My latest purchase...

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Originally Posted by Amadeus

It will allow me to bond two ports together to effectively become one connection, thus doubling the transfer speed between devices.

Not really, you should read up more about it. LAG show as double the bandwidth but unfortunately under a single flow situation the speed will never go higher than a single connection. If you had several machines communicating to the server where the total transmission bandwidth was higher than the capacity of a single connection then you would see the LAG coming into affect. There are reasons why this is the case.

That is budget HP series switches so you dont get any management of the ports. I would have just got something like GS116E (smaller and web management) for advanced home usage.

My understanding is that for all devices which have 2 aggregated ports, the bandwidth between those devices *will* be double that of a single port. Are you saying that's incorrect?

I actually have 6 devices which will be accessing the NAS concurrently.

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Originally Posted by Amadeus

My understanding is that for all devices which have 2 aggregated ports, the bandwidth between those devices *will* be double that of a single port. Are you saying that's incorrect?

I actually have 6 devices which will be accessing the NAS concurrently.

Yes/No, the total aggregate bandwidth will be say 2Gpbs but if you connected another computer also with 2 bonded connections and tried to stream a single file to the NAS then it would be limited to 1Gpbs as that is the bandwidth of a single physical connection but if you streamed two files at the same time it would be 2Gpbs as there are two streams so the switch would push that down the second pipe, not that you will hit those limits mind unless the file is one single large file meaning the drive will be doing big block reads and your file is not fragmented everywhere.

We have 35 computers in the office on a 4x1G bond and it works fine but then we shift lots of images around all day, its unlikely you will need that at home, unless you are just playing around then i would junk the switch you got and get a managed one so you get lots more to fiddle.

I'm not sure why you think it's not managed:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en...346.html?dnr=1

And the 548 page manual makes it look pretty managed to me.

I got it for a ridiculous price and *my* experience of Netgear stuff is it is not reliable. Of course, that may be just my experience but that's all I've got to go on.

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you are indeed correct, finally HP have put management on some of their cheaper switches

Ive used netgear at work for the past 6 yrs, only fails we have had was due to power spikes on the desk switches and one switch that was 5yrs old failed after being switched off for over 1h which can be common with hardware that is on 24x7 and then cools down. At the end of the day even peeps like HP will buy OEM switches and rebrand them, especially true of the lower end items.

HP KVM were made by Avocent etc.