Anyone network drives / iSCSI LUN for audio drives?

[alexdingley]

Hi there!

As I was reading through support materials ahead of receiving my new QNAP home server, I became aware of something interesting. iSCSI LUN is something that this device can serve up. Essentially (and forgive me if I'm oversimplifying it), it should allow me to have a volume that's resident on the network be mounted to my mac as if it were a local volume. (meaning it would presumably get backed up via time-machine and backblaze, and just act like a locally-connected drive in just about every way) Given that I'll be running (at least) Gigabit ethernet, I believe that's more than enough bandwidth for recording & playback... and the QNAP also has 10GbE (which will also be standard on my next mac too)...

In the interest of having fewer devices in the music-making space, I'm curious if this is a common practice / a good move. Have any of you ever worked with a network volume (whether by traditional network file sharing or via LUN) where it's your primary audio recording drive? Any thoughts / cautionary tales?

Or is everyone here pretty much plugging in a drive (or using an additional internal SATA / SAS / SCSI drive) for their "audio drive" ?

[digitaldrummer]

I'll preface this by saying that I used to work for a company that had iSCSI storage products for enterprise use (i.e. connected to servers, etc.) and I did quite a bit of work with iSCSI several years ago (iSCSI has mostly fallen out of popularity in the enterprise recently, it's too slow/high latency compared to NVMe-OF or local storage). I don't think you would be happy with it as a primary storage device for recording. The latency is not as low as a local SSD and actually consumer-grade network switches are really just not good enough to handle reliable iSCSI. I mean it will connect and you'll see the LUN but when you get really pushing it (like if you were recording several tracks while playing back several others, it might choke. Even if it's the only traffic going over that switch (if there are other devices, then it just gets worse...). A local SSD will prove to be much more reliable (and NVMe is typically even faster) and the latencies will be an order of magnitude better.

But for a backup device, where all you really care about is getting data backed up to another device, it will probably be OK for that and having the locally mounted LUN (volume) will just make it easier to deal with. no need to plugin a USB drive, etc. and it should be fast enough (for backups) over the gigE connection.

[Nick Sevilla]

I have yet to see network drives OTHER than ones connected via 10GB or higher fiber network, be able to do what you want.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fi ... ons-guide/

https://www.avid.com/solutions/media-pr ... -the-cloud

[digitaldrummer]

another thing I forgot is that to get the most from iSCSI you will want to configure "jumbo frames". but to do that properly you have to set it on all devices -- the network card in your computer, the storage device, and on all ports of the switch. if you skip one, it won't work. Usually jumbo frames is set to a value of 9000 (but it could be other values depending on the device, for example it might be 9216 or even higher). The goal is to create less fragmentation of the Ethernet packets. There will always be fragmentation because that's how Ethernet works - and storage devices will want to write 64K or larger chunks when doing a backup (that's what it would do on a local drive) and the standard Ethernet packet/frame is only 1518 bytes, and only 1500 max of that is data (and yes that is bytes, compared to the 64000 or more bytes that its trying to send). So there is a lot more overhead when sending small packets (ACKs, setting sliding TCP Window sizes, and other fun, nerdy details) and your effective throughput will be a lot less than Gigabit. if you configure Jumbo frames, you have a chance of getting around 80% data throughput efficiency. So at best (over 1GbE), 800Mb/s, or roughly 100MB/sec max. by comparison, a local SATA SSD can do up to ~550MB/sec read/write (bursts) and an NVMe can potentially do a lot more (~3300MB/sec for a PCIe Gen3 device).

[alexdingley]

Oh cool, I'll check those links out. Thanks for the insights/resources.