I just discovered this concept and it seems amazing that i no longer need to keep a hard drive in my main rig… and it makes my planned NAS setup even more exciting.
Any guidance? Like directly running Singleplayer and older games from the iSCSI Nas drive? Windows backup on there? Backup of other files? Maybe stuff like outputting blender renders on there directly? Long term thoughts?
Sigh…
iSCSI is block storage. For it to work well, you need a mirror setup, kept below 50% occupancy, and lots of RAM (64 GB minimum, preferably more):
If the idea of having 2-4 dedicated hard drives in the NAS to do the job of a single drive in your desktop appeals to you, go ahead.
But make another pool for your backups, in a more efficient raidz# geometry.
Normally you want your storage to be as close to the CPU and/or GPU as possible to get those latencies as low as possible. Doing what you’re thinking of is the opposite, further away with more protocols to add fluff delaying the game’s access to data.
A singleplayer game can still see hefty performance penalties from the setup you’re considering so I wouldn’t say that single- vs multiplayer is the issue, it’s more how much data does the game need access to at any given time and how sensitive is it to delays in getting that data.
I recommend you reconsider it if you have plans to game from the remote drive(s) unless the games in question happen to work well with higher than expected latency storage.
If your issue is that your client computer lacks the expandability to hold today’s large games because it has to have a small footprint for various reasons (aesthetics, etc), then perhaps using using Sunshine, Parsec or Steam Remote Play can be an option.
In that scenario you have a gaming computer with the storage, CPU and GPU to handle your needs and put it somewhere hidden away. And then you use your small form factor computer as a slim client, basically just a screen, keyboard and mouse with a network cable attached. You stream the video from your “Gaming server”. The latency added by the compression/decompression and network transit will not be felt as much as separating the storage from the compute power. You will lose some visual quality however, as the video compression is not lossless.
Yet another alternative to that is to not stream the video at all, rather just use very long HDMI/USB-C cables with some specialised gear to make it work, this method tends to get pricy though.
even more exciting.
I would replace “exciting” with complicated, extra buggy, unnecessarily difficult to setup, constantly breaking and lower in performance.
Don’t do this. Unless you’re managing like 20 machines and want deduplication, re-imaging, etc–booting over network is just a PITA. And you’ll never beat even a crappy NVME on your local machine.
Render your blender renders to your NAS and store your files that you want to share with other computers. For system files, just buy a cheap (even $50) NVME and get nearly zero latency and multiple GB/s of bandwidth.
This drive costs $60 chosen at random and delivers 5GB/s reads. That would require a 100gb ethernet fiber network.
And if Blender or Photoshop or whatever start hitting disk swap in place of RAM, you’ll see even worse performance just slow your system to a crawl. Is there a cool factor from booting over the network? Yes. But the cool factor wears off really fast when your NAS has to reboot and your gaming machine crashes. LAN parties are rare but what if you want to go play games at a big LAN party? Now you’re hauling your TrueNAS server along with you too.
Honestly, why? Even ignoring the necessary overhead for effective use of iSCSI, there’s going to be a massive performance hit compared to a local drive. While it’s theoretically possible, there’s simply nothing to be gained by this, and a lot to be lost.
I’ll take a slightly different perspective on this. In my experience, for what it’s worth, as I run a similar setup… Config isn’t particularly complicated and once done the setup has been very stable, never had any issues. Performance is fine - somewhere between a local SATA SSD and NVMe in my measurements, obviously assuming 10Gb network. The client takes the performance/latency hit of traversing the network, but otoh benefits from server-side ARC goodness and other ZFS trickery. Backup is already taken care of automatically (assuming you already have a process for backing up the NAS of course). Easy to extend storage by growing the volume server-side. Etc.
Always thought it made more sense to install LanCache (aka Steam Cache) on your NAS
2.5gbe motherboards on both devices…
Then you will have less fun… up to the speed of a single spinning disk, roughly, perhaps benefiting a bit from server-side arc but being penalised by network overhead latency instead.
i mean i still run games from my desktop hard drive to this day… will it be worse than the desktop HDD?
Depends on the specs of your server, how busy your network is, etc. Try it and see. But you would be much happier with at least 10Gb.
