NAS and Gaming machine in one

Community
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Hey Guys,
this is my first post ever so I am sorry if I put this in the wrong section or ignored some other rules.

So I stumbled across a video from Linus about a NAS machine wich also has a virtualized Gaming machine built in.
Here is the link from anybody that is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpXhSrhmUXo

So with Ryzen giving us great performance/cores for "little" money I would like to know what you think about something like this but with a Risen 7 1700 where you pass 4 cores to the NAS and the other 4 cores you use for gaming.

Having watched Wendells Video about FreeNAS (i think) and ZFS, I always wanted such a thing. But with this the cost would be cut dramatically.

Greetings from Me

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Honestly, you likely don't need 4 cores for a NAS unless you've got some serious home streaming demands.

Yes, Ryzen could enable this on a budget, but you should know that hardware passthrough compatibiltiy on AM4 has been rocky, due to poor IOMMU isolation, so passing a separate NIC may end up being problematic depending on your other hardware config/needs, and may preclude using a commercial solution like unRAID.

You should price out a right-size gaming rig and a right-size FreeNAS box, compare that with the cost of the Ryzen system, and if the numbers are close enough or in favor of the two separate systems, I'd recommend getting the 2 separate systems every time. You'll have less headaches, less overhead under load, and less complexity with the 2 boxes over the 1

Welcome to the forums, We love stuff like this. If you do end up going the virtualized route, make a thread about it to document your experiences with it.

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Well the issues with the IOMMU would put this line of thinking to an end, at least for me.
But if this gets worked out (I have no idea if this is even possible) the 2-in-1 machine would have some serious advantages. I could get most of the essentials for a NAS box with the new gaming PC try things out, and if the overhead is too big or the headaches are to strong I still could get another machine and harvest those essential parts.

I am somewhat in the progress of pimping my home network out and would like to have this FreeNAS or unRAID plattform to tinker around with. But as you said the IOMMU problems seem the biggest hurdle

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There's always the linux ACS patch, but that comes with its own, unique headaches, and introduces more overhead and legwork on your part.

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Ryzen PCIe passthrough is not quite there yet. It will probably be in the coming months.

I've not heard of anyone who uses the "gaming machine and NAS all in one" solution. If you have not dabbled in Linux and with virtualization before I would not recommend you get into that with all your stuff (gaming and storing your precious as well as not so precious data).

If you want a ready-made NAS you could just get a cheap, older workstation. Those can be had for as little as 250$ and they often have ECC memory. They ususally take up to 5 HDDs them (Freenas is happy to be run of a thumbdrive).

Then go nuts with your gaming system.

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If you're trying to combine them I would ask you, why? Just slap as many hard drives in the gaming rig as you can fit and call it a day.

Unless you explicitly need a NAS for something. Then my comment is moot.

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I second the "why?"

Just slam some drives in your game rig and call it good. No need to do a bunch of crazy virtualization, etc.

"Home servers are a meme" (TM)

1 Like
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*™

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I'd say:

Is a meme.

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It's useful for some things, it just isn't necessarily ideal in this instance.

I run a ghetto rackmount all-in-one router/nas/HTPC server/App server on one machine, mostly using jails, but with the router in a virtualized instance for isolation

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to answer the why:

I want somekind of server and I want it for cheap. I know that a second machine would be easier but I honestly don't have the space.
I just had my first real contact with linux, I set up a raspberry pi as a vpn to my homenetwork for various reasons and now I would like to have a place on the network to store all my stuff. I probably could use my main PC but it would need to run all the time or I would need to boot it over WOL.

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I had an older HP Z600 that I used just for this but yea it had to run all of the time. That said it had 12 cores and 24 threads with 48GB of mem so those specs were totally overkill for using it as a server and gaming machine but the parts were cheap - bought a barebones Z600 with something like 4GB mem and a single 2.4Ghz xeon and upgraded it on the cheap. I also had some SSDs and an RX480 and it ran the games that I played at 4K medium-high settings regardless of what I had going on in the background which was typically torrenting/popcorn time, windows shares, chrome with a million tabs open, etc. I realize these xeons have a low IPC compared with todays stuff but for the price I didn't care.