nas Qnap offer a NAS "for gaming" :D

[Korben]

 

 

Summary

Qnap markets it's new TS-x53D NAS for gamers

 

Quotes

Quote

Quad-core 2.5GbE NAS, suited for business and gaming.

 

My thoughts

Well, the marketing team has taken over, I guess. I mean: yes you can backup your game library, even at good speed with the 2.5Gbit. But come on... You can do that with literally every NAS. I read some people speculations about Qnap might suggest that the games should be installed on/run from the NAS. But I doubt that. Even with 10Gbit I wouldn't do that. 

A NAS with an out-of-the-box Steamcache-Server. That I would tag "for gamers".

 

Sources

Link: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/news/2020/qnap-launches-quad-core-intel-based-ts-x53d-2-5gbe-nas-series-featuring-pcie-expansion-for-10-gbps-or-m-2-ssd-cache-acceleration

[Statik]

Inb4 ROG Gaming NAS now with RGB!

[bcredeur97]

with SSD caching and 2.5Gbit, is it feasible to actually install games on a NAS mounted as a network drive and load them over your LAN? 

[RollinLower]

1 minute ago, bcredeur97 said:

with SSD's and 2.5Gbit, is it feasible to actually install games on a NAS mounted as a network drive and load them over your LAN? 

i doubt it. 2.5G isn't nearly as fast as local storage. sure it could be done, but anything storage intensive like loading a new area or stuff is probably going to take a performance hit.

[2FA]

7 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

i doubt it. 2.5G isn't nearly as fast as local storage. sure it could be done, but anything storage intensive like loading a new area or stuff is probably going to take a performance hit.

It's faster than most HDDs but slower than a SATA SSD.

[Dylanc1500]

1 hour ago, huilun02 said:

Next up, gaming network switches and gaming usb/ethernet cables

Way ahead of you.

[williamcll]

They should add Game download cache as an inbuilt feature.

[Boomwebsearch]

1 hour ago, huilun02 said:

Next up, gaming network switches and gaming usb/ethernet cables

 

I do like the idea of RGB ethernet cables and may actually buy them if they aren't too expensive, are there any RGB ethernet cables currently available?

[TetraSky]

7 minutes ago, Boomwebsearch said:

 

I do like the idea of RGB ethernet cables and may actually buy them if they aren't too expensive, are there any RGB ethernet cables currently available?

You'd be like those people who hang Christmas lights all year around, outside and inside.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, Korben said:

I read some people speculations about Qnap might suggest that the games should be installed on/run from the NAS. But I doubt that. Even with 10Gbit I wouldn't do that. 

 

5 hours ago, bcredeur97 said:

with SSD caching and 2.5Gbit, is it feasible to actually install games on a NAS mounted as a network drive and load them over your LAN? 

 

Yes, all my games are installed on my server not my gaming PC. Works perfectly fine. Loading games basically is not even bandwidth constrained, it's more about the latency which is fine and good NICs will be around and below SATA SSD. If you're more tech savy you can go with NICs that support RDMA (required on both ends) and have NVMe/PCIe low latency.

 

It's more that for most people this is needlessly complex rather than not being possible or not having good performance. Saying that though I've been doing it since probably around 2010 starting with 6 10K RPM SAS disks then moved to 2 512GB Samsung 840 Pros in 2012 then later 6 512GB Samsung 850 Pros.

[Not_A_Spider]

Which would be a better use of PCIe lanes, x4 for an SSD or two x2 aggregated network cards

[trag1c]

11 hours ago, Korben said:

 

 

Summary

Qnap markets it's new TS-x53D NAS for gamers

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

Well, the marketing team has taken over, I guess. I mean: yes you can backup your game library, even at good speed with the 2.5Gbit. But come on... You can do that with literally every NAS. I read some people speculations about Qnap might suggest that the games should be installed on/run from the NAS. But I doubt that. Even with 10Gbit I wouldn't do that. 

A NAS with an out-of-the-box Steamcache-Server. That I would tag "for gamers".

 

Sources

Link: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/news/2020/qnap-launches-quad-core-intel-based-ts-x53d-2-5gbe-nas-series-featuring-pcie-expansion-for-10-gbps-or-m-2-ssd-cache-acceleration

I built my own nas a while ago and I install games on it that don't require large amounts of asset streaming.  It works about as good as a regular hard drive on 1Gbit.

[Arika]

Hell you can game on normal external hard drives, not sure why this is a big deal. 

