NAS drive problems

[Retoto]

I recently uploaded most of my games to a NAS drive. I tried to open CS:GO, steam said it was running but it didn't open on my PC. Does anyone have any thoughts.

[iceman1980]

Retoto eredeti hozzászólása:

I recently uploaded most of my games to a NAS drive. I tried to open CS:GO, steam said it was running but it didn't open on my PC. Does anyone have any thoughts.

Bandwidth of the NAS? And how is the NAS shared?

[Lord Flashheart]

If you are using a windows network share, then that could be a problem.
ISCSI is the way to go.
It will present as a block device to the os, just like any hard drive.

If you do not know what that is, you need to do some homework.

[_I_]

never put a steam library on a remote drive

[Retoto]

Lord of Misrule eredeti hozzászólása:

If you are using a windows network share, then that could be a problem.
ISCSI is the way to go.
It will present as a block device to the os, just like any hard drive.

If you do not know what that is, you need to do some homework.

Homework it is then

[Lord Flashheart]

Retoto eredeti hozzászólása:

Lord of Misrule eredeti hozzászólása:

If you are using a windows network share, then that could be a problem.
ISCSI is the way to go.
It will present as a block device to the os, just like any hard drive.

If you do not know what that is, you need to do some homework.

Homework it is then

If you are using an old machine with freenas/truenas, then this may be helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzX6c58ydY4

[Lord Flashheart]

_I_ eredeti hozzászólása:

never put a steam library on a remote drive

Why not? When 10 gigabit networking equipment drops a lot in price, I will be.

If on a truenas/freenas system with redundancy and maybe an NVMe/SSD drive for caching, it could work out well.
Also caching can be done on the game machine using primocache or something similar.

I have my games backup on an old machine, now a NAS. I could use it now to run games if I wanted, but may be slow with 1 gigabit networking.
Games are updated nightly, using a windows 10 virtual machine.
Oh and another VM with ubuntu server as a lancache helps game downloads a lot.

[_I_]

its not the speeds, its the delays between requests and when the files are accessable

local drives are within a few ns ranges, remote drives are in the ms range

[Lord Flashheart]

_I_ eredeti hozzászólása:

its not the speeds, its the delays between requests and when the files are accessable

local drives are within a few ns ranges, remote drives are in the ms range

I know the network access will have delays, but that is what the caching is for.
I only use windows for gaming, so may boot that from the network also, with the pagefile on a local drive.

[_I_]

caching only helps when the data being accessed is cached
if the game is always asking for random data at random times it will never be cached

[Lord Flashheart]

_I_ eredeti hozzászólása:

caching only helps when the data being accessed is cached
if the game is always asking for random data at random times it will never be cached

Ah ok. You seem to be looking for problems.
The cache can be persistent, or reset on boot. There are many options with primocache.

It depends on the setup.

Also are there any actual benchmarks/tests to show if it is even an issue. Would you even notice. My guess for nearly all games is no.

Oh and if persistent, with a verify game contents of a game, it will them shortly be cached.

Leaving this conversation.

[iceman1980]

_I_ eredeti hozzászólása:

caching only helps when the data being accessed is cached
if the game is always asking for random data at random times it will never be cached

iSCSI has pretty big PDU Encapsulation delays. If you want the lowest possible latency you'll need a HBA and Fibre cables. Also some games will do asset paging this is what will bring down the entire NAS. If you wanted to really have low latency you could use Infiniband.

You can pick up old infiniband network switches from ebay then get an infiniband HBA

NAS systems are not exactly intended for game "streaming" due to the latency, there is a reason when VDI or Virtual Desktop infrastructure is used they "host" the remote machine on a server with serious bandwidth and processing capability. And use "Thin-clients" to remotely access that VDI infrastructure, but not "Stream data to and from a NAS that requires (close to realtime response)