10Gbps and game storage

jayecin

Explorer
Joined
Oct 12, 2020
Messages
79
I am considering adding a 10GB Nic to my nass and desktop and using the NAS for video game installs. Does anyone have experience with this and how well does it work? I already have a 10GB SFP+ capable switch and Cat6 home wiring, so my investment in network hardware would be minimal around 250 bucks. 10Gbps = 1.25 GigaBytes per second, which is double the bandwidth of a single SATA3 SSD, so I think it should be more than find there. I would plan on mirroring 2 x 2TB SSDS just for games. But what downsides or issues can I run into doing this?
 

John Doe

Guru
Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
635
did this with steam and 1gbe on spinning rust.
it is a bit slower to load games but i dont mind.

alternative could be to go fo connectx adapters e.g. mellanox
you can get 40gbe for around 70 USD
 

Chris Moore

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May 2, 2015
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But what downsides or issues can I run into doing this?
I put 10Gig SFP+ adapters in my desktop and NAS and ran the connection through a switch that had four SFP+ ports that were intended to be for uplink to other switches. I had to modify the settings in the switch to get the uplink ports to behave like regular network ports, but it all works great now. Fast connection to the NAS for the workstation and all the other devices have 1Gig ports off that switch. I used static IP addresses on the workstation and the server so I didn't have to worry about anything changing on me.

Sounds like you already have a switch. The only problem I ran into was that some of the SFP+ adapters were not recognized by my switch. It turned out to be brand lockout because the adapters I had were made by CISCO and the switch is made by Aruba. They are not friendly. I had to go back and get different adapters for the switch end of the connection. All troubleshooting in, I spent a couple weekends setting it up but it took I did have some delay waiting for parts to be shipped, so about a month and some time online figuring out why it didn't work. For example, I had to upgrade the firmware on the switch before I could reprogram the SFP+ ports as standard network ports instead of having them in a special management group.

What hardware do you have already? Had you already selected network cards you would like to try?
 

jayecin

Explorer
Joined
Oct 12, 2020
Messages
79
Thanks for the responses. First off I am a network engineer, so I am very familiar with networking hardware, compatibility and so on. I currently have a Juniper 3300-EX series switch that has 4 10GB SFP+ interfaces. I plan to utilize TwinAx cable between the NAS and the Switch and 10GB RJ45s from my desktop with a RJ45 SFP+ in the switch. As I mentioned, I already wired my house with Cat6 cabling.
Parts list
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2017
Messages
524
As much as I like this idea I have had trouble with certain programs simply refusing to work on SMB networked drives (have not tried iSCSI). Clip studio paint and photoshop both refused to function properly and a quick google came up with certain games not functioning. I also had a problem with my Bitdenfender causing Skyrim to crash on saves when saving to a SMB share but Bitdefender released an update within 30 days of me contacting them about it.
Here is the most recent report I saw of some games not working from network drives

Honestly I am very tempted to try this out myself, with the size of games today multi terabyte SSD's are filling up.
 

jayecin

Explorer
Joined
Oct 12, 2020
Messages
79
I was only considering using it for gaming, dont really have a need for photo or video editing. And yes, the game sizes are becoming such a burden for hard drives. I dont want a bunch of SATA cables running through my gaming PC, I like it really clean and neat and nvme drives are still expensive for large amounts of storage. I wouldnt bother doing this at 1gbps nics because those are only capable of 125MB/s which isnt even the speed of a mechanical drive, so load times would be too slow.
 

warllo

Contributor
Joined
Nov 22, 2012
Messages
117
Hi,

I use my TrueNas box for exactly what you are describing. I found that most games (that I play) don't work over SMB shares and I ended going to iSCSI.

iSCSI comes with a whole bag of worms in itself but it is working well for my purposes. I had to use 4 mirrored vdevs to get decent performance granted they are older 10K SAS spinners. For the most part, I have SATA SSD like performance, especially with writes. I also had to bump my TrueNas Core box to 64 GB of ram to get decent results.

I also found that a 10 gig nic was mandatory.

Hope this helps!
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2017
Messages
524
Warllo: iSCSI allowed all the games to work seamlessly for you?
Jayecin: Did you intend for only a single computer to access the steam library?
 

warllo

Contributor
Joined
Nov 22, 2012
Messages
117
Warllo: iSCSI allowed all the games to work seamlessly for you?
Jayecin: Did you intend for only a single computer to access the steam library?

iSCSI did allow all of the games (that I play) to work seamlessly as iSCSI presents it as a disk rather than a mapped drive. The use of iSCSI in my configuration does limit the steam library access to a single machine.
 
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