Storage server dilema

[Tempestspy]

I'm planning to setup a storage server

 

Issue: I'm wondering if my games should be installed in the storage server or should I stick with SATA in my machine then share it in the network.
 

Why is this a dilemma for me? I have a Gigabit network here which is 1000mbps while SATA is 600mbps.

 

Please help me decide

[Yakousei]

In my opinion storage server should be, as the name suggest STORAGE. So a place that you occasionally visit to save/grab something from.
And there will be discs just like on your PC inside that STORAGE, so the limitations still exist. Not that that really is much of an limitation.
 

Quote

 

Is upgrading to SATA III going to make any appreciable difference to gaming performance?

Nope. Only the fastest ssd drives are actually able to take advantage of SATA III's speeds. Even then, it won't affect your fps in any way.

 

 

[RollinLower]

correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't SATA 6GB/s?

[Tempestspy]

36 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't SATA 6GB/s?

I think it's 600mbs. By the way it's HDD not SSD

 

[M9_Shyamalan]

SATA III is 6Gbps, you can expect transfer speeds of around 600MB/s.

Your gigabit network would do speeds of up to 125MB/s

[Tempestspy]

12 minutes ago, M9_Shyamalan said:

SATA III is 6Gbps, you can expect transfer speeds of around 600MB/s.

Your gigabit network would do speeds of up to 125MB/s

Thanks for the clarification

[silentdragon95]

A storage server is never going to be as fast as a local SATA HDD, even if the gigabit networking wasn't the bottleneck (which it is), because of SMB (the Windows filesharing service) overhead.

 

It's totally possible to run games from a network share, but I'd advise against it, especially for newer games.

[Tempestspy]

19 minutes ago, silentdragon95 said:

A storage server is never going to be as fast as a local SATA HDD, even if the gigabit networking wasn't the bottleneck (which it is), because of SMB (the Windows filesharing service) overhead.

 

It's totally possible to run games from a network share, but I'd advise against it, especially for newer games.

Thanks for that! This info is helpful. By the way will the specs of my storage server matter in terms of transfer rate? I want to use my AMD A6 machine as the storage server

[Needfuldoer]

46 minutes ago, Tempestspy said:

By the way will the specs of my storage server matter in terms of transfer rate? I want to use my AMD A6 machine as the storage server

Not as long as the server only has a single gigabit Ethernet connection to the rest of your network.

 

That machine will be plenty to act as a home file server, as long as you don't ask it to transcode media in Plex for you.

 

[Tempestspy]

18 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Not as long as the server only has a single gigabit Ethernet connection to the rest of your network.

 

That machine will be plenty to act as a home file server, as long as you don't ask it to transcode media in Plex for you.

 

Ok got it! Thanks for this

[Blue4130]

7 hours ago, silentdragon95 said:

A storage server is never going to be as fast as a local SATA HDD, even if the gigabit networking wasn't the bottleneck (which it is), because of SMB (the Windows filesharing service) overhead.

 

It's totally possible to run games from a network share, but I'd advise against it, especially for newer games.

So don't use smb. iscsi would be perfect for this. 

[Tempestspy]

5 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

Software don't use smb. iscsi would be perfect for this. 

Please explain.

[Needfuldoer]

SMB (Server Message Block) is a file-level protocol, the default language used by Windows file sharing. It's fine for just copying files around, but it starts to buckle under heavy loads or a lot of network traffic.

 

iSCSI is a block-level share, the client PC treats a chunk of space on the server as if it was a hard drive. It's a lot more complicated to set up, and without being set up just right, only one client can safely connect to each share at a time.

 

Don't worry about it, SMB works just fine for your use case. No need to overcomplicate things!

[Tempestspy]

3 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

SMB (Server Message Block) is a file-level protocol, the default language used by Windows file sharing. It's fine for just copying files around, but it starts to buckle under heavy loads or a lot of network traffic.

 

iSCSI is a block-level share, the client PC treats a chunk of space on the server as if it was a hard drive. It's a lot more complicated to set up, and without being set up just right, only one client can safely connect to each share at a time.

 

Don't worry about it, SMB works just fine for your use case. No need to overcomplicate things!

Thanks for this info

[Blue4130]

37 minutes ago, Tempestspy said:

Thanks for this info

One problem that can potentially pop up is that with smb, there is no drive letter, instead it uses hostname. This can be a problem for some software. There are ways around it, but you need to be comfortable using command line in powershell. iSCSI doesn't have this issue as the iscsi share is assigned a drive letter. So for the software, it looks like a local disk.

[Tempestspy]

14 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

One problem that can potentially pop up is that with smb, there is no drive letter, instead it uses hostname. This can be a problem for some software. There are ways around it, but you need to be comfortable using command line in powershell. iSCSI doesn't have this issue as the iscsi share is assigned a drive letter. So for the software, it looks like a local disk.

ok got it! i'll do some research regarding this

[leadeater]

On 2/6/2022 at 3:36 PM, Blue4130 said:

One problem that can potentially pop up is that with smb, there is no drive letter, instead it uses hostname. This can be a problem for some software. There are ways around it, but you need to be comfortable using command line in powershell. iSCSI doesn't have this issue as the iscsi share is assigned a drive letter. So for the software, it looks like a local disk.

You can map a network share to a drive letter, but there are games that will not run off a network share mapped drive or not. However iSCSI isn't the only way around that, you can use a mounted VHDX hosted on an SMB3 share accelerated with either SMB Direct or SMB Multichannel.

 

As to what is logically best to do that would still be internal storage, it's just faster and easier almost in every instance. I still have my steam library hosted on my server though but I share the storage with VM hosting so my SSDs are dual purpose so make sense in that regard.

[wseaton]

Running iSCSI on a A6 spare PC at 1Gb for a general home NAS is like putting a rear spoiler on a Prius.

 

iSCSI presents an advantage if you are mounting data stores for virtualization. Not for a general purpose home NAS that spends most of its time streaming big files and acting as a general data dumpster.

[Blue4130]

2 hours ago, wseaton said:

Running iSCSI on a A6 spare PC at 1Gb for a general home NAS is like putting a rear spoiler on a Prius.

 

iSCSI presents an advantage if you are mounting data stores for virtualization. Not for a general purpose home NAS that spends most of its time streaming big files and acting as a general data dumpster.

So what is your solution to games that will not install on a network share? 

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

So what is your solution to games that will not install on a network share? 

Installing them to local storage, where software belongs anyway.

 

(Or mapping a share to a drive letter, if you really have to. Windows has been able to do this since at least NT 4.0.)