Samsung working on 160-layer or even higher ultra-stacked NAND

[Curufinwe_wins]

Just now, comander said:

2.5GbE or 5GbE is probably "good enough" diminishing returns kick in pretty quickly. 

I'd argue the goal for most is to be "good enough" instead of "GAHHH AWFUL" which is what you get with a single harddrive. 2.5Gbps is enough for 4 drive RAID10 and 5Gbps roughly matches a SATA SSD. 

I'd agree with that. Thus my comment about 5/10 hahaha. Mainly since wiring for 10 is the same as wiring for 2.5/5, and these days the price difference for addin cards still isnt as much to recommend not-future proofing. 

 

But I say that as someone using SFP+ so... add your own salt hahaha.

[leadeater]

32 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

when sata ssds are still plenty fast (and latency) and a 4TB QVO is only 500 dollars ish (not going to build a NAS worth the effort for that price)

This is something that always annoys me personally, when people call SATA SSDs slow. Good SATA SSDs are in our situations near identical in performance to NVMe so if you need large ish amount of storage there is no reason to not use an NVMe for boot and extra SATA SSDs, as long as you don't run I/O benchmarks you're not going to see a difference so why worry about it.

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

This is something that always annoys me personally, when people call SATA SSDs slow. Good SATA SSDs are in our situations near identical in performance to NVMe so if you need large ish amount of storage there is not reason to not use an NVMe for boot and extra SATA SSDs, as long as you don't run I/O benchmarks you're not going to see a difference so why worry about it.

For now anyways. Though it is worth noting (as I experienced first hand recently) that below 2TB (in the US, cant speak of other markets), the price difference between entry level NVMe and dramless SATA SSDs has basically completely disappeared. I ended up buying a 2TB 665p not because I wanted NVMe for boot, but because the only 2TB SSDs (at the time) cheaper than it were all cache-less. 

 

I love Samsung drives, and I wish I could keep recommending/using them, but their performance crown has come with some seriously huge markups relative to the competition that make it just not worth spending more for. (Minus the QVO series, and even that really isn't remarkable except the 4TB option).

[Curufinwe_wins]

32 minutes ago, comander said:

If you're trying to go cheap, you can get 2.5Gb NICs for like $30, 5GB NICs for $70 and 10Gbps  for $100ish. 

If your goal is "good enough" 2.5Gbps checks the box much of the time. I want to emphasize that real world performance of SSDs for all but large file transfers isn't THAT amazing. 

You end up paying 2x or more for not that much more performance. 

now, there are switches... I'm still hoping for inexpensive 2.5G switches in the near future (other wise... CR305)

I didn't pay even 50 dollars a port for my SFP+ cards, and there are still a lot more second hand RJ45 10GbE ones, but comparing 5 to 10 at least, I don't think it is much of a value to drop haha.

 

2.5 might be getting cheap enough to seriously consider, I haven't looked as much into them.

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

I didn't pay even 50 dollars a port for my SFP+ cards, and there are still a lot more second hand RJ45 10GbE ones, but comparing 5 to 10 at least, I don't think it is much of a value to drop haha.

 

2.5 might be getting cheap enough to seriously consider, I haven't looked as much into them.

Unless you've got a 10gig switch, I don't see the point in gaming off a NAS. I think it would be more cost-effective to ensure both the NAS and your PC have two NICs; one 1gig, the other 10gig. The 1gig NICs connect to a common switch/router for shared household use. Then you can direct connect the 10gig on its own subnet between the NAS and PC. Since ideally this volume for gaming would be over an iSCSI LUN via 10gig, it's a non-issue.

 

Besides, Steam makes it all or nothing as to where the data is located. Yes, you can backup and restore independent titles, but what a huge PITA. I think a feature petition is in order here. I would love for Steam to offer multiple directory paths where you can choose which titles are stored where with the ability to move them around later. Keep your commonly most played games local while relegating the rest over to the NAS.

 

Done this way, I think you could have your cake and eat it too.

Edited April 22, 2020 by StDragon
Edit: Turns out you CAN add more Stream Library Folders. Sweet!

[Dylanc1500]

3 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

Not much use with all the staff working from home right now.

I have a solution.

[Curufinwe_wins]

20 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Unless you've got a 10gig switch, I don't see the point in gaming off a NAS. I think it would be more cost-effective to ensure both the NAS and your PC have two NICs; one 1gig, the other 10gig. The 1gig NICs connect to a common switch/router for shared household use. Then you can direct connect the 10gig on its own subnet between the NAS and PC. Since ideally this volume for gaming would be over an iSCSI LUN via 10gig, it's a non-issue.

