Here is a copy/paste of a post I did on a forum. It describes in very light detail how to add iSCSI based storage to a Mac. With the new Macbook lacking firewire, this might actually become a more popular method.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with a few different bits of technology, one of them being iSCSI. iSCSI is a relatively cheap and efficient method of adding storage to a computer that uses your existing network infrastructure. If you have a gigabit network and a Linux server (I haven’t tested other solutions) you can add as much storage to your Mac as you can fit in your Linux system.
You might be thinking, “I have a 2TB USB/FW drive why would I want iSCSI?” USB and FireWire drives are a fine thing but lets look at some of their disadvantages.
* USB2 is actually slower than many FW400 devices
* If you have a mac with just one FW port and your external drive doesn’t include a FW port, you can’t attach anything else to that FW port AND use your drive
* External drives add noise
* External drives must be located close to the computer, not ideal in a HTPC setup
Here a really quick overview of how it is done, I can certainly provide more detailed information however. Here is a list of what you need to get the job done.
1. Linux server with gigabit ethernet
2. A hard drive or RAID set that you want to share to your Mac
3. gigabit switch
4. Mac with gigabit, the more recent the better
5. GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator for Mac
6. iSCSI Enterprise Target for Linux
Setup your Linux system and install IET. If you’re using Ubuntu, IET might be available in apt. I use Fedora so I compiled IET from source. Edit the /etc/ietd.conf file to point to your disk or RAID set (or even a file that was made using dd if=/dev/zero of=filename bs=1024 count=1 seek=n where n is the size of file you want in bytes). Start the ietd service, /etc/init.d/iscsi-target under Fedora.
Install the GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator on your Mac. Enter System Preferences and click the new GlobalSAN button. Add your Linux server’s IP address to the Discovery screen. Click on the target tab and your disk should be shown, click it and logon to it without a username or password UNLESS you configured one in IET. Be sure to check the persistent tab if you want this drive to appear each time you boot your Mac.
Open Disk Utility and format the iSCSI disk. Your Mac will format the new drive and it’ll soon appear on your desktop. You can use it like any other disk you’ve ever used. You can partition it, copy/delete files, whatever. As far as the Mac is concerned it is a normal hard drive.
In my setup I have an Intel Mac mini, 1.83Ghz C2D and a Linux server built in late January, 2.2Ghz C2D. The disk being shared to my mini is a single 120GB PATA drive. I am able to copy files to the drive with a top speed of 44MB/s. Reading is actually slow but I attribute that to a limitation with the mini’s internal drive. I haven’t been able to test using OpenSolaris as the iSCSI target though OpenSolaris would be a fantastic choice as a storage server.
To be fair, there are some negatives to this setup. The biggest one being you can’t have multiple Macs using the same disk at the same time. You can unmount the disk on one mac and mount it with another one, but having two macs connected at the same time risks your data.
