Who else put their games onto a NAS?

[Lord Flashheart]

Firstly I am NOT trying to encourage anyone to do this.
I am interested in any issues with any who have done anything similar.

What have done and why?

Games are becoming huge in size. I want all games quickly updated and available to play. Also hard drives are much less expensive that NVMe

My internet is limited to 100 megabit. Anything faster will not be available for a while and it seems much more expensive. If I got at some point 1 Gigabit internet, it seems some steam updates are unable to take advantage of it anyway. Also there is the ongoing extra cost if I did.

Most important - spend little money!

I have an old machine with trueans scae. I setup a pool with 5 x 4TB drives a have already and 2 x 16GB intel optane from ebay, as special devices for something called dedupliction.
It is RAIDZ1, so has 16TB storage.
Those optane drives were not exactly expensive.

So I have 2 x ISCSI shares of sparse 12TB drives to store games. This was to have the benefit of compression, snapshots & deduplication.

Deduplication is the trickiest part to get right, without consuming vast resources on the server.

After playing around an on old machine, it seems the only way to get it to behave is to use large block sizes.
The truenas scale gui has limited options.

For those familiat with linux & zfs, the command was:

sudo zfs create -s -V 12TB -o volblockzise=1M Pool/ISCIBlock1

Then create another for the second share.
In the gui, turned on deduplication , compression, sync to disabled. In the GUI, 128k was the maximum block size, which sucks & why the command line option was needed.

So presently, the deduplication ratio is 1.99, compression is 1.25 (3.22GB compressed to 2.5GB). Most important the deduplication data needed is a massive 3.03GB

When sharing as ISCSI, was important when connecting in windows to format with 1MB block sizes. The is wasteful of space with some games apparently. The compression takes care of that though (on truenas)

So on the server are two important virtual machines. The first is windows. It is connected to one of the ISCSI drives. Its only job is to update games.
The second is a virtual lancache server, details of which are here: https://lancache.net/

So my gaming machine is attached to the other ISCSI share, now with all games on there.

Running games directly off a NAS like that could be sluggish

I bought a 1/2 TB nvme for a local caching storage. The samsung 980s were on sale.
So downloaded samsung magician, updated the firumware & the 10% over provision option.
My caching software of choice is promocache. It has 420GB local storage as cache on my gaming machine.

I had to visit the truenas forums a few times to get useful information. Some were very helpful. Others were downright hostile.

It is working as well as expected now. My local LAN is 2.5 gigbit.
Games are typically updated overnight with the windows virtual machine.
When turning on the gaming machine, updates are typically very fast.The highest download speed I have seen is 280 MB/s. Most struggle to do that though.

The promocache software is configured to update games locallly, then write to the NAS after a short delay.
Also mostly when gaming, the game data is on the local NVME drive. There is no need to move games around.

Presently I am downloading a fair amount of games overnight, provided free through the epic game store mainly.

This little project cost me little in money. The extra expenses got the optane drives and the 1/2TB samsung.
It did take time to work out how to setup, but was a bit ill at the time, so needed something to concentrate on at home.

The 4 x sata SSDs my games were on, will be put into the server and used for more storage on the server.
Ah sata SSDs, still useful but the lost middle child of storage!!!


USEFUL AND INFORMED FEEDBACK IS APPRECIATED!