Synology LAG w/o router/switch LACP support

Just recently noticed my Synology is only using one of two ports connected to my router. Went digging and came across your YouTube video for bonding two ethernet ports on the Synology. Since neither my router or switch support LACP, I would obviously need to use adaptive load balancing. My questions is regarding ethernet cable connections.

Would it be best in my situation to have both Synology connections going to the router, or one to the switch and one to the router, or both to the switch? Everything going to the switch is in my office and nearby. The items on the switch relevant to the NAS are a tower from which I do the NAS management and content loading (not much streaming) and an HDHomerun TV tuner/DVR that streams to the NAS. The devices that use the media server are mostly wireless from around the house (xbox, shield, roku, etc.).

I just bought this mesh router and more recently the switch so I’m not inclined to buy new equipment. At the time of the purchase, I had no idea what LACP was nor that I wanted it. So not ideal, but I think bonding would be some amount of benefit even if it’s not using ideal equipment. But would like advice regarding the physical connections.

I don’t think you will notice much difference, but you will have some redundancy if you are able to bond your two ethernet connections, though your router will have to support bonding, my old Asus did, so perhaps yours does too. You can test if it makes any difference if you plug into both your router and your switch.

Think you are basically wasting your time, unless you beef up your router and buy a managed switch.

Check the network settings in the Synology. If you just have one IP address, you just need one connection. If you have two IP addresses on the same subnet then this will accomplishing nothing so unplug one of the cables. You might create a network loop if you have multiple connections and a single IP address and your switch does not support spanning tree protocol to suppress the loop. That would really slow down the network…

LACP will not double your throughput to the synology. You would need multiple clients that are both trying to communicate to the synology simultaneously at maximum network speed to even see any benefit from LACP. At best, LACP would provide redundency. Don’t lose sleep over it…it’s tech that sounds great but really doesn’t deliver much value. If you want to go faster, wait for 10GB or faster interfaces. Prices have fallen and availability is increasing!

I would look into setting up MPIO between your Synology and your tower. This would use iSCSI which your Synology should support. Here are a couple of links that might help you out.

Below they mention that the connection doesn’t survive a reboot, but it may just be the service not setup to start on reboot. Even if it doesn’t, as long as you aren’t rebooting all the time this shouldn’t be a major issue.
https://www.froebe.net/blog/2017/10/05/howto-set-up-iscsi-with-multipath-mpio-in-windows-10-solved/