I have a Akitio T3 10GBe Thunderbolt adapter connected to my iMac 5K, and a Aquantia AQtion 10GBe PCI card in my 2010 Mac Pro. I've connected the 10GBe Thunderbolt adapter to the 10GBe PCI adapter with a 10ft Cat 7 cable. I use my Mac Pro as a file server for the iMac.
While no drivers are needed, it's not immediately obvious how to get the best speed out of this set up. I figured I would need to set the preferred service order in System Preferences > Network so that the 10GBe adapters are top of the list. The list is as follows…
- 10GBe Adapter
- Ethernet
- WiFi (*iMac only. Only on so that certain Apple features work such as AirDrop, Continuity, etc)
When I mount a drive from the Mac Pro on the iMac (a 2x 8TB IronWolf RAID 0) I get inconsistent speeds with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test over the 10GBe connection. Reads are consistently around ~500MB/sec which is awesome, where are writes vary from 180MB/sec down to a paltry 15MB/sec
The only way I can get a consistent 180MB/sec+ for the write speed is to shut off all network connections on my iMac *except* the 10GBe. My theory is that some data is being sent over regular Ethernet (and maybe, horror, WiFi?)
Obviously by shutting these networks off, my Internet doesn't work anymore. As a work around I've set the Mac Pro Internet Sharing settings to share its internet from Ethernet to PCI 10GBe. This works, and on my iMac I now have consistent speeds and internet!
I'm just curious if this is the best approach or if there's a way to keep my regular iMac network ports active for internet but force all SMB shares to/from the MacPro over 10GBe only?
No comments:
Post a Comment