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Hi, I have Win Server 2012 and a IX2 I-Omega NAS storage plunged into the LAN

The NAS has the iSCSI function and I set up a drive and allocated 4GB for a test. I was able to connect to to the server and initiate the drive in Disk Management. So now I have a 4GB drive on the Server that points to the NAS. Yay!

Now how does this work in practical use? Is it only useful local to the server? Can I map drives to it through the Windows server name?

One thing I want to set up is have a share on the server, I copy important files to it daily, then 1x week the NAS will run a copy job and copy everything from the server folder to the NAS device which is RAID1

The server has a 3TB 128cache WD datacenter HDD- I get amazing write speeds , then I can copy using the job to the NAS for redundancy since it’s slower to copy.

What is the best way? Part of this is just messing around and setting up a iSCSI because I’ve never done it.

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Sorry for all the typos! I’m on a mobile device !

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It’s a NAS, you can use CIFS or simple windows file shares, why would you create it as iSCSI then want to use that?

iSCSI can be backup targets or storage locations for virtual environments among other things, but what you described doesn’t sound like there is need.

iSCSI also allows you or software to initiate direct SCSI commands to the storage.

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Practical use, it’s a backup target or a file share. You can do both at the same time, but I recommend one or the other since the backup target usually will consume quite a bit depending on your retention policy (or if it’s continuous, it will definitely fill it up).

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I use iSCSI for two reasons:

  1. If I need to make network storage look like a local drive to Windows for a specific reason (rare).

  2. Shared/clustered VM storage

In your use case, I don’t see any reason why I’d choose iSCSI over CIFS/SMB/NFS.

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Thanks all! Most of it was just trying to understand and messing around on my lab network. But I can see how using file share is more simple.

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One of the features of iSCSI is the use of jumbo frames

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(2) should work with SMB3 / NFSv3/v4 as well :slight_smile:

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I wonder what are you going to use Iomega for. Its performance is completely horrible for frequent backup jobs. Most probably will be OK for a very slow backup appliance only (cold data? archive?).

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