Help with configuring & understanding 10gbe networking

[Sam_P]

Hi all,
I’m a complete beginner, so apologies in advance. I’m 100% sure you’re going to read this post and shake your head. Please take pity on my soul. I come with my head bowed and hands open!

My immediate problem is that I’m not transferring over the network cables, but rather using my wifi connection. I have tested turning off wifi and my network connection goes away completely, even though I am plugged into the switch. I also cannot log into the NAS-1 using the web interface using the ip address.

I don’t even know what words to search for in this case. My main question is How can I help myself here? Are there articles for this stuff already written? How I can understand what I have so I can understand what kind of transfer speeds should I expect?

I’m hoping to be able to learn how to troubleshoot this myself, if my setup messed up, and if so, how can I fix it?

What I have in my hardware mix right now…

1. UGREEN DXP4800 Plus - nas-1
2. UGREEN DXP2800 - nas-2
3. TP-Link TL-SX105 | 5 Port 10G/Multi-Gig Unmanaged Ethernet Switch
4. A different ‘regular’ switch
5. Western Digital 8TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM
6. Windows machine with this NIC installed: 10 Gigabit M.2 to RJ45 NIC, Intel 82599 Controller

network diagram

TYPO: not 10/100 but 100/1000 mbps for amber lights. picture of switch plugs with lights - I used the manual to label the indicator lights

There is some more stuff plugged into my ‘regular switch’ that I want to stay in the network so do not want to unplug, but this is the gist of it.

2 things I’ve tried to do so far, shown below. Definitely NOT what I was hoping for…

Use iperf3 to test transfer speeds between windows machine and UGREEN DXP4800 Plus

Here are my current results - 292 mbits/sec.

Transfer from nas-2 to nas-1

painfully slow!

[Sam_P]

also a few more screenshots of the ethernet things:

I checked the I219-V and it says it’s installed in my PCI bus - so does that mean it’s the m.2 adapter? I think that was the case???

no ethernet

this is the driver I installed to try to make my m.2 adapter card work.

[etorix]

@Sam_P

painfully slow!

Not unusual when transfering lots of small files from Windoze…

@Sam_P

I checked the I219-V and it says it’s installed in my PCI bus - so does that mean it’s the m.2 adapter?

The i219 is a PHY to the NIC part in the motherboard chipset.

@Sam_P

this is the driver I installed to try to make my m.2 adapter card work

You have an old 82599 (X500 family) but have installed a driver for the newer, 100GbE-class, 800 family: It doesn’t work.
Let’s blame it on Intel nomenclature…

[Sam_P]

Hey just coming back here. Firstly thank you for your reply @etrorix!!

I ended up checking one final thing - does bios detect the m.2 card? And guess what - it didn’t! So while the most likely error is due to my dumbness - I just decided to return the m.2 adapter and replace it with an m.2 to PCIE 4x and a PCIE 10gbe adapter.

I’m hoping since it is a more common setup it is easier to install!

[Sam_P]

Small update - I switched to a m.2 PCI-E 4x adapter and a TP link 10 gbe card and it WORKS!

I didn’t have to fiddle with anything driver wise to get it to become recognized and work. It was great. I’ll leave links below. I’m sure there are still some things I’ll need to do to optimize and I’ve not yet tried passing files between, but the iperf3 test read 10gb transferred per second, which is quite exciting

Ok, end of my noob update. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back with more progress soon.

m.2 adapter: Amazon.com: GELRHONR NGFF M.2 to PCI-E 4X 1X Riser Card,M.2 Key M 2260 2280 SSD Port to PCIE Adapter with LED Indicator SATA 15pin Power Riser for Bitcoin Miner Mining-Black : Electronics
TP Link: Amazon.com: TP-Link 10GB PCIe Network Card (TX401)-PCIe to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter,Supports Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, Servers 2019/2016/2012 R2, and Linux, Including a CAT6A Cable : Everything Else