Is it possible to hook FreeNAS to a desktop with a direct Ethernet connection?

[Shiroi Kage]

So I'm having bandwidth bottlenecks on my FreeNAS box when I'm trying to run a massive archive of photos directly from the server for something like Lightroom. My desktop's motherboard has dual 10Gb/s NICs on it, and I want to use one of them as a direct link to my FreeNAS server, for which I will have to buy a direct link card. Anyone knows if that feasible, or even useful? Since they both will have to be connected to the same switch and be on the same network, would that cause any problems?

I'm a networking newb so excuse my ignorance.

 

[depasseg]

Yes, you can put a 10GbE NIC in Freenas and connect it directly to a PC directly. Just pick a different IP address range.

I'm not sure what you mean by them being on the same switch and network though. That seems to contradict the request of a direct connection.

Where are you running into bottlenecks?

 

[Shiroi Kage]

Yes, you can put a 10GbE NIC in Freenas and connect it directly to a PC directly. Just pick a different IP address range.

I'm not sure what you mean by them being on the same switch and network though. That seems to contradict the request of a direct connection.

Where are you running into bottlenecks?

I want my FreeNAS box to still be available on my home network since I have other clients that want to connect to it, but I only need the 10Gb/s connection to my main PC. My PC will have two interfaces, one to the home network and one to the NAS box, and the FreeNAS box will do the same. I thought that might produce conflict, but I reckon since they're going to be on different IP ranges, it's not going to be an issue.

As for where I'm running into bottlenecks, it's in reading/writing massive amounts of data, creating encrypted volumes, and so forth. Lightroom also seems much laggier than when the photos are on a local drive, especially when importing.

 

[depasseg]

I thought that might produce conflict, but I reckon since they're going to be on different IP ranges, it's not going to be an issue.

You reckon correctly.

As for where I'm running into bottlenecks, it's in reading/writing massive amounts of data, creating encrypted volumes, and so forth.

If the FreeNAS network connection is fully saturated, then adding a separate adapter could help, but if it isn't then the issue is likely with the pool performance and configuring another adapter might not do much.

 

[Shiroi Kage]

You reckon correctly.


If the FreeNAS network connection is fully saturated, then adding a separate adapter could help, but if it isn't then the issue is likely with the pool performance and configuring another adapter might not do much.

The issue is indeed with the network connection. Removing my switch from the equation, my network utilization went from ~700Mb/s to over 900Mb/s, and performance increased in general. I am getting my 10Gb/s card today so I will be able to do some benchmarking with a much faster network connection. We'll see how that works.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Hardware specs?

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Shiroi Kage]

Xeon E5-2603V4 with 128GB of Kingston ECC 2400MHz DDR4 RAM. The motherboard is a Supermicro MBD-X10SRL-F. I have 15, 6TB WD Reds hooked up via SATA 3 either to the motherboard's own SATA ports or to an LSI/IBM RAID card (the one everybody and their mother recommend on this forum) flashed to IT mode. PSU is some SeaSonic that I can't remember the model of either.