how to use hdds in different pc as local disks?

[Xeliath]

So, I heard a NAS isn't good for storing games (And playing them frequently)

I want to have my Steam library go there, and I also need to be able to use a drive to record to (I have multiple drives.)

What would be?

Please include instructions, as in this catagory, I'm very dumb.

If you are wondering why I would ask this question, it is because I need more fans in my case (A InWIn 805) and that requires taking the hdd cage out.

I do not want to use a external drive enclosure, but I do have a second computer with free SATA ports and SATA power, and it has ethernet if that means anything.

I also have about 6 HDDs, but I won't use RAID due to different capacities, brands, and rotation speed.

Yes, I literally don't know how many HDDs I have (Because some might be dead, I have a total of 12)

 

But is it possible to redirect OBS (I use OBS to record) to write to a HDD instead of my C drive?
I cannot afford to spend any money on this right now, so only free options work ._.

If a HDD only NAS is fine for games and recording, then just say so.
Thank you

[Windows7ge]

Saving your games to network storage (NAS) and running them over the network won't work. If it did the performance would be terrible.

 

Although you SHOULD be able to stream OBS to the other system. I don't recommend it because if anything goes wrong you'll have at least a broken recording if not a unusable file because it didn't close correctly. This also means if you don't notice that it lost connection with the storage PC then you'll keep recording but nothing was recorded.

 

You can test this anyways though. I'm not an OBS user. If it turns out to be quite stable I'll eat my words.

 

First and foremost. What OS (Operating System) is this other computer running? Likely Windows, but what version? If not Windows what else?

[Xeliath]

2 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Saving your games to network storage (NAS) and running them over the network won't work. If it did the performance would be terrible.

 

Although you SHOULD be able to stream OBS to the other system. I don't recommend it because if anything goes wrong you'll have at least a broken recording if not a unusable file because it didn't close correctly. This also means if you don't notice that it lost connection with the storage PC then you'll keep recording but nothing was recorded.

 

 You can test this anyways though. I'm not an OBS user. If it turns out to be quite stable I'll eat my words.

 

First and foremost. What OS (Operating System) is this other computer running? Likely Windows, but what version? If not Windows what else?

It isn't running any OS atm, what would you recommend?

Also, there is something called iSCSI, but I don't know anything about it.

[Windows7ge]

12 minutes ago, Xeliath said:

It isn't running any OS atm, what would you recommend?

Also, there is something called iSCSI, but I don't know anything about it.

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer Systems Interface. I only know one form of it but it's history goes back pretty far and I don't know it's past. For now don't worry about it. It should be quite irrelevant to what you're doing.

 

Do you know the specs on this PC that you want to use as storage? CPU, RAM quantity, type. The motherboard model. Power supply specifications? This will help us figure out what kind of OS we could run on it. For easy storage Windows would be quick'n'dirty or we can have a play at a intended network storage based OS like FreeNAS or RockSTOR

[Xeliath]

3 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer Systems Interface. I only know one form of it but it's history goes back pretty far and I don't know it's past. For now don't worry about it. It should be quite irrelevant to what you're doing.

 

Do you know the specs on this PC that you want to use as storage? CPU, RAM quantity, type. The motherboard model. Power supply specifications? This will help us figure out what kind of OS we could run on it. For easy storage Windows would be quick'n'dirty or we can have a play at a intended network storage based OS like FreeNAS or RockSTOR

It is using a i5... um, I think a i5 660, (Not 6600) it has 12GB ram... Don't ask... It is DDR4, I think it is using some random Dell motherboard, and the PSU is a 500W 80+ white, I think...?

[vrod]

If it’s a 660, it’s not DDR4.

 

i’ve run games over the network before and it was pretty damn fast! You just gotta use the right setup, then it will work pretty well.

 

i used FreeNAS (still am for other stuff) and it has a iSCSI target service as well. What size drives do you have?

