Steam vs iSCSI

[Lockon Stratos]

Hi all!

So i play with my gaming pc pretty erratically and got tired of waiting for updates (150 mbps isnt a screaming fast connection) so i thought what if i set up a iSCSI share on my NAS and link it to two PC. One would be a potato only tasked with doing the updates, the second one would be the gaming PC. Would steam have any issues with this?

(I would shut down the potato before i fire up the gaming rig OFC.)

[ReBoot]

As usual, loading times may or may not suffer, but should work.
150 Mb/s isn't that slow though.

[Lockon Stratos]

Originally posted by ReBoot:

As usual, loading times may or may not suffer, but should work.
150 Mb/s isn't that slow though.

Cant be any worse than a local HDD..... :D As for speed maybe its not that slow but considering game and update sizes it couldnt be called fast either. Besides why waste time if i can solve the update issue by making use of the potato low power PC's i have lying around.....

Best solution would be an option to cache the updates on my NAS but valve doesnt have such a solution. The question is what the client has to say about "swapping" the storage between two pc.

[xarvn]

I suspect it would be no different than if you had moved steam games on an external disk drive to another machine. Each time this is done, Steam would insist that the games in the library are in need of "updating"; the updating process would mostly be some type of file verification, however. This of course takes time and would occur whenever you switch machines to access the library. The time necessary for the changeover between your gaming PC and the dedicated update PC would depend on the number of games, but I think that even a library of a few titles would make things impractical. I could however be wrong so you will have to try this in order to be sure.

At best you would be better off keeping the potato to update the library and then via file sharing copy over the fully updated game files of the game you want to play on your game machine. After doing this Steam will require that the game be "updated" (that is mostly be verified). This method would save time only if updating required more time than the file verification. For large or multiple updates this would be the case. But sometimes there are very short updates that complete in a few seconds. In this situation verifying the files would take much longer especially for large games. The advantage though is that only the game that you copied over form the potato would be verified instead of every game in the shared library.

[xarvn]

Remember an article about experimenting with a network download server for Steam games:
https://pcper.com/2018/05/building-a-steam-caching-server-for-faster-game-downloads/

And an old discussion thread, though without a positive resolution:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/154642901287459991/

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Lockon Stratos:

Best solution would be an option to cache the updates on my NAS but valve doesnt have such a solution. The question is what the client has to say about "swapping" the storage between two pc.

You said

Originally posted by Lockon Stratos:

(I would shut down the potato before i fire up the gaming rig OFC.)

that'll avoid the potential issue just fine.

[Lockon Stratos]

Originally posted by ReBoot:

Originally posted by Lockon Stratos:

Best solution would be an option to cache the updates on my NAS but valve doesnt have such a solution. The question is what the client has to say about "swapping" the storage between two pc.

You said

Originally posted by Lockon Stratos:

(I would shut down the potato before i fire up the gaming rig OFC.)

that'll avoid the potential issue just fine.

Thats only prevents a iSCSI issue, not steam doing waxky stuff like re-verifying ATM 1TB+ of games .....

Originally posted by xarvn:

Remember an article about experimenting with a network download server for Steam games:
https://pcper.com/2018/05/building-a-steam-caching-server-for-faster-game-downloads/

And an old discussion thread, though without a positive resolution:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/154642901287459991/

I read that one too but that would require 3x of the space i need with this. Plus i am the only one using steam pretty much.

Originally posted by xarvn:

Each time this is done, Steam would insist that the games in the library are in need of "updating";

That would be pretty dumb.....

[xarvn]

I found another article that may be relevant to what you are trying to do. After looking through it, I get the feeling that perhaps ReBoot might have been right and that Steam may not necessarily behave as I had described. So long as the NAS is mapped correctly with the appropriate privileges, the author suggests that it will work as desired. No additional space should be necessary as both the game machine and the potato will share a common game library.

With both PCs using the same account, Steam will automatically disconnect the potato (assuming that it was left online), when you log on with the game machine and vice versa. Again, I have not verified the procedure described in the article. Here is the link:

https://anardil.net/2019/steam-library-on-network-attached-storage.html

[Satoru]

Originally posted by xarvn:

I found another article that may be relevant to what you are trying to do. After looking through it, I get the feeling that perhaps ReBoot might have been right and that Steam may not necessarily behave as I had described. So long as the NAS is mapped correctly with the appropriate privileges, the author suggests that it will work as desired. No additional space should be necessary as both the game machine and the potato will share a common game library.

With both PCs using the same account, Steam will automatically disconnect the potato (assuming that it was left online), when you log on with the game machine and vice versa. Again, I have not verified the procedure described in the article. Here is the link:

https://anardil.net/2019/steam-library-on-network-attached-storage.html

Note that 'conceptually' it will 'work'

But practically you can encounter many issues using any kind of external storage mechanism. The most common issue is your games being 'uninstalled' due to network blips, bad usb controllers, or literally anything.

If you have problems, you're on your own.

[Juan Manu]

Originally posted by xarvn:

I suspect it would be no different than if you had moved steam games on an external disk drive to another machine. Each time this is done, Steam would insist that the games in the library are in need of "updating"; the updating process would mostly be some type of file verification, however. This of course takes time and would occur whenever you switch machines to access the library. The time necessary for the changeover between your gaming PC and the dedicated update PC would depend on the number of games, but I think that even a library of a few titles would make things impractical. I could however be wrong so you will have to try this in order to be sure.

At best you would be better off keeping the potato to update the library and then via file sharing copy over the fully updated game files of the game you want to play on your game machine. After doing this Steam will require that the game be "updated" (that is mostly be verified). This method would save time only if updating required more time than the file verification. For large or multiple updates this would be the case. But sometimes there are very short updates that complete in a few seconds. In this situation verifying the files would take much longer especially for large games. The advantage though is that only the game that you copied over form the potato would be verified instead of every game in the shared library.

I agree completely brother

[xarvn]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Note that 'conceptually' it will 'work'...

...If you have problems, you're on your own.

Right you are. And the likelihood of official support is nil. The idea however does have merit and could be of benefit to more wider use cases. With family sharing there would be no need to duplicate game files. The load on Steam servers would be reduced due to not having to provide for redundant copies of games and updates.

[Lockon Stratos]

Well here goes nothing, potato ended up running xcpng because VNC wont work withoput a monitor plugged in (it has a x5-z8350 cpu, 3 vcpu's allocated to windows vm). ATM it updating currently "installed" games on the iscsi.... (and OFC win update totally kills the party but im too tired to deal with it)

[Lockon Stratos]

Well steam finished with downloading. Disconnected iSCSI on VM then connected on gaming PC. Added the new drive to steam and it picked up the games without any verifying or other BS like that. Onlz downside to this is that onlz one PC can connect to a iSCSI share.....

[✪ Klean]

If you have problems, you're on your own.

[Lockon Stratos]

Originally posted by ✪ Klean:

If you have problems, you're on your own.

If you have such a negative attitude dont even comment....