I bought one of these because I keep running out of disk space. With the ability to store 12Tb, I thought it might keep me going for some time to come.

It allows you to build raid 0,1 and 5 arrays and Netgear’s own X raid something or other. Unfortunately, it doent allow striping and mirroring. It  is compatible with OS X and supports AFP shares and Timemachine as well as iscsi as I mentioned earlier. However, the GUI is a bit flaky and didn’t seem to like Initiator iqn’s at all. If you download the root ssh plugin you can access the box as root over ssh and look at what it is actually doing.

iscsi config is held in /etc/ietd.conf

Target iqn.2010-2.taurus.sinodun.com:calendarserver
 Lun 0 Path=/e/calendarserver,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN293R60037B-003,IOMode=wb
 HeaderDigest CRC32,None
 DataDigest CRC32,None
 IncomingUser user xxxxxxxxxxxx
 InitiatorIQN iqn.2010-02.com.sinodun.hydra:calendarserver

Target iqn.2010-2.taurus.sinodun.com:collaboration
 Lun 0 Path=/e/collaboration,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN293R60037B-001,IOMode=wb
 HeaderDigest CRC32,None
 DataDigest CRC32,None
 IncomingUser user xxxxxxxxxxxx
 InitiatorIQN iqn.2010-02.com.sinodun.hydra:collaboration

Firstly their Target IQNs don’t look like the spec described on wikipedia – I don’t know if it is Netgear or Wikipedia that is wrong here and don’t care as this doen’t seem to break anything.

The real problem in the Initiator IQN – I had to add this by hand and it gets stripped out of every entry in the file every time a new iscsi target is created and at other random times. According to the Netgear web GUI theses are needed for persistent reservation support.

However, once it is working it seems nice and stable. If your disks don’t mount just go and check those Initiator IQNs.