I just threw away a network cable

[AGTDenton]

What drivepool software are you going to use?

If you are Windows based then I can recommend Stablebits stuff, they do Drivepool and Scanner, 2 very good bits of software, Drivepool will drop any drive of any size or connection type into a pool, best thing is its NTFS, so if the machine or a drive dies the rest data is still easily accessible.

Exactly that

I bought it a while ago for another PC which kept failing, but didn't continue to use the software afterwards. Thankfully this time round I'm configuring Drivepool from the get go.

I like the fact if worst case scenario the motherboard/controller fails you can pull the disks into another PC or external disk housing and you're up & running again. The only other ultra worst case scenario is CoveCube go under and the licence fails, but the fact they have a cloud subscription service and money flow I can't see that happening.


I got a good bundle when I bought it which included all 3 products that they develop, so I might experiment with the cloud storage portion. Could be useful for things like phone & laptop backups when away.

The only other 3rd party Drive Pool software I'm aware of is M-Division, wondered if you'd tried it?
The inbuilt Microsoft one with Server Essentials is awful.

[circuitmonkey]

Had a similar issue recently when I moved into the new house, but only had myself to blame as I made up the cables.
Couldn't get it to sync about 100mbps
Cheapy £10 network cable tester from Toolstation for the win, saved a fair amount of hair pulling out and found out a bad crimp was to blame
Paid for itself already

[AGTDenton]

Finally the last byte has transferred. So now just to shed a tear and dismantle it.
I'll take a few pictures as the x58 was an astonishing architecture for it's time and this was an outstanding board.
I might put it on the Review My Build as a send off

Don't think the parts will get much attention on eBay, but I'll give it a go as would rather keep as much out of landfill as possible.

Had a similar issue recently when I moved into the new house, but only had myself to blame as I made up the cables.
Couldn't get it to sync about 100mbps
Cheapy £10 network cable tester from Toolstation for the win, saved a fair amount of hair pulling out and found out a bad crimp was to blame
Paid for itself already

I could really do with some new Network testing equipment my old stuff is long gone

[AGTDenton]

Ok so as I started to use the new PC I noticed downloading some files from a cloud service wasn't as fast as I'd expected.
SpeedTest revealed I was getting the full 450mbps upload but worringly only 200mbps down, which tied in with the LAN issues I was experiencing.

I came across this post, which is similar but not exactly the same to my chip (I225-LM)
https://community.intel.com/t5/Ether...1188301/page/4

I had the same issues and these setting resolved it for me:

Energy efficient ethernet Off
Interrupt Moderation Rate Low
Receive buffers 1024
Transmit Buffers 1024

Mine doesn't have the Energy Efficient Ethernet option, but it made me think if I did have some sort of energy saving setting enabled within Control Panel > Power Options that I was unaware of. The only thing I could see as potentially related was PCI Express > Link State Power Management. Changing this to Off did not change anything.
So I proceeded to change the Interrupt Moderation Rate to Low, and low and behold I now get the full 450mbps.
I've started to dismantle the old one so I don't have the means to transfer a big file yet but when I get my other system online that I'm waiting for some parts for I will test the LAN rates again...
I have not altered any of the buffers. Right now I can't see a need but that may change as I use things more & more.
My Speed & Duplex remain on Auto Negotiate, I had tried changing that again but no difference.

What a nightmare, though I suspect this isn't the real cause and the saga will continue