[Xeliath]

1 minute ago, vrod said:

If it’s a 660, it’s not DDR4.

 

i’ve run games over the network before and it was pretty damn fast! You just gotta use the right setup, then it will work pretty well.

 

i used FreeNAS (still am for other stuff) and it has a iSCSI target service as well. What size drives do you have?

crap. I ment to write ddr3

[Xeliath]

 

1 minute ago, vrod said:

If it’s a 660, it’s not DDR4.

 

i’ve run games over the network before and it was pretty damn fast! You just gotta use the right setup, then it will work pretty well.

 

i used FreeNAS (still am for other stuff) and it has a iSCSI target service as well. What size drives do you have?

I have a 2TB, two 1TBs, 2 or 3 320GBs, and about a billion 160GB drives

Yeah, don't ask why I have so many 160Gb drives. AND, I can't really RAID them either. Not enough SATA ports, and different rotation speeds and brands.

[vrod]

FreeNAS (and ZFS) you could technically make it work with a striped 1TB mirror and 320GB mirror. Scaling would be pretty bad though.

 

If I were you, I would try to get an extra 2TB and get rid of all the other drives.

 

Then make a pool of a single mirror with the 2tb drives. Then create a zvol and present that as a logical device to your pc. Make sure to use wired networking with a transfer rate of at least 1Gbps!

[Windows7ge]

8 hours ago, vrod said:

i’ve run games over the network before and it was pretty damn fast! You just gotta use the right setup, then it will work pretty well.

 

i used FreeNAS (still am for other stuff) and it has a iSCSI target service as well. What size drives do you have?

Your experience would be entirely dependent on what game you're trying to run. Are you launching minesweeper or crysis 3 over the network? It's easy to launch small applications but if larger ones have to constantly fetch large amounts of data it won't make the user experience very good and I'm back to my argument of reliability. If anything goes wrong the game will stop working. Considering the unknown reliability of this system and how it's going to use a whole series of scratch disks is all the reason to not encourage that. File transfers are easy because they're backed by TCP and latency isn't important.

 

I also would not encourage iSCSI. Using SAMBA's SMB and mapping the network drive should work a treat. Though I do support just using the larger disks if SATA ports are limited. If you want to use more drives than ports you have you can consider the LSI 9201-8i or 9211-16i when money isn't so tight. Then a couple breakout cables. It'd let you plug in those billion 160GB drives and you could match & RAID em up for some application.

[paddy-stone]

Personally I would just go with a USB 3.0 enclosure, it still has it's issues, but not so bad as networking. I would still keep a backup of the games on the NAS though. The USB can be hidden somewhere, so it doesn't have to be an ugly box sitting on the top/side of your PC... for mine I use a USB 3,0 extension cable and have it sit in my media cabinet.

[Xeliath]

3 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Personally I would just go with a USB 3.0 enclosure, it still has it's issues, but not so bad as networking. I would still keep a backup of the games on the NAS though. The USB can be hidden somewhere, so it doesn't have to be an ugly box sitting on the top/side of your PC... for mine I use a USB 3,0 extension cable and have it sit in my media cabinet.

are there any that have more than 3 3.5" drive bays for less than $40? (Literally less than, I quite literally have $39.89)

Maybe I'll just wait and buy a second, 1TB SSD, record and play games from that, and have a NAS or something to permanently store data.

Unless someone has a large (500GB or more) SSD I can have, I will probably have to go for a NAS, after saving up to buy a 1TB SSD.

(I have some 2.5 inch drive bays available)

My other question is is it okay to use a HDD as the boot drive for a NAS?

[paddy-stone]

3 hours ago, Xeliath said:

are there any that have more than 3 3.5" drive bays for less than $40? (Literally less than, I quite literally have $39.89)

Maybe I'll just wait and buy a second, 1TB SSD, record and play games from that, and have a NAS or something to permanently store data.

Unless someone has a large (500GB or more) SSD I can have, I will probably have to go for a NAS, after saving up to buy a 1TB SSD.

