Link Aggregation or USB 3.0 for NAS

[MJD]

I am looking to purchase a NAS solution for backing up several computers in my house and was wondering what the community thought about using Link Aggregation for the connection or USB 3.0. I did some research and even though my Netgear WNDR 4000 comes with a USB 3.0 port, people report very slow speeds supposedly because of NTFS formatting, but even without the formatting the speeds are still under 2.0 standards. Also, I would like storage above 2TB and that is not natively supported. I do have DD-WRT firmware installed on it though, but have not found if it can support 2TB+ drives.

So, on paper USB 3.0 seems great, but in real life it appears horrible. Any suggestions?

[+BudMan MVC]

So you think you need more than gig? Or linking multiple 100mbit ports? Does this nas your looking to buy support that? You can move some serious speed across a gig connection. Unless you talking backup of ssd to ssd I don't think the gig wire is going to be your bottle neck.

Any nas you buy I would think would have gig, and gig switches are cheap.. And if you have to update nics in your other boxes, again cheap..

I see 70 to 90MBytes per second over gig without any issues.. And that is on CHEAP ass hardware to and from a VM ;) Would 90MBytes per second not be fast enough for your backups?

[TPreston]

TBhonest if you are already looking at Link Aggregation you would be better off building a home server rather than a throwaway nas box.

Dual port gig cards are ridiculously inexpensive these days because Broadcom NetXtreme II has gone EOL Ie 5 for $59.99 bucks online.

I get 180MB/s down from a NC380T on a Windows 8 client to 2 NC380T's on the server.

There are loads of these cards using the Broadcom BCM5706C chipset HP,Dell etc HP's have the best software IMO.

[Bryan R.]

Usually with cheap NAS devices from the likes of Netgear get horrific transfer speeds because of crappy software or bad RAID controllers. You would be much better off with a better quality NAS or just build your own file server. Many people on Neowin recommend QNAP.

[MJD]

Wow, lots of options out there, but USB 3.0 is certainly out of the question. QNAP looks appealing although I am also looking into BURP and FreeNAS. Budman, I always considered my network to be the bottleneck and probably incorrectly as you are correct that 1gb should be sufficient, but it's a bit too close to comfort for me. I know I will rarely if ever use more than 1gb of bandwidth, but I do know I will feel more comfortable with 2gb.

[+BudMan MVC]

And you are running ling aggregation now, you have nics that allow bounding? How are you getting 2gb?

So lets do some math, lets say you got some ok nics and see 900mbits on the wire with these.. That is roughly 112MBps -- do you have have HDD that can sustain that in read and write? 112 puts you pretty high up on the charts for drives benchmarks

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-01-Read-Throughput-Average-h2benchw-3.16,2901.html

So I would love to see the iperf tests of your network btw.. Tpreston can you post your iperf results for your setup??