How to Speed Up Your NAS With iSCSI

PCWorld has a new article with the same title as this post. The title is somewhat misleading because changing your storage usage on your NAS to iSCSI has some other advantages over just a speed boost. As the article summarizes:

I've already touched on some of the benefits of using iSCSI. As mentioned above, an iSCSI network target appears to a system as a local drive; therefore, not only can you format the iSCSI target with the host OS’s file system, but you can also run applications that require local storage from the iSCSI volume instead. This flexibility is great for small businesses because many programs cannot run over shared networks, even if you're using mapped drive letters; iSCSI works around that issue.
For some workloads, iSCSI may also offer better performance. Although iSCSI improves PC performance in the enterprise by allowing large storage arrays to connect to client systems without the need for custom hardware or cabling (which can result in a huge cost savings), I'm going to focus on average consumers and desktop systems here. To prove that iSCSI can enhance your PC's performance, we ran some benchmarks on a testing unit; I'll show you the results on the next page.
Source: PCWorld

Nevertheless, the use of iSCSI has some drawbacks as well:

Note, however, that using iSCSI has some drawbacks. While setup is not terribly difficult, configuring an iSCSI target and initiator is more involved than simply browsing to a shared network resource. Also, only one initiator should be connected to the iSCSI target at a time, to prevent possible data loss or corruption. In addition, assuming that you use a fast server and drives, performance may be limited by your network connection speed. A gigabit network connection (or better) is the optimal choice; with slower network connections, the potential benefits of iSCSI may be nullified.
Source: PCWorld

The article walks through setting up an iSCSI connection using a Thecus NAS, but many modern NAS devices support iSCSI. Performance, when accessing files that require multiple small input output reads and writes can approach a 30% speed boost or more.

On Ebay Now