(I have some 2.5 inch drive bays available)

My other question is is it okay to use a HDD as the boot drive for a NAS?

It's better to have a USB for a boot device for a NAS in general, but it depends on the OS you'll use... for some OS you can't use the same HDD as the OS itself is on, so it'd be a waste of a HDD to be a boot drive. Freenas for example is very happy and actually preferred to have a USB flash drive as the boot drive. Cheap and no waste.

Yeah I'd actually just go for a bigger HDD for an external drive when you have the money.

[Acedia]

You can create a virtual disk (*.vhdx) on the NAS and mount it locally. Don't see the point tho since it's slow af.

[vrod]

17 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Your experience would be entirely dependent on what game you're trying to run. Are you launching minesweeper or crysis 3 over the network? It's easy to launch small applications but if larger ones have to constantly fetch large amounts of data it won't make the user experience very good and I'm back to my argument of reliability. If anything goes wrong the game will stop working. Considering the unknown reliability of this system and how it's going to use a whole series of scratch disks is all the reason to not encourage that. File transfers are easy because they're backed by TCP and latency isn't important.

 

I also would not encourage iSCSI. Using SAMBA's SMB and mapping the network drive should work a treat. Though I do support just using the larger disks if SATA ports are limited. If you want to use more drives than ports you have you can consider the LSI 9201-8i or 9211-16i when money isn't so tight. Then a couple breakout cables. It'd let you plug in those billion 160GB drives and you could match & RAID em up for some application.

Why would you add an extra overhead like SMB? iSCSI has a much lower overhead and has much better compatibility between unix and windows.

 

And even for large games, the iSCSI method worked flawlessly for me. I played far cry, gta v and cities skylines mostly.

 

maybe the games are big but the data loded per second is not that much. For my case, it was small enough to reside in the ARC (ram-based read cache on zfs) almost the entire time. So basically, not much was ever read from the actual HDD’s... only the first time, loading it into the ARC.

[Windows7ge]

6 hours ago, vrod said:

Why would you add an extra overhead like SMB? iSCSI has a much lower overhead and has much better compatibility between unix and windows.

 

And even for large games, the iSCSI method worked flawlessly for me. I played far cry, gta v and cities skylines mostly.

 

maybe the games are big but the data loded per second is not that much. For my case, it was small enough to reside in the ARC (ram-based read cache on zfs) almost the entire time. So basically, not much was ever read from the actual HDD’s... only the first time, loading it into the ARC.

iSCSI can have its own problems where performance will tank to almost 0 for unexplainable reasons. This would cause OPs games to hang. SMB on Linux works well @ 1Gbit. The overhead limitation doesn't come into play until you go 10Gbit which OP is not.

 

There is no reason to run games off of remote storage like that. If you buy an SSD or an HDD with a SSD cache your experience will be a lot better. Not to mention every time the server is turned off or restarted the ARC is cleared meaning you're going to be waiting again. If you can afford to keep it turned on forever good for you but personally I'm always doing tweaks & upgrades which would make the read cache worthless in that use case. I don't expect OP to find that much better. Considering the scratch nature of the computer I wouldn't save games on a server that I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find its still working. Save them locally. Tell me the benefit of running them remotely besides saying its cool. How is it better? It's not faster. A 5400RPM drive over SATA is faster than gigabit.

[vrod]

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

iSCSI can have its own problems where performance will tank to almost 0 for unexplainable reasons. This would cause OPs games to hang. SMB on Linux works well @ 1Gbit. The overhead limitation doesn't come into play until you go 10Gbit which OP is not.

 

There is no reason to run games off of remote storage like that. If you buy an SSD or an HDD with a SSD cache your experience will be a lot better. Not to mention every time the server is turned off or restarted the ARC is cleared meaning you're going to be waiting again. If you can afford to keep it turned on forever good for you but personally I'm always doing tweaks & upgrades which would make the read cache worthless in that use case. I don't expect OP to find that much better. Considering the scratch nature of the computer I wouldn't save games on a server that I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find its still working. Save them locally. Tell me the benefit of running them remotely besides saying its cool. How is it better? It's not faster. A 5400RPM drive over SATA is faster than gigabit.

