Games Installed on Network drive anyone?
Presently my games are installed on 4 x 1TB samsung QVO SSDs in windows striped drive.

I have 2 computers - one for gaming and another linux one for general use that used to be my gaming machine.

I am looking to have my main machine - MSI B450 tomahawk + 32GB memory + 3600X as a dual boot. Windows will be for gaming & linux for everything else both on the 256 GB NVMe SSD.

The second one - well I will get a low profile case & install ubuntu server. Also I have a sata card to put in extra drives. I will install the 4 x 1TB SSDs (RAID 0 initially) and some hard drives for games storage. Linux apparently has much more efficient software RAID & disk management. On windows the fake BIOS raid & windows storage spaces are not so good. It willl be running 24/7 and have various things running on it. Samba can be used for network shares. Oh and it is a Z77 motherboard + i7-3770K CPU + 32GB 1600 memory.

If I do this will wait until the 10 gigabit network cards come down in price to connect them. Two 10 gigbit cards will be used mainly for NAS and the onboard 1 gigabit NICs will be used for internet access via my switch & router.


Anyone doing anything similar?
Will it cause any issues with game loading times?

Useful & informed info appreciated.







Legutóbb szerkesztette: Lord Flashheart; 2020. jan. 21., 23:02
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"Something called iSCSI looks promising" No it has a lot of latency overhead.
"Setup aggregate ports" I doubt your switch will even do LAG or port-group / port-channeling, if you believe just plugging in 4 cables == link aggregation you are wrong severely.

I don't feel like explaining in length why or why not, I'm not paid to help you.
Legutóbb szerkesztette: iceman1980; 2020. jan. 23., 19:43
Hi, I found this link how to use network drive and this will work fine. Check this https://anardil.net/2019/steam-library-on-network-attached-storage.html
Ive stored and played my games off of my HOME NAS 4x 8TB setup for many years, there is nothing hard about doing this.

Set the NAS as a Networked Drive with Drive Letter. Select this in Steam settings. Its that simple. Make sure any PC doing this on the Network has full Write privileges (not Read-Only) or it won't work.
Legutóbb szerkesztette: Bad 💀 Motha; 2020. dec. 26., 8:59
hristo13 eredeti hozzászólása:
Hi, I found this link how to use network drive and this will work fine. Check this https://anardil.net/2019/steam-library-on-network-attached-storage.html
Hello, So I mastered this in windows and have no problems but when I try it in Ubuntu I get an error when trying to add the library. Any and all help would be apprectiated.
The error I get: "New Steam library folder must be on a file system mounted with execute permissions."
FSTAB is as follows
/IP/Games/ /media/Games cifs Credentials,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777

It mounts fine and I can add and delete files just fine. I even created a whole new empty folder and it still doesn't work.
if the pc the game is installed on is capable, use remote play for the other pc
I posted this a while back. I have my games on a NAS, but as a backup, and on an ISCSI block device. I still run games off the machine I play on.

My 'Home Server', an older machine has proxmox installed, which is a pretty good & free hypervisor.
On there is a Truenas VM (with the games backup and other data), windows 10 and a lancache server.
The games are updated/downlaoded nightly through the lancache to the ISCSI drive. My backup is then up to data. Games downloads are then very fast.

Oh and also pfsense router, pihole, ubuntu linux and a few other useful things.

I tried windows for storing games awhile back, but was highly problematic.

Dr StrangeGlove eredeti hozzászólása:
I posted this a while back. I have my games on a NAS, but as a backup, and on an ISCSI block device. I still run games off the machine I play on.

My 'Home Server', an older machine has proxmox installed, which is a pretty good & free hypervisor.
On there is a Truenas VM (with the games backup and other data), windows 10 and a lancache server.
The games are updated/downlaoded nightly through the lancache to the ISCSI drive. My backup is then up to data. Games downloads are then very fast.

Oh and also pfsense router, pihole, ubuntu linux and a few other useful things.

I tried windows for storing games awhile back, but was highly problematic.

That is an interesting concept. I am however am trying to move from windows to linux and I wanted it to be set up the same way it was in windows, only in linux. Kind of sticking it to the man by doing everything I can do on windows in linux instead.

Any and all advice is appreciated though.This also could turn into my next project lol
Skweeges eredeti hozzászólása:
Dr StrangeGlove eredeti hozzászólása:
I posted this a while back. I have my games on a NAS, but as a backup, and on an ISCSI block device. I still run games off the machine I play on.

My 'Home Server', an older machine has proxmox installed, which is a pretty good & free hypervisor.
On there is a Truenas VM (with the games backup and other data), windows 10 and a lancache server.
The games are updated/downlaoded nightly through the lancache to the ISCSI drive. My backup is then up to data. Games downloads are then very fast.

