General info needed about a nas

[Joep_Wimmers]

hey guys and galls , 


so i've been spending my free time and spare cash making my pc near silent , and all in all I've reached the point where my mechanical hard drives are the only thing bugging me sound wise, i was thinking to put my general storage drives ( 2x  wd black 3TB and 2x seagate baracuda 2TB in a nas ) the bulk of the files are movies , images, an EXTENSIVE steam library,.... ( so nothing major --> most of the important stuff is on the ssd) 

can these drives be plugged into something like a Qnap TS-431 or Synology nas ? (yes i do know there are specific nas harddrives out there , and i plan on upgrading on the long term) 
If i redirect steam to the new network path it should be fine right ? 
and i guess gigabit speeds should be "OK" for the steam libraty 

so what do you guys think ? any major gaps in my reasoning ? 
 

[leadeater]

Yes you can put them in the NAS, will have to backup the data ofc as it will wipe the disks.

 

Running games off a network share does work, ish. I've had issues with some games. The better way is to create a VHD using disk manager on the NAS share and then mount this VHD in Windows. This will act like a real disk and steam will work much better.

 

1Gbps will be fine, not great but just as fast as a single good HDD.

[Joep_Wimmers]

thanks a lot  , i'll look into setting up a VHD

[Joep_Wimmers]

23 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yes you can put them in the NAS, will have to backup the data ofc as it will wipe the disks.

 

Running games off a network share does work, ish. I've had issues with some games. The better way is to create a VHD using disk manager on the NAS share and then mount this VHD in Windows. This will act like a real disk and steam will work much better.

 

1Gbps will be fine, not great but just as fast as a single good HDD.

one more question , i've got some spare parts laying around ( pentium g2360 , 8gb ram stick , h97 board, my old psu (1000w which would be overkill but cant hurt )  ) , this could make for a quite capable nas build right , and power consumption should also be sub 200w if i do some quick napkin math 

if i were to set up windows server or even just windows and share the harddrives , that would make my plan a little easier right ? 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Joep_Wimmers said:

one more question , i've got some spare parts laying around ( pentium g2360 , 8gb ram stick , h97 board, my old psu (1000w which would be overkill but cant hurt )  ) , this could make for a quite capable nas build right , and power consumption should also be sub 200w if i do some quick napkin math 

if i were to set up windows server or even just windows and share the harddrives , that would make my plan a little easier right ? 

Yea those parts will work, not sure about easier. Being able to keep the existing data on the disks would be the main bonus that would make it easier.

 

Also if you used Windows 10 on the NAS and on your desktop you could use 2 1Gbps NICs and make use of SMB3 Multichannel for double the throughput which you couldn't do using a Synology/QNAP NAS.

 

Edit: Server 2012 R2 also supports SMB3 Multichannel so if you have a copy of that you can use that.

[Joep_Wimmers]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Also if you used Windows 10 on the NAS and on your desktop you could use 2 1Gbps NICs and make use of SMB3 Multichannel for double the throughput which you couldn't do using a Synology/QNAP NAS.

yeah , i saw linus's video on that , interesting thought 

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Joep_Wimmers said:

yeah , i saw linus's video on that , interesting thought 

Yea it's something I've been using for a long time now, really does work well. I use 10Gb between my desktop and server though and I have my VHD that contains my steam library on an array of 6 SSDs (for space rather than speed since my library is over 2TB).

[Joep_Wimmers]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yea it's something I've been using for a long time now, really does work well. I use 10Gb between my desktop and server though and I have my VHD that contains my steam library on an array of 6 SSDs (for space rather than speed since my library is over 2TB).

well that is what i call a nice setup  

well i'm probably going to go with my spare parts pc/nas then and add in some nics in the near future   , thanks a lot for the input 

[Joep_Wimmers]

On 8/23/2016 at 11:43 AM, leadeater said:

Yea those parts will work, not sure about easier. Being able to keep the existing data on the disks would be the main bonus that would make it easier.

 

Also if you used Windows 10 on the NAS and on your desktop you could use 2 1Gbps NICs and make use of SMB3 Multichannel for double the throughput which you couldn't do using a Synology/QNAP NAS.

 

Edit: Server 2012 R2 also supports SMB3 Multichannel so if you have a copy of that you can use that.

so i've built the machine, i'm having no trouble with my steam library whatsoever , however there is a little snag , i cant really install any games or programs on the shares
do you perhaps know of a way ? 
 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Joep_Wimmers said:

so i've built the machine, i'm having no trouble with my steam library whatsoever , however there is a little snag , i cant really install any games or programs on the shares
do you perhaps know of a way ? 
 

A lot of software installers don't let you select a mapped drive to install the software on, another reason why I use a mounted VHD. Steam you can add a new Library and set it's location to a mapped share, that is supported, but running any native installers for games outside of steam or for software usually doesn't allow you to select a drive letter that is a mapped drive which is rather annoying. Not everything has this restriction though.