Hardware iSCSI Storage: What is it, and why you should be using it

We explain why iSCSI might be the ideal way to add network storage to your PC.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/05/25/what-is-iscsi-storage/1

 

Interesting idea. I run a server at the moment for keeping files stored, but I'm considering something different to allow me to use the server as a folding rig.

How much would a setup like this cost for an average one?

 

FreeNAS has iSCSI built in, and the new version (OpenMediaVault) will have it as well. So to answer your question Ph4lanx, free, that's how much

 

That first picture on page one would have me worried about my NAS!

 

very nice tutorial.

what about other OS? if they don't have iSCSI, would it be possible to do the mapped network drive as usual?

 

...isn't that about the same as what NDAS does?
(only without extra drivers)

 

OSX has had it since 10.4, M$ since win2000 and linux since 2005.
Basically if your OS doesn't support iSCSI then you're still using an Amiga.

 

I'm still not seeing the benefit over regular network drives... and look, I can actually get the amount of free space reported correctly!

 

Have you seen the price of that Qnap though? £450!

 

That's just Windows Home Server being awesome.

Yayyyy.

Microsoft in "We can't make two Windows products talk to each other properly" shocker. It's reading the first drive in a 5-disk box that's 500GB in size.

I know! It's a business box but the software is really very very nice. Still, I was just using it as an example for the guide I'll do an iSCSI one maybe for FreeNAS when I do our "build our own NAS" article, but I still need to blag some hard drives for a month to actually do it.

Actually you had to download a PowerPack for XP to have iSCSI

 

+1 for Freenas, has pretty much any network service you want. Including iSCSI

 

CAT5eeeeeeee cable, you say?

 

Looking forward to that. Off the shelf NAS boxes always seem hideously overpriced to me.

There are lots of options out there for homebuilds - freenas, UnRaid (heard about but not looked into closely), full blown linux server, even just setting up shared&mapped drives on a windows box. Would be good to see a detailed pros and cons list of the various OS options, and how they stack up against the software from the likes of Drobo, Thecus, Qnap etc...

Hardware has always seemed the easy bit by comparison. I guess the only concern I have is the presumably lower power benefits of a purpose built box, but having seen power figures for a few purpose built NAS's, I'm not convinced that they're all that much better than a system built with an eye on power. Obviously a NAS is likely to be on 24/7, so things like do the disks spin down properly etc... becomes a bigger issue. I'm always surprised how few NAS reviews look at those sorts of things, though I appreciate the cost of the NAS box itself (especially an off the shelf one!) is likely to be by far the bigger cost for many years.

 

iSCSI <> NAS

Nas is getting a lot of pc's on a networked storage, iSCSI for attaching one pc to it (or more if having multiple LUN's), but without sharing the same volume. Unless clustering.

 

Surely you'd have to test it with two computers simultaneously?

 

Biggest Problem of NAS systems are their price and their horrible bad performance when transfering files to the NAS. I bought a NAS some month ago. It was a very cheap one (etrayz). Yes, you can put 3 TB into a NAS, and yes, you can stuff 8 TB into a NAS, but how long will it take to get transfered to your NAS? I think buying a cheap AMD system, which needs less then 50 Watts is the better solution. You get more for your money!
I mean, where is the advantage when you have a Gbit network but the NAS is only able to give you a transferspeed of 20 MB / sec? Try to transfer 1.5 TB to such a NAS, it will take you days!

 

i played around with iSCSI when i built my current fileserver a year or so ago
when i reinstalled the OS on my desktop i cba reconfiguring iSCSI and just dumped the data into an SMB share
not worth it for home users imo, theres almost no advantage

 

I have iSCSI software on my server that shares my dvd ROM since i only have one of them. I can login into my dvd player from anywhere with the internet. The low bandwidth basically means that all I can do is jog the cd tray in and out. As far as internet file sharing I use something called HFS which generates a website based on the HDD structure. I can share pictures and music anywhere with this though my original idea was to use it to stream movies to mobile devices connected locally over VLC4iPhone. Works great, everyone should have a file server!

 

"We briefly tested the teaming feature with a motherboard we had in the lab, but found it didn't improve our performance - we suspect our mobo's Gigabit controller just isn't good enough."


Probably because the NAS isn't capable of fully saturating a single Gigabit connection, let alone 2.

 

I was wondering, can you share those block level targets via SMB/AFP at the same time? So far I only tried creating targets on an existing volume and it doesn't work for those.