How would making steam game install directory on a the network file share work?

[bgc341]

Hi everyone I was wondering ho would load times be if were to install a game on the network drive and would the game even work at all?

Also i'm using an external 8TB WD on my apple airport extreme 

[jackaboy02469]

you can do that?

 

[Withenex]

I would think it would work just as well as on an internal drive from an ease of use standpoint. If there's a network bottleneck somewhere between your PC and the file share then you'd see less performance than you would on an internal drive but LAN speeds are usually pretty good. 

 

If the file share is set up properly and you can access it from windows file explorer you should be able to install things to it no problem. I think you might even be able to have multiple different computers use the same files (I'm not exactly sure, but it makes sense to me)

 

installing games on a network location definitely won't help your loadtimes unless you're putting them on ssd's. If you're using a regular hard drive that's just adding another step/ point of failure to the whole process of accessing the files that your games need, so keep that in mind. Also if you plan on keeping this running 24/7 I reccomend a NAS drive since they're designed to be run all the time and be near other spinning disks

 

if you're asking for a full walkthrough on how to set it up you're probably gonna be looking at an ubuntu server machine running a samba share

[bgc341]

1 hour ago, Withenex said:

I would think it would work just as well as on an internal drive from an ease of use standpoint. If there's a network bottleneck somewhere between your PC and the file share then you'd see less performance than you would on an internal drive but LAN speeds are usually pretty good. 

 

If the file share is set up properly and you can access it from windows file explorer you should be able to install things to it no problem. I think you might even be able to have multiple different computers use the same files (I'm not exactly sure, but it makes sense to me)

 

installing games on a network location definitely won't help your loadtimes unless you're putting them on ssd's. If you're using a regular hard drive that's just adding another step/ point of failure to the whole process of accessing the files that your games need, so keep that in mind. Also if you plan on keeping this running 24/7 I reccomend a NAS drive since they're designed to be run all the time and be near other spinning disks

 

if you're asking for a full walkthrough on how to set it up you're probably gonna be looking at an ubuntu server machine running a samba share

Thank you for the info I’ll be sure to keep that in mind, if I were to build a small mas server how should I go about it the budget I have is 500 usd, what could I get with that budget?

 

[Withenex]

well, the purpose of the server is mass storage, right? then you should put a good portion of that money towards storage. You don't need anything fancy for a case, or a high wattage power supply. I'd recommend a processor with integrated graphics, basically the bare minimum to get a PC to post. basically you'll want fast networking (probably gigabit Ethernet, which will probably already built into your motherboard) Keep it plugged in directly to your router and then you can look up some tutorials to make the directories browseable by windows machines over the network. I built my linux server for about 300 dollars, but I already had a processor and gpu on hand.

 

Installing a program is more than downloading the files and putting them where they need to go. On installation of a program the OS actually edits the windows registry. So to have another PC use the same files on the server to play a game, you'd have to "install" the game in the exact same directory, which shouldn't take very long since the files are already there, but it should make those registry entries you need to actually run the game.

Cheers

[Lurick]

As someone who has their setup exactly like this, yes it works and it works well

I've got my Z drive mapped from my QNAP over SAMBA and just pointed my Steam installs to a folder called Steam under the Z drive. One thing to note is that you cannot put the games directly on the drive itself but you need a folder to put them into, steam doesn't like installing games on the root of the drive for some reason.

[Donut417]

50 minutes ago, Lurick said:

As someone who has their setup exactly like this, yes it works and it works well

I've got my Z drive mapped from my QNAP over SAMBA and just pointed my Steam installs to a folder called Steam under the Z drive. One thing to note is that you cannot put the games directly on the drive itself but you need a folder to put them into, steam doesn't like installing games on the root of the drive for some reason.

I wonder if it would work in Linux. I haven’t tried this yet, but it’s not like I have shit loads of games on Linux. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

25 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

I wonder if it would work in Linux. I haven’t tried this yet, but it’s not like I have shit loads of games on Linux. 

I'm skeptical at anyone saying it works "well" as IO over network shares is much MUCH slower than directly to a HDD, let alone an SSD.  I'm not talking any specific OS either.

 

Games often involve streaming in lots of small files, I'd expect that to be considerably slower over a network share, Windows or Linux.

[bgc341]

2 hours ago, Withenex said:

well, the purpose of the server is mass storage, right? then you should put a good portion of that money towards storage. You don't need anything fancy for a case, or a high wattage power supply. I'd recommend a processor with integrated graphics, basically the bare minimum to get a PC to post. basically you'll want fast networking (probably gigabit Ethernet, which will probably already built into your motherboard) Keep it plugged in directly to your router and then you can look up some tutorials to make the directories browseable by windows machines over the network. I built my linux server for about 300 dollars, but I already had a processor and gpu on hand.

 

Installing a program is more than downloading the files and putting them where they need to go. On installation of a program the OS actually edits the windows registry. So to have another PC use the same files on the server to play a game, you'd have to "install" the game in the exact same directory, which shouldn't take very long since the files are already there, but it should make those registry entries you need to actually run the game.

Cheers

Thanks I’ll keep that in mind

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I'm skeptical at anyone saying it works "well" as IO over network shares is much MUCH slower than directly to a HDD, let alone an SSD.  I'm not talking any specific OS either.

 

Games often involve streaming in lots of small files, I'd expect that to be considerably slower over a network share, Windows or Linux.

Well maybe it's the fact that I'm using RAID 10 across 8 drives and get better IO but I've not had any issues thus far but I get great IO over SMB v3

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 9/27/2019 at 7:01 PM, Lurick said:

Well maybe it's the fact that I'm using RAID 10 across 8 drives and get better IO but I've not had any issues thus far but I get great IO over SMB v3

Let's be honest, its going to vary from game to game anyway and unless you do a comparison, you'd never know.  I just know copying lots of small files over the network is WAY slower than copying them directly on the same PC.

I just can't imagine getting the 6 second fast-travel load times I get on Assassins Creed Odyssey over a network share.  I'm sure other games the difference would be marginal as I also found the number of CPU cores and their speed makes a HUGE difference in Assassins Creed games.