[Paul Muller]

Thanks Glenn for confirming that I am not losing my marbles (at least in this case), if I were a betting man Synology’s approach to iSCSI probably works great with Windows and vmWare which is the bulk of the market anyway) and unless that’s broken there’s little commercial pressure to address it.

Steve – as usual you are a source of great help and knowledge. My 10GbE FreeNAS iSCIS implementation was never able to get any faster than about 2.5Gb/sec (R/W) even with 16 striped HDDs (or 4 striped SATA III SSDs) on the fastest controllers I could find. The STRANGE thing is that AFP/SMB with the same box easily hit 10Gb/sec R/W speeds.

So clearly my SmallTree NICs are NOT the problem (whew).

So, what is it about iSCSI that is such a pig? When I saw you at NAB you demonstrated your amazing FreeBSD based appliance that was using a sparse disk image with FCPX to get 10Gb/s speeds, what is the iSCSI performance like?

(to be clear, I would have bought one of those instead of a Synology were it not for the fact I needed more spindles than would fit in your great device!)

p.s. it’s perversely comforting to know that despite Apple’s success OSX remains a poorly supported operating system, somehow demonstrating we’re still safely on the fringes of respectable society 🙂

[Paul Muller]

Sorry for re-opening the wound, but I am having similar challenges and wonder if/how you solved the problem.

After months of using a FreeNAS SAN and struggling with general flakiness and the feeling that I was running without a safety net, I switched over to a DS3612xs which features 4x 1GbE ports as well as a slot for a 10GbE NIC (which I have populated with an Intel x540T2 paired to a (wonderful) SmallTree dual-10GbE NIC on my 2009 12 core Mac Pro) and the Globalsan iSCSI initiator.

FreeNAS worked great with this setup and iSCSI MPIO (albeit I was never able to get it working faster than about 250MB/sec), but I can’t get it working on Synology DSM 4.3 (most recent updates installed).

Enabling multiple sessions on the DS3612xs results in a duplicate drives on being created – one for each instance.

What am I doing wrong?