Upgrade networking on HPE-180t to 10GbE

[Dealio]

Lately I attempted to upgrade my networking in my HPE-180t desktop from the native 1G networking to 10G networking by adding a 10Gtek network add-in card that has dual 10G RJ-45 ports. The 10Gtek card uses 4 PCIe lanes (X4) and it uses the Intel X550-T2 chip, and the card uses the Intel PROSet software/drivers.

The installation into an X4 slot went well and I’ve connected the 10G port to a 10G switch (Netgear XS708T) using a 100ft RJ45 flat CAT 7 cable. I also have a ReadyNAS 626X attached via bonded dual 10G LACP connection to the same switch. My goal was to provide very quick access to the NAS from the desktop so that I could essentially use the NAS almost like local storage. I do photography and videography and want to avoid moving files from local storage to NAS but without losing editing efficiency usually associated with a slow network connection (like 1G). A 10G connection should provide 1 GB/s transfer rates and a bonded dual LACP connection should provide about double that rate.

Although the connection from desktop to switch works, I’m not getting 10G file transfer speeds, even when I copy a single multigigabyte file from an SSD or RAM disk across the network to the NAS. The best performance I got was about 350MB/s. I then tried creating a bonded dual LACP connection on the desktop to the switch thinking that it would increase (double?) the transfer rate because of the increased bandwidth. Still I only get 350MB/s or so.

Does anyone have experience with using 10G networking with older hardware like my machine. Any tips are appreciated. Also, I wonder if there is some limitation in the motherboard (Pegatron Truckee 1.0401E) that shares PCI slot bandwidth with other slots — I think I’ve read that idea somewhere, but didn’t verify it and don’t know how to determine if there is any limitation in the motherboard.

Machine specs:

HPE-180t Pavilion Elite desktop (2010 vintage)

48 GB RAM

Intel 990X CPU (6 cores)

Samsung 860 Pro 1TB SATA III SSD (system drive)

Samsung 860 Evo 1TB SATA III SSD (applications and working drive)

Add-in cards:

AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 (PCIe slot x16_1)

10Gtek X550-10G-2T-X4 10Gb dual-port network card (PCIe slot x4, also tried x16_2)

Sound Blaster AE-5 5.1 audio card (PCIe slot x1)

TIA,

David

[banhien]

@Dealio 

Where do you connect to ? Machine only has

PCI Express x16: 2 PCI Express x4: 1 PCI Express x1: 1

Regards.

[Dealio]

Thanks for your quick response!

I have the NIC in the X4 slot. But I've tried moving it to the second X16 slot (the first X16 slot has the video card). The performance in either slot is not 10G performance and a long way from dual 10G.

David