For the sata drive behavior it’s probably it finishing the writes from buffer. I like to use the iotop utility to watch storage IO activity on my systems. Could try running it on both systems to get a better picture of what’s going on.

I currently use NFS and CIFS but have used iSCSI in the past. I like the simplicity of NFS & CIFS and they meet my uses. iSCSI has it’s strengths as others have stated.

• /var/lib/mysql - I would say iSCSI in it’s own image+lun. Should get lower latency as well as higher transfer rates compared to NFS for DB but it depends on the kinds & how much usage.
• virtual machine images - I prefer NFS mounts for same reason, easier to work with the files directly. If you do go with iSCSI you can have different disk images for different kinds of VMs. Should be able to use both at same time on most hypervisors if you want to play with them too.
• lots of small files - NFS should work without issue