Is it safe to enable jumbo frames on my Drobo?

Question

Here's my network scenario:

Airport Extreme, with 4 wireless clients -- three of them on the 5GHz network and a fourth on the 2.4GHz. DroboFS, connected to the Airport with a wired connection.

I'd like to know if it's possible to enable jumbo frames on the Drobo in such a way as to allow the machine on the 2.4GHz network to benefit from it -- the Drobo is a media storage unit only.

Answer 1

Jumbo frames require that all devices on the Ethernet domain support them. WiFi does not support jumbo frames, so you can't enable them on your network. (Even if the Airport Extreme supported jumbo frames on it's wired interface and fragmented them, it wouldn't improve performance for wireless clients by any significant margin.)

Answer 2

Jumbo frames requires that all devices on the network in question support jumbo frames and also share the same MTU otherwise they will all fall back to the lower common denominator. Jumbo frames isn't necessary for most cases these days as modern switches and routers are much more capable. If you are however intent on copying large (50-100Mb+) files in large quantities then you may want to take the time to setup a dedicated jumbo frame subnet.

If you're transferring extremely large files there may be a moderate improvement but this is for transfer of whole files, not streaming of media. To improve that performance reduce the latency and go to a wired connection. If you're still having issues maybe you need to address how you're encoding your media.