 

Besides, Steam makes it all or nothing as to where the data is located. Yes, you can backup and restore independent titles, but what a huge PITA. I think a feature petition is in order here. I would love for Steam to offer multiple directory paths where you can choose which titles are stored where with the ability to move them around later. Keep your commonly most played games local while relegating the rest over to the NAS.

 

Done this way, I think you could have your cake and eat it too.

I'd agree with that, and do exactly that. Though I don't game on the NAS, it is exactly that setup. Primary 1 GbE network with secondary direct 10GbE.

 

Eventually I'll turn the primary network over to 10 GbE probably, but for now, that seems to make the most sense for both speed and cost.

[leadeater]

57 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Besides, Steam makes it all or nothing as to where the data is located

Glad you cross that out because you can have multiple Steam libraries and can pick where they get installed and move them after the fact too. Not a feature I make use of but nice anyway,

[XenosTech]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Glad you cross that out because you can have multiple Steam libraries and can pick where they get installed and move them after the fact too. Not a feature I make use of but nice anyway,

lol I currently have 3 steam libraries, it would be more if this motherboard had more sata ports available for use q.q

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Glad you cross that out because you can have multiple Steam libraries and can pick where they get installed and move them after the fact too. Not a feature I make use of but nice anyway,

It's been awhile since I've used Steam. I'm an on and off gamer. Life priorities and all that. Anyways, from what I can tell this was added sometime in 2012??? Anyways, I never though adding more locations was possible. But sure enough buried in a menu it's there. 

[Unixsystem]

On 4/21/2020 at 2:27 PM, Brooksie359 said:

But if it is in a NAS is it fast enough to run game off of? I want a large amount of storage to keep games on because damn are games big these day and even with 2 tb I can only keep a small portion of the games that I have in my library that I actually like. 

For a while I was experimenting with my FreeNAS box, running 3x old WD Blacks striped with 32GB RAM over a 10gig NIC. As long as the array has a decent amount of free space, ZFS is very good at using the RAM to speed up transfers, and I was often able to saturate my NIC with sequential transfers. Of course there's going to be a fair latency bump over local storage, but the difference wasn't noticible in most instances I could see. 

 

The real problem with using a NAS for game installs is that games are really inconsistent if you try to install them to an SMB share. Some games are totally portable and can be run from anywhere, some require an install but accept a network drive as long as it's properly mapped from the local system. Other games will refuse to install to a nonlocal drive altogether. Sometimes you can screw around with junctions and trick the software into thinking its local, but honestly at a certain point the trouble outweighs any benefit. 

 

There is one workaround in that you can use iSCSI instead of SMB and then every game should work flawlessly since the local system doesn't knownthe difference between the local drives and the networked one, plus you also get a bit less latency on reads and writes versus a traditional share. The problem is that iSCSI generally only allows one system to hook up to a given share at any one time, so you need to section off some or all of your NAS drives to act as a separate share, sort of defeating the purpose of putting all your games on your big ass NAS volume. Also, and I didn't test this myself, but iSCSI apparently suffers much more severely from the volume getting full; apparently anything over 50% full capacity and you start to see performance degradation, and it gets exponentially worse as you start to fill it up more. This is compared to a traditional share where you can generally fill it up to 80%+ without losing meaningful performance. 

 

Tl;Dr: You totally can use a NAS as a game drive and it can be very fast, but all the other hurdles make it a massive pain to actually implement. 

[DeScruff]

On 4/21/2020 at 11:17 PM, StDragon said:

It's been awhile since I've used Steam. I'm an on and off gamer. Life priorities and all that. Anyways, from what I can tell this was added sometime in 2012??? Anyways, I never though adding more locations was possible. But sure enough buried in a menu it's there. 

Makes sense, 2012 is about the time when a SSDs were still really small, but it was clear a smaller SSD + HDD would become a popular config for a few years, and games were only getting larger.
- Anyone remember the Samsung 840pro? At launch in 2012 it was $150 to get a 128GB. And there was also a 64GB model.
Back then I didn't think I would be running HDDless PCs anytime in the near future. Much less my parents.
 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, DeScruff said:

Anyone remember the Samsung 840pro? At launch in 2012 it was $150 to get a 128GB. And there was also a 64GB model.

Yep, got quite a few of them and still in use in the same system today. Man those were great, still are