Playing games off NAS?

[skywake]

i was thinking of how drives speed will always increase.

I was thinking of the fact that @TheGeeker had Cat5e/6 cables through the walls and NAS already setup. In the long run? Sure, we'll probably get to a point where large SSD arrays become the norm for a NAS. But we're not there yet. Maybe if you're Linus and have Kingston giving you enough 480GB SSDs to build a leaning tower of SSDs but not for the average enthusiast.

 

And when we do get there? It probably won't be with Thunderbolt anyways. We'll probably just use 10Gbps Ethernet, stuff that by then will probably come as default.

[leadeater]

I was thinking of the fact that @TheGeeker had Cat5e/6 cables through the walls and NAS already setup. In the long run? Sure, we'll probably get to a point where large SSD arrays become the norm for a NAS. But we're not there yet. Maybe if you're Linus and have Kingston giving you enough 480GB SSDs to build a leaning tower of SSDs but not for the average enthusiast.

 

And when we do get there? It probably won't be with Thunderbolt anyways. We'll probably just use 10Gbps Ethernet, stuff that by then will probably come as default.

 

And the Cat 6 cable @TheGeeker already has is certified for 10Gb over 55m, unless it's Cat 6a so it would be the full 100m. And in future an upgrade to Cat 7a for up to 100Gb, but seriously who at home needs that.

 

@LittleCarrot Thunderbolt is clearly not fit for purpose based on the existing equipment and configuration so continuing to push this is not actually helping. Thunderbolt is a fantastic option for a NAS located in very close proximity to the computer that is going to use it.

[skywake]

And the Cat 6 cable @TheGeeker already has is certified for 10Gb over 55m, unless it's Cat 6a so it would be the full 100m. And in future an upgrade to Cat 7a for up to 100Gb, but seriously who at home needs that.

It's also worth remembering that consoles run games off either 2.5" drives or optical media. Both of which are quite a bit slower than even 3.5" drives, certainly slower than Gigabit. Consoles are "inferior" in a lot of ways but they still offer a decent experience. Most of the shortcomings for consoles are because of the GPU not the method of game storage. Where the OS is stored? For sure. Where the games are stored? Not so much.

I'd agree that for some games we're at the point where drive performance matters more than it used to. Mostly the few AAA games of the last couple of years that have been 50GB+ installations. But most games? It's barely a problem. Other than loading screens you probably wouldn't even notice.

[leadeater]

It's also worth remembering that consoles run games off either 2.5" drives or optical media. Both of which are quite a bit slower than even 3.5" drives, certainly slower than Gigabit. Consoles are "inferior" in a lot of ways but they still offer a decent experience. Most of the shortcomings for consoles are because of the GPU not the method of game storage. Where the OS is stored? For sure. Where the games are stored? Not so much.

I'd agree that for some games we're at the point where drive performance matters more than it used to. Mostly the few AAA games of the last couple of years that have been 50GB+ installations. But most games? It's barely a problem. Other than loading screens you probably wouldn't even notice.

 

Yep and considering most games now are optimised first for console then PC the need for super fast storage to be able to play games isn't going to be an issue for quite some time. SSD performance is just nice but certainly is not required for an enjoyable gaming experience.

[invinciberry]

Try to find where the bottleneck is. Use wired Ethernet for sure. Do some speed test on your NAS. Also consider change the Ethernet cable in the wall from cat 5e(which is very common) to cat 6 or 6e. This concept should work with games that does not read and write too often. You can put most of your game library on the NAS and one or two currently playing games on local SSDs.

[Phinux]

@TheGeeker This is something I already do and depending on how you do it it works well or extremely well. If you are just mapping to a network share on the NAS and add this to your steam library 90%-95% of games will just work no problems at all. I have however had some games not like being installed and run like this, easy way to deal with that is put those games on the local SSD.

What I do is a little different and requires a bit more networking know how to do it. I use iSCSI to my NAS as this makes the storage appear as a real locally attached disk to the computer and every game works. I use directly connected Intel X540-T1 in my desktop and server for 10Gb networking and my storage in the server is 6 SSDs and many HDDs in a storage pool with auto tiering so I get the full speed of 10Gb all the time.

The first method I mentioned is much simpler to do and I would recommend doing that. It sounds like TF2 might be one of the few that can't run properly off a network share but it should work the way I do it, since I don't have TF2 I can't really confirm either setup as not working/working for that game.

As an extra note the streaming throughput or MB/s doesn't typically make the biggest difference to game load time it's actually response time, which SSDs are miles quicker than HDDs so even with 1Gb you might not increase game loads by too much. Depends on the game and how it access it's files.

Edit: My steam library is 2TB just for reference

Much like @leadeater, I've successfully run games off a NAS through iSCSI, in my case in a simple 1 Gb ethernet. I actually setup a batch script back then to setup symlinks so Steam would actually believe the files were on C:\. Worked like a charm, was pretty awesome to store hundreds of ISO rips for my emulators, regardless of device used to actually play.

What's smart about going the iSCSI and/or "folder junctions" is that everything happens at the OS level and apps are none the wiser — Steam or games see themselves as running locally off C:\, every time they request a local file the entirety of the network part is dealt with by a trust and tried solid OS (e.g. Windows and FreeNAS).

Just hit google for "MKLINK" and make a .bat, one line for each game (from C: to a drive letter you'll always use for that iSCSI target), and fire that script on any machine to setup the whole thing anew on a vanilla Steam install in just one double-click.

It works well with emulators on a near-storageless Kodi/kiosk-like front-end media center client too, as long as you have enough CPU/RAM/GPU to actually run the emulator.