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The device has an onboard 8 port unmanaged gigabit switch. The two external ports are just switch ports and cannot be aggregated in any way. The entire cluster
by gorkish 4y ago
The device has an onboard 8 port unmanaged gigabit switch. The two external ports are just switch ports and cannot be aggregated in any way. The entire cluster is therefore limited effectively to 1gbps throughput.
IMO it ruins the product utterly and completely. They should have integrated a switch IC similar to what's used in the netgear gs110mx which has 8 gigabit and 2 multi-gig interfaces.
- geerlingguy 4y agoIt would be really cool if they could split out 2.5G networking to all the Pis, but with the current generation of Pi it only has one PCIe lane, so you'd have to add in a PCIe switch for each Pi if you still wanted those M.2 NVMe slots... that adds a lot of cost and complexity. Failing that, a 2.5G external port would be the simplest way to make this thing more viable as a storage cluster board, but that would drive up the switch chip cost a bit (cutting into margins). So the last thing would be allowing management of the chip (I believe this Realtek chip does allow it, but it's not exposed anywhere), so you could do link aggregation... but that's not possible here either. So yeah, the 1 Gbps is a bummer. Still fun for experimentation, and very niche production use cases, but less useful generally.