Look at the title of this topic, the guy is asking how this is possible, I am giving an answer to that question. I’ve never experienced any performance tanking to 0 through iSCSI... it mostly rather comes down to the configuration and hardware.

 

in addition many games don’t even support being run over SMB. You circumvent this with iSCSI because windows sees it as a logical device.

 

One use-case I had for this was to host the games for my home on 3 pc’s. We had 1tb of games but instead of using 1tb on each pc we managed to clone the zvols of the original gaming-partition and then presenting the clones to the other 2 machines, worked like a charm. A friend of mine runs a netcafe with 300+ machines and he uses iSCSI with no issues for a year now... so your problems must have been isolated.

[Xeliath]

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

iSCSI can have its own problems where performance will tank to almost 0 for unexplainable reasons. This would cause OPs games to hang. SMB on Linux works well @ 1Gbit. The overhead limitation doesn't come into play until you go 10Gbit which OP is not.

 

There is no reason to run games off of remote storage like that. If you buy an SSD or an HDD with a SSD cache your experience will be a lot better. Not to mention every time the server is turned off or restarted the ARC is cleared meaning you're going to be waiting again. If you can afford to keep it turned on forever good for you but personally I'm always doing tweaks & upgrades which would make the read cache worthless in that use case. I don't expect OP to find that much better. Considering the scratch nature of the computer I wouldn't save games on a server that I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find its still working. Save them locally. Tell me the benefit of running them remotely besides saying its cool. How is it better? It's not faster. A 5400RPM drive over SATA is faster than gigabit.

I said I do not have any extra HDD drive bays.

I also only have $40.

My case is a InWin 805, and I need the extra fans.

[Xeliath]

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

iSCSI can have its own problems where performance will tank to almost 0 for unexplainable reasons. This would cause OPs games to hang. SMB on Linux works well @ 1Gbit. The overhead limitation doesn't come into play until you go 10Gbit which OP is not.

 

There is no reason to run games off of remote storage like that. If you buy an SSD or an HDD with a SSD cache your experience will be a lot better. Not to mention every time the server is turned off or restarted the ARC is cleared meaning you're going to be waiting again. If you can afford to keep it turned on forever good for you but personally I'm always doing tweaks & upgrades which would make the read cache worthless in that use case. I don't expect OP to find that much better. Considering the scratch nature of the computer I wouldn't save games on a server that I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find its still working. Save them locally. Tell me the benefit of running them remotely besides saying its cool. How is it better? It's not faster. A 5400RPM drive over SATA is faster than gigabit.

All but one of the games I play are under 10GB.

Also my main computer is running Windows, if that makes any difference.

The drives I put in don't matter, just to put it out there. If if comes down to it, I have three, almost identical (except RAM) old computers that I can use.

[Xeliath]

7 minutes ago, vrod said:

Look at the title of this topic, the guy is asking how this is possible, I am giving an answer to that question. I’ve never experienced any performance tanking to 0 through iSCSI... it mostly rather comes down to the configuration and hardware.

 

in addition many games don’t even support being run over SMB. You circumvent this with iSCSI because windows sees it as a logical device.

 

One use-case I had for this was to host the games for my home on 3 pc’s. We had 1tb of games but instead of using 1tb on each pc we managed to clone the zvols of the original gaming-partition and then presenting the clones to the other 2 machines, worked like a charm. A friend of mine runs a netcafe with 300+ machines and he uses iSCSI with no issues for a year now... so your problems must have been isolated.

