Home NIC options for ISCSI

[d3n]

I have been contemplating seting up my home storage server with ISCSI support. A NIC with true ISCSI offload ability is way out of my price range so I was going to settle for checksum offload and jumbo frame support at 9k

I happily found this handy comparison
guide of nic chipsets.

Most of the NICs I had been looking at are based on the realtek chipset and have a jumbo frame size limit of 7.5k.

My question is anyone else have an ISCSI setup at home?

 

[cmetz]

d3n, you do not want a RealTek chipset of any sort. Especially for iSCSI.

I have tried iSCSI in software in Intel Pro/1000MTs, and was very unhappy with the performance and stability of the setup. I would not suggest this route. I don't think iSCSI is fully baked yet, certainly not at the lower end. Probably if you have a iSCSI offload HBA that looks like a full SCSI board to the OS and an appliance SAN controller it would work okay. Both of those pieces cost real $$.