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ISCSI Disk?
Is this an actual disk, or is it just a partition of a disk?
I saw an offer for a dedi with 100GB ISCSI Disk, but I didn't even know you could get 100GB drives (usually 80/120). The fact it's so cheap also made me wonder if it was a single partition of say a 2TB drive or something
Edit: nevermind, should have searched first. found my answer
Comments
It's basically a partition (more accurate term would be a LUN). If the provider is reputable and intelligent enough to do iSCSI properly (and if they're doing iSCSI they need to be intelligent), it should perform roughly equivalent to a local disk, though not QUITE as well.
Thanks for the reply
It's a virtual disk on a SAN. Not a physical disk attached to the machine, but a virtual disk attached over the network,
I simply love the iSCSI protocol and I use it to mount disks on my computers which are hosted elsewhere over the internet. It behaves like a local disk, but, of course the actual speeds are limited by your internet connection, for example at home i do some 20 MB/s to the datacenter where I host my servers upload and about 3 times more download even though my connection is supposed to be symmetric, it isnt
Even so, it has enough iops as it is hosted on raid 10 so I can use it much like an IDE drive of an older generation which does about the same speeds in "dd test" but this one has higher iops by far.
I hope you have your data backed up. That's a horrible idea to run iSCSI over the internet. Let's hope you don't disconnect while updating any important data such as partition information or a file.
The data is further layered in containers, those are written at once and read many. Disconnections happen when I lose power anyway with real disks which can also fail physically. It is not more dangerous, besides, this is why journaled file systems have been invented.
EDIT: As for the backups... Those are the backups in case my house burns or something.