Windows Iscsi Drives

If you are like me, a regular average Joe-Schmoe with a bunch of laptops networked together, then then only way you are sharing files between the computers is with Windows Shared folders (okay, for the technically inclined, it's "SMB shared folders"). Well, some people may be using FTP instead but that and SMB are pretty much it.

For folks who can afford to shell out cash for some serious hardware or get to salvage the old equipment from server rooms and network closets, iSCSI storage is one really cool way to get files across computers. iSCSI network attached storage devices act as block-level shared devices unlike SMB shared folders which are simply file-level shared resources. What this means is that you can access the disk, format it, re-partition it, and do pretty much anything that you would do with the disk if it were attached to your computer. You get to have your files in-sync across computers because although you are accessing them from different locations, they are essentially the same files (just like with SMB or FTP, but this is better integrated). Linux can share disk devices as raw storage using the iscsitarget package.