# Which NIC to use with istgt (iSCSI)



## AndyUKG (Dec 13, 2010)

Hi,

  does anyone have good experience with istgt iSCSI target driver performance wise? If yes can you share what network card you are using or any other relevant info?
I am using bce driver with Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 and I have very poor performance. I've been told the FreeBSD driver for this card has issues by one person, but would be good to hear the experiences of others. Clients tested are Windows Server 2003R2 and 2008.

Additional info on my set up and performance, CPU is a Xeom X5550 (4 core Nehalem with HT). Using the same RAID backend (ZFS RAIDZ) Samba performance can easily get over 60MB/sec read/write but iSCSI is around 10MB/sec. Tweaks I have tried: On iSCSI I have tried istgt with command queuing enabled, I have tried the ZFS volume with various block sizes, I have tried istgt with various block sizes, I have tried Windows client with various NTFS cluster sizes. I have tried with jumbo frames enabled, I have tried client direct connected with xover cable. None of those tweaks made any significant difference to performance.

thanks for any comments! Andy.


----------



## dave (Jun 29, 2012)

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=182320


----------