Oh and also pfsense router, pihole, ubuntu linux and a few other useful things.

I tried windows for storing games awhile back, but was highly problematic.

That is an interesting concept. I am however am trying to move from windows to linux and I wanted it to be set up the same way it was in windows, only in linux. Kind of sticking it to the man by doing everything I can do on windows in linux instead.

Any and all advice is appreciated though.This also could turn into my next project lol

My setup typically means i use windows for gaming purposes only, and are on windows for a minimum amount of time where games updates are from the lancache Virtaul machine.
So no web browsing ,except maybe drivers on windows. Just updates & games.
Oh and posting on forums like this when waiting for a game server.

As for using linux for games, the biggest issue are the DRM & anti cheat.
I am hoping due to steamdeck, will be forced to play nice with linux.
I am sticking with windows (10) for games for now. I hope it is 100% doable on linux before support ends.
Having stream library on NAS over 10Gb ethernet, should work with pretty much comparable speed with SATA SSD. Basically the real speed is dependent on the 10Gb network latency which is some tens of microseconds.

Basically there are few different ways how disk IO may happen:

1. Load big files / assets from disk to scene in memory: This is probably the most common way to access disk, since games knows that this way of accessing data is fast. You should be able to get data 2x speed compared to SATA SSD.

2. Load / access lots of small files: This is actually harder, since on every operation has the starting overhead. Though if game does not wait that the earlier small file load is ready before making the next one, then game can just launch 10000x parallel file operations to the NAS and again you will be able to use the full capacity of the 10Gb network.

3. Random read/write access to a single file: This is not so common operation with big data amounts, so probably amount of data written is small and you will not notice any problems. Though this is the one of the hardest workloads for network drive.

4. Sequential access to files, where next access pointer depends on the earlier data which was read: Pathological case where your network drive will not perform well.

So people are saying that there is a huge overhead in file access through network drive, but actually the overhead is few tens of microseconds per access operation, so when big files are loaded from the network, performance will be good. Though is one compares it to NVMe SSD:s then it will be always a lot slower compared to them.
not really
each access on a hdd or ssd is in a few ms or less
adding network link will increase that time by huge amounts
Depends on the game.

If something like RDR2 or TotalWar Warhammer then it's much preferred to install to local SSD.

Games like God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tomb Raider 2013 (or newer TR) play just fine via NAS.

I've used this option for Steam Gamea since Win7 was the everyday OS.

If it's a game where you mod the story and such, much easier to handle that via local drive IMO
_I_ eredeti hozzászólása:
not really
each access on a hdd or ssd is in a few ms or less
adding network link will increase that time by huge amounts

I can tell you from experience there is no difference except the fact that EA games and UBI Soft games will not work. Also anything with Anti-cheat because it doesn't like it. I have been running it this way for about 4 years now.
Legutóbb szerkesztette: Skweege; 2023. febr. 16., 14:36
Skweege eredeti hozzászólása:
_I_ eredeti hozzászólása:
not really
each access on a hdd or ssd is in a few ms or less
adding network link will increase that time by huge amounts

I can tell you from experience there is no difference except the fact that EA games and UBI Soft games will not work. Also anything with Anti-cheat because it doesn't like it. I have been running it this way for about 4 years now.

If using windows sharing, it will cause many issues.
ISCSI drives are the way to go in that situation.
Not sure if this is still relevant but you can buy a pair of 10Gb Infiniband NICs with a DAC cable for 60 bucks on ebay.[www.ebay.com] These work even with fiber and it's not even that much more expensive. With a cheap QLC ssd on the remote machine the access times are almost indistinguishable from local pc.
Legutóbb szerkesztette: <(´= ⩊ =`)>; 2023. máj. 27., 0:35
Yeeter the noob deleter eredeti hozzászólása:
Not sure if this is still relevant but you can buy a pair of 10Gb Infiniband NICs with a DAC cable for 60 bucks on ebay.[www.ebay.com] These work even with fiber and it's not even that much more expensive. With a cheap QLC ssd on the remote machine the access times are almost indistinguishable from local pc.


I did think about something similar.
I have 2.5 gigbit local lan speeds. This is apparently fine for now, due to the local cache setup.

Frequently accesses data is accessed at nvme speeds.
As for writes, the cache uses a delayed write option, so are written to the NAS a little later. This is typically when gaming and do not notice. Its seems to top out at 200 MB/s write speeds. I know this through the task manager & viewing the ethernet speed.
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Közzétéve: 2020. jan. 21., 21:59
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