One possibility for a house lab/server/NAS is to make use of a Mac Mini oder Studio with exterior Thunderbolt gear just like the OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 and a Thunderbolt 10GbE SFP+ adapter. Each answer has benefits and drawbacks, in fact, and with a Mac, particularly a Mac Mini, there are clearly benefits by way of ecosystem, computing energy & energy consumption, however you usually learn that macOS is just not meant for server operation.
One of many related points is the creation of LUNs as iSCSI targets. I would want this, as a result of I might additionally need to use my server for manufacturing work, not only for file storage, media-related issues (like Plex) and different companies (e.g. Vaultwarden). For the latter three, macOS plus Docker or native installations might be a positive answer, offered you are utilizing correct Thunderbolt gadgets.
For top-bandwidth fast-access manufacturing work, nonetheless, my consumer Mac would want to attach through iSCSI for native mounting, and you are able to do that with third-party initiators on macOS, even when the most effective/quickest possibility will price you an honest amount of cash.
However are you able to create a LUN on macOS? On turnkey options like a Synology NAS it is a easy course of through DSM’s SAN Supervisor. On Linux you have got tgt or scsi-target-utils to create targets, however these will not be out there through macOS bundle managers, so I assume that both they have not been ported, or macOS is just not suited.
Is there any answer for macOS, an answer that’s steady, e.g. after reboots?