Here's my hardware info, if it helps

i7 9700k

TridentZ RGB 2x8GB (3200MHz C15)

Nvidia RTX 2070 (Founders Edition)

Asus ROG Strix Z390-E

Samsung 970 Pro 512GB

Corsair H115i Pro RGB

Corsair RM650x 2018

InWin 805 (Not the 805 Infinity)

 

Second computer (for NAS/iSCSI/ETC)

i5 660

2x2GB DDR3, 2x4GB DDR3 (All running at 1033MHz)

A random Dell motherboard that supports the CPU I stated before

 

Hard drives I own - All are 3.5"

Unknown brand 2TB HDD

WD Black 1TB

2x WD Blue 320GB

a assortment of 160GB HDDs. Not all from the same brand, not all same cache size, not all same rotation speed.

Unknown brand 80GB HDD ------------------- Don't question it

[Jarsky]

So you took out the 2 disk drive cage and put in 2 extra fans down the bottom? 

Why do you need so many fans? 

 

The logical answer is to just put all your game libraries on the single 2TB drive and put that in the computer locally, rather than having to run 2 systems all the time. And just find somewhere to fit it in....Ive run so many systems with hard drives just blu-tack'ed somewhere. 

If you really need to go the network route, some games and game launchers don't like SMB which is where iSCSi comes in but its complicated to setup the iSCSi Initator/Target if you haven't done it before. 

 

 

[Windows7ge]

47 minutes ago, vrod said:

Look at the title of this topic, the guy is asking how this is possible, I am giving an answer to that question.

Fair point, I do not believe it is a worthwhile endeavor though.

48 minutes ago, vrod said:

in addition many games don’t even support being run over SMB. You circumvent this with iSCSI because windows sees it as a logical device.

That is true. I'm implying to abandon that and just use SMB for file sharing. Run the games locally.

 

48 minutes ago, Xeliath said:

All but one of the games I play are under 10GB.

24 minutes ago, Xeliath said:

Samsung 970 Pro 512GB

Assuming you move most of your excess information over to this other system you'll have an easier & better time just running the games locally (not to mention it's an SSD ~550MB/s vs 115MB/s Ethernet. You seem to have the storage on your SSD to do so. You could use the NAS as external storage & should be able to stream OBS to (again I don't know how well that will go but you can test it)

 

You could also skip the NAS and consider paddy-stone's suggestion and get an USB external enclosure or a dock then pop the drives in as you want to use the data on them.

[vrod]

16 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Fair point, I do not believe it is a worthwhile endeavor though.

 

16 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

That is true. I'm implying to abandon that and just use SMB for file sharing. Run the games locally. 

Unless there is a specific and valid use-case for the setup, I would recommend running the games locally as well.

[Mikensan]

A local spinner might hit 150mbyte/s and an iSCSI target over a gigabit link might hit 110-120mbyte/s - games aren't going to suffer from the throughput of the disks comparatively. The only disadvantage is the length of the ethernet cable and the computer's ability to process the protocol that would add to latency. For this reason iSCSI > SMB for latency sensitive operations. SMB is a terrible choice - not to mention some apps/games may be aware if a "drive" is networked and not install.

 

Most games pull what they need into RAM and seldom write to disk. This is why SSDs don't make such a dramatic difference outside of load times for games. The only game that comes to mind that is more disk intensive is Minecraft since it pulls map data to disk and read/writes a lot to it - but not so much to overwhelm your iSCSI connection.

 

That said I would just install Windows and use storage spaces to pool the disks together. If you have an SSD spare I would give that to storage spaces to use as cache. FreeNAS is not ideal with a bunch of various disks like that. Then setup iSCSI between the two and call it a day.

 

My only advice would be to use a dedicated NIC/port for your iSCSI so your normal network traffic doesn't bog it down while downloading stuff. Those you can get off ebay for <$20 each, perfect for your budget.

[Mikensan]

To others doubting gigabit iSCSI, pleanty of small businesses run their virtual machines off a gigabit link to their storage (NAS/SAN) without issue, his gaming experience will be fine.