New NAS question

[inactionman]

I've just bought a new NAS (a ReadyNAS 4 Ultra), which I didn't realise supports iSCSI, bonus! I'm putting 3x 1.5Tb drives in there in raid 5.

I'm running windows 7 pro and I'm thinking of getting rid of my internal bulk drive and just using the SSD and some space on the NAS over iSCSI on my second on-board gigabit NIC, adding an extra 1.5Tb drive to the raid array for this. I don't know too much about iSCSI (I'm not a hands on techie anymore), firstly will this work and secondly, is it worth doing?

 

[TdC]

lots of my tech mates swear by trunking their multiple gigabit nics into their nasses. dunno about iSCSI speeds though.

 

[Insane]

We've done some iSCSI work here lately with multiple NICS and big-ass SANs, the big thing is redundancy here though. running 2x dual port NICS from different batches connecting to 2 iscsi switches.

The general view is to have a dedicated vlan for iSCSI, so you'd connect the 2nd interface on both NAS and computer to each other with its own dedicated subnet.

as far as I am aware, iSCSI itself is exclusive access only so only one computer can read/write to it at any one time. So you cant really share the LUN itself with anything else.

As for speeds, a quick look on Smallnetbuilder's review seems to indicate both iSCSI and SMB file transfers are effectively the same speed throughout (64MB/s write - 94MB/s read) so it might just depend on how you ideally want the files presented to yourself.

 

[inactionman]

Ok, useful stuff so far; but I'm looking at hooking up the nas on one of it's nic's to my gigabit network (which will also connect to my computer through one nic through a gigabit switch together with the rest of my network) and the other directly to my computer through it's other nic. Mainly to play around with iSCSI, but also to get rid of a drive.

 

[Embattle]

On my DS410 while testing iSCSI I managed to match my SMB transfers via gigabit connection (9k Jumbo frames), so got around 105MB/s read and 45MB/s write. I would probably use it as everyday storage if my gigabit connection was permanent, but since it isn't I still use my local hard drive and access my NAS via powerline networking.