[Techstorm970]

When ur a NAShat but you also wanna game

[Kisai]

13 hours ago, bcredeur97 said:

with SSD caching and 2.5Gbit, is it feasible to actually install games on a NAS mounted as a network drive and load them over your LAN? 

Not really. Even 10GbE file servers in an office environment just get drowned when 10 people start working on the same file.

 

For all practical purposes what a NAS does in a home/home-office environment is a means to keep stuff you're not using "right now" somewhere else. But the problem with 100% of proprietary NAS systems is that you're married to the thing, and if the power supply or the cpu on it dies, SOL, even if the drives still work. 

 

So if your business requires you to work on the same project, then the NAS/Server controls all the file access and version control. If you're just playing games, then you probably just want to tell Steam to move your games to this device if you don't play it for a month. Or at least in theory if Steam could do that (it doesn't). The Microsoft Store, Epic store, or GoG should really do that, but EG Store is too busy trying to grow market share by giving away free games.

 

There is CPU performance burned to do networking unless you have various hardware checksums/transfer offload features. even then you only see it in the more expensive Intel parts and not in the cheapy Realtek parts that are commonly attached to the system's USB bus. So if you're playing games on a Laptop that comes at multiple performance costs. A desktop however, not so much, and if you have enough RAM, the loading time might not even be that relevant, but physical disk caching and network caching are two entirely different animals.

[wanderingfool2]

41 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Not really. Even 10GbE file servers in an office environment just get drowned when 10 people start working on the same file.

That is a completely different use case as to installing games and playing using it.  2.5Gbit (320MB/s), even two people using the connection at once would be 160MB/s.  As games are designed with HDD's in mind, 160MB/s is more than adequate.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Not really. Even 10GbE file servers in an office environment just get drowned when 10 people start working on the same file.

10Gb on a file server can support thousands of concurrent users for general office and user environment work. If it's slow it's because it's only a couple of HDDs and you've run out of I/O performance, doesn't really have anything to do with network connection speed.

 

Here's a graph of the last 24 hours of our Netapp (NAS SVM for SMB & NFS shares)

Peaked around 2.8Gbps, which was most likely some scheduled backup task someone has configured to put on a network share.

 

Last 30 day graph for good measure

Spoiler

 

I legitimately have no idea why people seem to think file servers and file storage need way more than what is actually required. 

 

More applicable to this topic every NAS on the market today supports some form of SSD caching if you want to even use it as a simple 4 bay NAS can support office work and game loading just fine, but you can use the M.2 slots and enable it if needed. Also QNAP specifically advises to use an iSCSI mounted disk for game storage on the NAS which is good, it's the most compatible way to do it.

[Korben]

So I see some people actually say it's doable to play games from a NAS storage. Kind of suprises me, to be honst. I thought the latency would kill this idea. But as @trag1c and @leadeater pointed out, it seams to work. I would be interested very much in this since I'm planning an ITX build. To save money for big SSDs it would be nice to use the NAS as Gamestorage. Any guides for network configuration?

 

PS: my point still stands: that's not a reason to label a NAS "gaming". To my knowledge this NAS does not provide one feature that differentiates it from others towards gaming.

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Korben said:

I would be interested very much in this since I'm planning an ITX build. To save money for big SSDs it would be nice to use the NAS as Gamestorage. Any guides for network configuration?

It's still a lot easier and cheaper to just use local SSD, M.2 pricing is really good. NAS is just another PC so you're buying a whole extra computer to put some disks in to just to potentially save a little space in the primary PC, you'd likely be able to go up in SSD size for cheaper.

 

I do it cos why not and it does make it slightly easier if you want to reinstall the OS or mount the games on a different computer but it's still firmly in the doing it for fun not for a good reason category.

[Korben]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

It's still a lot easier and cheaper to just use local SSD, M.2 pricing is really good. NAS is just another PC so you're buying a whole extra computer to put some disks in to just to potentially save a little space in the primary PC, you'd likely be able to go up in SSD size for cheaper.

 

I do it cos why not and it does make it slightly easier if you want to reinstall the OS or mount the games on a different computer but it's still firmly in the doing it for fun not for a good reason category.

I already have a NAS (Synology) with 10Gb NIC  I think I'll try it, but tips for configuration would be very welcome since my knowledge of network is quiet superficial. Currently my PC is directly attached to the NAS by 10Gb NIC on both sides (both are also connected via 1Gb to my home network). Why I chose this config is a long story...

