Anybody use an iscsi drive for media? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EddieKeytonJr · 2023-11-08 06:38 So I’ve ran out of drive space on my plex server and mounted an iscsi share from my truenas. It seems to work great. I tested with 5 1080p streams off network and no buffering. My question is, how feasible is this? I’m new to this whole thing but I do know that since the disk is not on the same server. That not only does it have to be served to the device but now it has to be served from the other machine(truenas) to my media server and then to the person watching. My question is; is this a viable solution for the long run? How much of a long term fix is this? Has anybody been successfully using an iscsi share for long term without any issues? I ran tests using the built in tools in Linux mint and it stated that I am getting 150mb/s read and 130mb/s write. I ran it for about an hour and it seemed to stay pretty consistent. I’m only running on a 1gbe network. So I know that could end up being a bottleneck. Seems like everyday I’m learning something new, but sometimes it gets daunting. Thanks for anybody’s input that helps me out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-08 07:06 Since iSCSI is used in data centres for central storage arrays (SAN) you have nothing to worry about. iSCSI is perfectly fine and has many benefits but also downsides. For media storage NFS would be the better option because you can share it with as many clients as you like, where as with iSCSI you can only do that if you have a cluster file system like VMFS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zarlo5899 · 2023-11-08 07:08 > My question is, how feasible is this? only the data needed it send to the server and the server will cache files locally so speed things up > My question is; is this a viable solution for the long run? a lot of major cloud providers do this for their block storage for VM's (might not be iscsi but have the VMs disks on another server then the one running it) and a side note i have just about all of my steam games installed on a network mount and have done this for years with no issues (other then when the NAS needs to reboot) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DayshareLP · 2023-11-08 08:32 I use an SMB share, on a ZFS dataset, as my media share. And it works flawless. I also have iscsi shares for my personal rig. I preferred the SMB share on a ZFS dataset because it's 100% dynamic and I never have to create a limited volume or something else. That means my media share is, at all times, as big / small as it needs to be. (I don't know if you can do the same with iscsi but I don't think so because it's on a block level). With my 10GB link to my Server I easily reach speeds of 700MB/s and more at some times (which in most cases ist the limit of SMB). I don't know if you can use an iscsi share with two clients at the same time. But with SMB you definitely can. That makes it easy to controll the content of the shade from my windows PC. For context: My media server is s jellyfin instance on an Ubuntu VM that hast the SMB share mounted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- arcadianarcadian · 2023-11-08 09:13 In the previous company where I worked, we were using iSCSI extensively. Both as datastore and mounted fs to VM. if you have a robust network you're good to go. iSCSI depends on the quality of the network. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- shimgapi95 · 2023-11-08 09:21 Im using-it in my home lab to expand storage of my chromebox (I have 1 with only 16Gb of storage, and I mount the docker volume on an iscsi drive, and it's my dedicated hass server using docker). for Media, I would stick to smb/webdav, as migrating media is a pain when you want to do-it outside of the iscsi drive, but for data that can be easily rebuilt, iscsi is nice when needed advance storage stuff, just make sure you have a good netwrok between the initiator and the target. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tech2but1 · 2023-11-08 09:27 I run iSCSI for a couple of things, like my Docker data store is iSCSI to an Xpenology server but it is all on the same machine. Across different machines, like for the Plex storage, I just stick to mounting drives as SMB. If the connection drops then there's less to go wrong. Having said that the servers are all on a UPS and the batteries/cache controllers on all the servers are in order so I wouldn;t have an issue switching do iSCSI. iSCSI is fine as long as your network and servers are up to the job as it is a bit less fault tolerant to network/server issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tangobravoyankee · 2023-11-08 13:26 I've done it in the past, passing individual whole drives from FreeNAS to my Windows server running Plex as a stopgap solution until I could rebuild the Windows server with more drive bays. Was great for me 'cause I could have those drives in my DrivePool like any other physical disk and when I eventually rebuilt the Windows server I just moved those drives over and it was just like they'd always been there. If I were planning to use network storage long-term, like others have said, I would lean towards SMB/NFS. IMO, network block storage should be reserved for when it's specifically required or is advantageous. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- reklis · 2023-11-08 13:49 Just want to point out that if you are doing this with proxmox it could create issues for you down the line. When you upgrade proxmox versions, for example this last version update, the recommended procedure is to backup the vms. If you run the proxmox backup command it will try to snapshot the drives. If the drives are iscsi drives then it will try to create a proxmox backup of the full iscsi “disk” from your network which may cause problems for you like it did for me. I didn’t have room for the backup on my host. Not a “problem” with iscsi per se. Just food for thought. Personally I switched from using iscsi to mounting cifs shares and I’m happy with my setup. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- autogyrophilia · 2023-11-08 14:26 iSCSI it's a fine protocol. It works at a low level. However, it is not unheard of corruption happening thanks to unproperly functioning networks. My preference would be to use NFS, which it's a slightly less performant solution but more performance in theory. There is also the new hotness, NVME/TCP ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mpopgun · 2023-11-08 14:45 I use cephfs instead of iscsi...But they are similar, and it works great for me. Cephfs can be exposed via iscsi if you want and mount it on Windows and Linux as a mapped drive....no need to setup samba or anything extra. I have 6 hdds in my cephfs cluster and I can max out my 1gbps network with file transfers. Which is way more than I need for my Plex server. But back to your point, iscsi is more than capable of supporting our Plex traffic, should work great! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EddieKeytonJr · 2023-11-13 18:50 Thanks everyone for the replies. I feel more confident in using iscsi. It’s greatly appreciated!