iSCSI and CIFS Network Disks for RAID0/RAID 1 Configurations

Abstract

In this paper, we have tested the impact of the network disk configuration to the system performances. The performance analysis compares two network disk configurations, practically evaluating two different network protocols using identical physical disk configurations. One network drive is configured to operate as an iSCSI block device, while the other operates as a network share disk using CIFS protocol. Testing procedure is based on the use of DiskSpd tool and encompasses measurement of the flow rate, number of the operations and the average response time. Based on the results, iSCSI shows significantly higher flow rates and lower delay values as the size of the data block grows. In smaller blocks, the differences between iSCSI and CIFS are almost negligible.