I guess I would be called a "Power User", as I'm building a very large storage device for home use. However this also means that I need to be careful in selecting the components, as the money I'm spending is my own.

The storage device will have 12 x 750GB SATA drives utilizing a 3Ware controller yet to be selected. The storage device must satisfy the following use cases.

1. Extended capacity for my personal machine.

2. Primary storage for encoded video (large files)

3. Work space for encoding video.

4. Support multiple concurrent client connections for video playback.

Multiple concurrent access to the data is a primary requirement. For this reason, I'm not 100% certain that iSCSI is the way to go, as a strict iSCSI implementation creates a lock between the target and the intiator to prevent corruption caused by concurrent disk operations.

I would like the space to appear as a local drive to each of the client machines. But NAS uses protocols that are extremely inefficient and would probably cause problems with video encoding.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the capabilities of some of your products. Could you suggest a particular product which would satisfy these requirements? Perhaps clearing up any incorrect information I may have?

Danke