Back end storage - iSCSI or NFS?

[lorenzoj]

Hi
I'm not new to the world of IP cameras - for the last 4 years or so I've had several cameras at my house. Over the years I've upgraded them as I've played with new models and newer technology has become available. Currently I have 15 high resolution (2 MP minimum) cameras at my house. I've played with several NVR software platforms, and for the last several years have used Blue Iris.
Local storage is an array of SSDs, so plenty fast, but after 30 days I have Blue Iris move recordings to archive storage. I have about 3 years of recordings, on a 7TB partition of which I'm using the majority of. Currently the 7TB is on an external NAS, and I have an iSCSI LUN mounted in windows, so accessed as a local drive, although it resides on network storage.
With the NAS device I have, I have the ability to create an iSCSI storage LUN which I can then attach to the blue iris DVR (as I have been for several years now), OR I can create a windows share, and map a drive to the share.
I'm in the process of rebuilding the NAS, which as you can imagine, copying 7TB of data is taking a while to back up, but I don't intend on getting rid of footage. If there ever was a time to pick between iSCSI and plain windows shares (NFS), this is it.

Looking for any suggestions or input on whether to use iSCSI or NFS. I have plenty of space left - more than double in fact - so regardless which option I go extra storage isn't the problem.

 

[corkangel76]

iSCSI has a *touch* lower network overhead than an NFS or SMB drive mapping. They do function the same, however if you are concerned about network bandwidth, use iSCSI... Just remember that in the long run, anything that has to leave the local machine and travel across the network, even at gigabit speeds is going to be SLOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW compared to locally attached storage.

 

[wseaton]

iSCSI is going to involve a bit less network over-head, but there's some additional packet controls inside iSCSI that give it an advantage over NFS because it's actually working at a layer underneath SMB , NFS (or CIFS).

However, I don't think these controls matter when the application is already network aware can can write to network shares already. iSCSI is really for when you want to extend a logical data volume from your machine across a network and make it invisible to the layer above it. On a gig network it will take a *lot* of cameras to saturate a common NFS link.