Is link aggregated NAS faster?

I will be hooking my media server up to my Linksys Maxstream router. If I use link aggregation between the router and my server will this improve the communication speed between the two devices, and if not what is the actual point of link aggregation? How can this be beneficial to me or anyone in a media orientated set up?

I plan to rip my Blu-ray collection to the server hard drive and I just want to lessen the occurrence of buffering and felt like link aggregation is one of the tools I could use to achieve this goal

 

By enabling link aggregation, there will be increased speed performance between you NAS and a router. To increase performance beyond the router, you need to make sure your receiving device can be upgraded. It is a TV at the other end, make sure it is connected using LAN cable instead of WiFi. If it is a computer on the other end, you may consider upgrading network card to a dual gigabit port option or change it to 10GbE standard. This will make big difference when streaming heavy video files. You will also need to check is your router coming with a LAG function if not, you can connect a smart switch to it which doesn’t cost much and will do the task. Also, make sure your cables are not old CAT5. You need to be shielded CAT6a cables for best performance.

 

Shielded LAN cables

Having old cables will mean loads of interference and lost speed. Make sure you have shielded CAT6a cables or better.

Link aggregated switch

Make sure you have a smart switch with link aggregation function.

Link aggregated NAS

To have link aggregation enabled double check that you have a NAS with dual or more LAN ports.

10gb cards

This will speed up network bandwidth 10 times. This is great for heavy 4K file streaming

Dual LAN  usb card/adapter

Dual LAN will let you send data parallel. So if you have two files 1Gigabyte in size – it will take just half of the time to send these two files. Alternatively, the device would send only one file at the time.

 StarTech USB3 Adapter

Alternative to link aggregation

If multimedia is the only thing performing slowly in your setup, you should consider a NAS with video transcoding function. This will change video format to a smaller resolution to match the destination device resolution. This will take off the strain of the network and there will be no more buffering. But if you are not happy to reduce resolution – please upgrade the network.

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