Gaming NAS question

[Thunderpup]

Good Evening, 

 

In an effort to cut down on the amount of physical drives, and wires, i have in my main rig i am considering building a NAS for storage.  Now this would be for backup data, surveillance storage, and possibly to game from. 

 

That last part is what i am curious about.  Does anyone use their NAS to game from? and if so what kind of performance are you seeing? I don't do a whole log of actual online game play, but i don't want latency to be huge. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

You really shouldn't game on a serverits a big securyity hole unless your using vms or conainters.

 

What hardware and budget are you working with.

[Oshino Shinobu]

For the most part, games just load from storage into RAM and then run from that. Performance should be unaffected, but expect slow load times unless you're using >1Gbps networking. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You really shouldn't game on a serverits a big securyity hole unless your using vms or conainters.

 

What hardware and budget are you working with.

I don't believe OP plans on using the server to game on, they plan to store the games on the NAS and run the games on a different system. Basically using the NAS as a storage device, while the other PC actually loads and plays the games. 

[tt2468]

2 minutes ago, Thunderpup said:

Good Evening, 

 

In an effort to cut down on the amount of physical drives, and wires, i have in my main rig i am considering building a NAS for storage.  Now this would be for backup data, surveillance storage, and possibly to game from. 

 

That last part is what i am curious about.  Does anyone use their NAS to game from? and if so what kind of performance are you seeing? I don't do a whole log of actual online game play, but i don't want latency to be huge. 

I do. I am using inexpensive mellanox 10Gb cards that are just direct attached to each other. I am using 3x 1TB WD reds in a raidz (zfs), along with an intel 730 series as my array cache. Performance is really good, to the point where the difference is really not noticeable.

 

My specs are:

• Pentium g4400
• Asus h110m plus/csm (I think)
• 8GB DDR4 Crucial
• Mellanox connectx-2
• Intel 730 240GB (Cache)
• Adata SX900 128GB (Boot)
• 3x WD Red 1TB raidz
• Ubuntu server 16.10
• Samba
• ZFS

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I don't believe OP plans on using the server to game on, they plan to store the games on the NAS and run the games on a different system. Basically using the NAS as a storage, while the other PC actually loads and plays the games. 

Oh yea, if you doing that, then assuming you have a gig network it will work fine.

 

 

[Thunderpup]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You really shouldn't game on a serverits a big securyity hole unless your using vms or conainters.

 

What hardware and budget are you working with.

This wont be for remote gaming, but gaming on a computer that is also in the same house.

 

Budget would be around $800 give or take

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I don't believe OP plans on using the server to game on, they plan to store the games on the NAS and run the games on a different system. 

Pretty much that. 

[Thunderpup]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Oh yea, if you doing that, then assuming you have a gig network it will work fine.

 

 

by the time i do this i'll have a gig or better network.

 

[paddy-stone]

Should be no problem as long as your NAS can saturate the Gigabit network I would think. Might be slightly slower load times between using a regular mech storage drive and the NAS, but huge difference if you normally use an SSD... of course depends on game too, some games are just crap with loading times no matter the storage medium.

[thewinner007]

it will work, if you don't mind slower loading times, I'm actually doing it with a super cheap ready nas duo from netgear, I don't know why but I have a maximum of 20MB/s of transfer speed, but all my games still works, the coolest thing is that i can run another pc to download my steam/gog/origin/uplay/zodiac... games and play them with my main pc ... which is a server... and is loud af.... BUT it works fine, just slow loading times, but the game performances shouldn't be affected, remember that games wich have a lot of ram-hdd transfers will have a minor performance loss, (I'v personally tested hytman absolution, ds3 and shadow of mordor at 60 fps stable all at ultra, except mordor which had a maximum at 120 and a minimum at 100, then i limited it at 60 becouse my monitor is just a 60hz one, but some random indie games like costume quest have a lot of loadings which made it run at something like 30-45 fps minimum and 60 maximum... just so random, probably it's due to a not so up-to-date pcie 2gen for the graphic card, but that's my experience)

[Thunderpup]

Thanks everyone for their input.

 

 

[Scruffy90]

This has been tired with steam libraries and i've gone as far as trying one game to see if it works. you get performance hiccups, really bad ones. The only thing i've been able to run smoothly off the NAS were emulators with smaller rom sizes.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I feel like I'm super late to the party. I tried this as an experience one time just to see if I could do it on 1GbE Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless, and 802.11n. Here's the loading times:

 

Depending on the game, once it's loaded, it usually doesn't touch storage very much. GTA V though requires constant access. You need 1GbE or 802.11ac minimum to have it run without severe glitching out:

 

 

I also attempted Skyrim, but that didn't work for some reason.

 

So in short, yes, it's possible to run your games off your NAS.

 

The way I did it though is mapped the NAS drive so it looks like a regular drive (i.e., it has a drive letter). Steam should be able to find the games fine from there.

[Thunderpup]

14 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Depending on the game, once it's loaded, it usually doesn't touch storage very much. GTA V though requires constant access. You need 1GbE or 802.11ac minimum to have it run without severe glitching out:

 

Thanks.

 

While i haven't figured out the exact set up just yet i do know that this will be a wired connection.  

[Pixel5]

you should really not do this if the whole idea behind it is getting drives out of your PC and having less wires.

This reason alone is not really a reason unless you have money to burn.

 

If you do decide to do this just scrap the idea of using the NAS to store games and use it only for the other stuff you mentioned.

Get a Synology NAS or something similar, put one single high capacity drive in your PC for games and whatever you want in the NAS.

[Thunderpup]

5 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

you should really not do this if the whole idea behind it is getting drives out of your PC and having less wires.

This reason alone is not really a reason unless you have money to burn.

The less wires was for my main PC

 

i plan on having a wired NAS because by the time i will have built it i will also have run Ethernet cables throughout the house.  I plan on converting all of my phone jacks to ethernet/coax ports.  

 

So the only extra wiring will be from the NAS to the wall.