 gbps per connection max since it doesn't "fan" the connections packets across ports. Same for Dynamic LAG a single client connection will only go as fast as a single port. I was using a Netgear "click" 8 port switch with untagged ethernet connections in the switch.