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Korben said:

I already have a NAS (Synology) with 10Gb NIC  I think I'll try it, but tips for configuration would be very welcome since my knowledge of network is quiet superficial. Currently my PC is directly attached to the NAS by 10Gb NIC on both sides (both are also connected via 1Gb to my home network). Why I chose this config is a long story...

Same network connection layout I'm using, just easier and cheaper than buying 10Gb switches (at least at the time). iSCSI is the best option as there are some games that don't like running off a SMB network share.

 

There's some good guides online on how to mount an iSCSI disk on Windows, check the Synology documentation on how to create an iSCSI disk.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

 

I legitimately have no idea why people seem to think file servers and file storage need way more than what is actually required. 

 

 

Because we are talking about NVMe SSD's, not some cheapy SATA NAS with 4 5400 or 7200rpm drives in it like you'd typically find in one of these celeron boxes. Mechanical performance aside, if games designed for the PS5-class devices come to the PC, the expected SSD performance would be around 60GBits not 2.5 of 2.5G ethernet, and not the 6 of SATA 3. So a 4x mechanical drive array is still not even close to a single SATA SSD.

 

Anyway, my point was that these devices are often more marketing than they are fact. 

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/nas/view

Nearly every device caps at the same bandwidth, which is slightly below that of a single 7200rpm drive. Both the $2000 5-drive bay model and the $300 QNAP TS-431P which you'll note is basically what you get with a 1Gbit connection anyway (880mbit) without using the higher end ethernet parts and switches.

 

A NVMe drive would require bandwidth that is not achievable over ethernet. You're not going to find a 40gbit (5GB/sec, Thunderbolt 3) ethernet NAS to directly run games from. You're better off with the external drive enclosure. Save the NAS for the DVD/DB/UHD PVR/VOD/Plex type content because 8K streaming is only going to push 100mbits at present.

[Master Disaster]

56 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Same network connection layout I'm using, just easier and cheaper than buying 10Gb switches (at least at the time). iSCSI is the best option as there are some games that don't like running off a SMB network share.

 

There's some good guides online on how to mount an iSCSI disk on Windows, check the Synology documentation on how to create an iSCSI disk.

I'm currently playing around with ESXi on my NUC (for fun and as a learning exercise, its nothing serious) and I'm using an iSCSI target on my NAS as a destination to install and run Linux & Windows. It works perfectly.

 

Its worth mentioning that Synology DSM does not allow you to shrink an existing volume, only expand a volume into unused space. If (like me) your volume already exists and is using the full space you cannot create a separate volume to separate the iSCSI LUN from the rest of your data.

[leadeater]

24 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Because we are talking about NVMe SSD's, not some cheapy SATA NAS with 4 5400 or 7200rpm drives in it like you'd typically find in one of these celeron boxes.

Well I was responding to the comment about a file server with 10Gb connection dying over just 10 office workers using some documents, legit a crap Marvell CPU powered NAS can handle that just fine, without 10Gb.

 

Like seriously those graph I posted are from a multi million dollar storage configuration and the SVM I posted, Storage Virtual Machine, hosts network shares for roughly 10,000 computers and also all the NFS mounts for all our Linux servers that hosts our LMS (Moodle for ~30,000+ students). This is why I said I have no idea why people think you need so much more for file servers than what is actually required.

 

But as to the other part NVMe SSD simply is not required for gaming at all and on PC that won't change any time soon. And what makes game loads faster is not bandwidth it's the latency improvement you get from NAND storage i.e. the IOPs improvement which you can do either by putting SSDs in your NAS or more HDDs.

 

I personally run all my games off an iSCSI mounted dual 10Gb pathed setup, I don't even peak 10Gb actual usage loading up a game. These are also high end dual port server 10Gb cards I pulled out of decommissioned servers.

 

Edit:

P.S the site you posted is using a test client with a 1Gb connection, all those NAS's are client side network limited for throughput.

[Korben]

13 minutes ago, Kisai said:

... Mechanical performance aside, if games designed for the PS5-class devices come to the PC, the expected SSD performance would be around 60GBits not 2.5 of 2.5G ethernet, and not the 6 of SATA 3. So a 4x mechanical drive array is still not even close to a single SATA SSD.

I doubt that in the near future developers for PC games will even think about an requirement of that kind of storage bandwith for their games. It would exclude way too many customers...

These kind of games will either be PS5 exclusive or will not require the bandwith (they may take advantage of it, but will be playable without). Look at minimum requirements for GPU of the most AAA games... The hardware base (I'm not talking enthusiast here!) has not switched to SSD (even SATA) by a great portion.