4TB ZFS need opinions

Dexter_Kane · May 15, 2017, 3:02pm

I run all my games off a ZFS pool on my server, but I use ISCSI rather than SMB. It works great.

Run your steam library from a NAS (Break a leg challenge) [UPDATE] Blog

Background When I built my gaming PC I decided not to use any mechanical storage, and instead only have a single 240gb (this was 4 or 5 years ago) SSD. This was party because I needed to remove all the drive cages to fit a large 200mm fan in the front of the case, but also because I had a NAS server already and figured I could use that for all my storage and only have small SSDs in my other machines. Obviously 240gb is not a lot of space for games so my method of dealing with that was to install each game to a virtual disk (one per game), this made it easy to move games that I was finished with to the server and vice versa. So I would have maybe 5 games stored on the SSD at a time and I could just move them back and forward to the server as I needed. This worked pretty well but it had some limitations. The biggest limitation was that as far as steam was concerned only one game was ever installed at a time, so half the time when I wanted to play another game I would mount the VHD, load up steam and find myself looking at an 8gb update. Recently I've been playing around with ZFS and ISCSI and thought I could probably use this to store my whole steam library remotely on the server, so for the last few days that's what I've been working on. Now as far as I know steam doesn't care if you install your games to a network share or a local disk, it is totally possible to run a steam library off of SMB or some other network file system. An advantage of that is that you can share the library with multiple machines or users. However the performance isn't perfect. I don't have much experience with this method but a few times I would mount the VHDs directly off the shares (rather than copying them across first) which ran okay but I experienced a few issues, such a videos which played during loading screens would often be choppy, as well as some texture pop in issues and other things like that. So using network shares totally works, but I wanted to try and get as close …