Link Aggregation - Win10

[elmerF 1]

 

Long story short. I struggled with a home media server based on win10, emby, hdhomerun, and a one-horse consumer nas, for well over a year. Mostly audio sync issues and HD stuttering problems. I had a wired gigabyte home network stretching to each client (rokus, shields, and xbox one) and still had problems. First I upgraded the old win10 machine being used as a media server to an 8 core processor, lots of memory, and SSD drives for OS and also cache/transcoding. Still having problems. Then I started upgrading the network using all cat-6. Nope, problems are still there. I finally turned off the experimental nvidia gpu support and that cleared up the audio sync problem and fortunately I now had the CPU power to handle the increased transcoding load. SD input worked well, but HD was still stuttering. 

 

Well, after some research, I found that even though my motherboard was fairly expensive in its day, they had apparently skimped on the NIC.  Let us say the NIC is quite common, but not a household name brand and leave it at that. It appeared that the stuttering problems arouse when there were recording streams coming in, while at the same time, content was being played. Hmmm, bandwidth! So I found a managed switch on sale and bought a fairly inexpensive intel dual pcie nic (EXPI9402PT) and downloaded the latest intel drivers. It looked like teaming (link aggregation) was working, but it wasn't. Apparently microsoft does not want link aggregation in win10, just their server line. It seems to be a cat and mouse game and intel keeps updating their drivers - but not for the low price intel nics, Okay then, the dual intel i350-T2 doesn't cost that much more, and it is supported using the latest intel driver (23.2). Once I had link aggregation setup (and it was relatively painless), it was like night and day.  No more stuttering! And, just to make things better, I was able to use the older hardware to create a freenas build and the EXPI9402PT teamed up just fine under that OS.

 

Hope this helps someone experiencing similar problems. And, it's not like I'm and intel fanboy. That 8 core processor is not one of theirs, but when something works, especially when they are going out of their way to circumvent microsoft greed, then give credit where it's due. 

[Luke 37281]

Thanks for the info !