Link aggregation on Windows 10?

Basically this is to increase the throughput to a a higher end NAS like the Synology 12 bay NAS DiskStation DS2415+ (Diskless) I use. By adding a multi port board like Intel's Pro1000 (EXPI9404PTL) and using what Windows calls teaming you are supposed to be able to increase bandwidth between your workstation and NAS up to the number of ports linked on each end. For example with all 4 ports of the Synology linked and the 4 ports of the Intel card linked you should have a theoretical max bandwidth of 400 Gb/s which is almost local SATA speeds. But there are some catches not the least of which seems to be that Microsoft seems to be trying to force you to upgrade to server versions of their OS in order to use teaming. This means you have to hack around them to get it set up and upgrades may undo you workaround and have to be done again. This happened to me just this morning.

Doing some more research however shows that usually even with 4 ports available on both ends the link aggregation algorithm will only use one. A good explanation can be found here. To confirm this I set up my Synology with 2 ports linked on each of 2 networks and the workstation with 1 on one network (mounted as drive T)  and 4 teamed on the other (mounted as drive S).  LAN Speed Test showed no difference between using either network connection.

Though it also returned these results for a local 8 TB drive like is in the NAS (D:) and a Samsung 840 EVO mount locally as E: so I'm not sure that means much.

A better test might be doing a copy to from one folder on the NAS to another via the single workstation port

And via the 4 teamed ports

Note those are Bytes not bits per second. Not that much faster peaks though more consistent.

Just to confirm, after linking all 4 of the Synology ports together we do not see any more improvement in speed either because 4 port link aggregation really only provides 4 times the bandwidth to 4 or more devices.

Note the theoretical max for a  1 Gb/s port is 128 MB/s. 

So this seems to confirm teaming 2 connections might help some but it is unlikely you will get anything near a 2X bump. A third is unlikely to help at all unless you have high volume going to more than 2 places at once. And so on.

Just for fun I ran Crystal Disk Mark to get some comparative read/write times.
A Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB SSD

WD Red 8TB NAS Hard Disk Drive (what is in the NASs)

Synology 12 bay NAS DiskStation DS2415+ in SHR-2 mode

Drobo5n in SHR mode

Instructions for setting up teaming on Windows 10

So if after reading all the above you still want to team your ports here is what you do.

1) Download ProSet (PROwinx64.exe) Intel download site. Lookup “Intel Network Adapter Driver for windows 10” currently ver. 22.10

2) Run and install the exe (keep the file, you might need it again).

3) Find the temp folder the the drivers where put in (install does NOT install the ones we want) by looking for PROUnstl.exe in your users temp folder (C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local\Temp)

Use that to local the PRO1000 folder. Copy the PRO1000 folder to some where safe as you will be needing it often.

Adding teaming to Pro1000:

1) For each Ethernet port, go to properties->configure->driver and click “update driver button”

Note yours will not mention teaming if this is your first time through this process.

2) Choose “browse my computer for driver software” then “let me pick from a list…” then “Have desk”

3) Browse to where you copied the PROWin64 files and browse to \PRO1000\Winx64\NDIS65

4) You will see about 5 inf file there. Choose the 1st one (you will need to keep track of which one you used)

5) From the list of adapters scroll down and choose 82579V Gigabit Network Connection.

Note ignore this warning

6) Finally, repeat steps 3-8 for each of the 4 ports.

7) You’ll probably need to reboot at this point, after that you will see new teaming tabs in the Ethernet port properties.

8) For first Ethernet port, go to properties->configure->driver and click “update driver button”
You should now have a teaming tab. Select new Team is one is not already defined from previous run and select all the ports you want in the team.

You now have your ports teamed on your Windows 10 PC but as I said at the start you may need to come back and do this all over again after an update. Also this assumes you have also linked the ports on switch as well. For Unifi this would look like this.