Is there a way to team or aggregate dual nics in win7?

[musiclover7]

Every motherboard in my home network has dual nics, which up to this pnt, has been completely pointless.. Wondering if that is still the case. At work, we team our nics for fault tolerance which also lends the potential for better speeds. As most motherboards these days come with dual nics, I am wondering when Windows will come up with a decent way to make sense of that hardware.. Anyone??

I will be traveling all day today, so won't be able to reply back to this thread.. however, will look into it tonight..

 

[pparks1]

Well, for most businesses with servers the NICs are often teamed for 2 purposes. 1 for fault tolerance...so if 1 nic fails the box continues to run and service the network. 2 for aggragating and getting speed increases. For example, a mail server or SQL box could have a need for more bandwidth than can be supplied by 1 NIC. However, in the aggragation sense...this is mostly for internal networks where there is tons of internal traffic.

It's highly unlikely that a home computer could be completely saturating a 1gbps network link...as most hard drives cannot even supply the data fast enough to saturate a single connection. Next, most home users network traffic goes out to the Internet...and with this..you are obviously limited to the bandwidth that your ISP provides....which comes nowhere near the capacity of a single NIC.

Finally, in order to actually aggragate NIC's, you have to have a switch which allows this functionality...and most people aren't investing in gear of the caliber for their home use.