Hello, I have some questions that have been running my mind about NAS.
So, i'll tell you a bit about what my set up is going to be.
There will be my bedroom where my main pc (most powerful one) will be and it'll have it's own monitor, you know just 20-28" or so and then in the lounge there will be my old desktop. There will also be a laptop or two around the house of which are other people's. I/we will be playing games, watching movies, listening to music etc. and I was wondering if each device only had, let's say, 128G of storage (SSD) and wee all just accessed our files off of the NAS would this work?
On the NAS (ideally/reason for asking the question) would be:
-Steam library
-Movies
-Music
-Photo's
and other things.
Now the main question here is, will the steam part work? I know that two of us wouldn't be able to play the same game on 2 different accounts on 2 different machines whilst accessing the one game folder on the NAS as it just won't work, if that is correct? That aside, if it were to be just me who would be using the steam games, if I felt like serious gaming i'd go to my room and use the good pc and if i felt like casual gaming i'd go to the lounge and play on my old desktop with the 50" tv. Would that work? accessing my steam games on different machines (NOT AT THE SAME TIME) through the NAS? Also would my loading times suffer and or would there be any lag or any cons to this situation?
Or am I better off having a smaller NAS just for movies and music etc. and selling the gfx card in the old desktop to make my new one more powerful and rely on steam streaming for gaming in the lounge?
Also Also, for the case of steam streaming what kind of local internet would I need to represent exactly or almost exactly what I would see on my good desktop? And in the other scenario, should I get one of those 4 way gigabit ethernet connectors and put it in my NAS like linus was talking about in his NAS video on Youtube.
Thanks for your time and i'll wait for hopeful answers!
If you're just streaming movies then you probably don't "need" the 4gigabit card. It's overkill.
I have wireless N at home (haven't upgraded to AC yet) and can use my laptop to simultaneously stream a blu ray rip to my TV and a couple of 1080p movies (feature films around 2GB in size, so a decent bit rate) to two other laptops without any issues whatsoever. My TV is wired to the router though (1 gigabit), it makes a difference (the rest aren't). Your milage may vary.
Use wired gigabit ethernet where you can, especially for stationary devices like desktops, TVs, NAS and such. It takes a lot to saturate a gigabit connection. I've had some success with powerline adapters for parts of the house where i can't run a wire.
That is basically how I have mine set up, with SSDs in all the computers and accessing everything from a NAS. it works well. I probably wouldn't run your games over the network, it'll work, but it's pretty slow, some games I've tried doing that with and it was really bad, others were noticeable but playable. What I do is install games to my SSD (in a virtual disk for each game, but this is more for making my backup easier and you could do this without using virtual disks) and then when I'm done with them I move the game files to the NAS, when I want to play it again I just copy it back across. So I have the speed of the ssd while playing but the storage space of a hdd when I don't need it.
I've tried steam streaming to my phone over wireless ac. It worked fine at 1080p 60hz. I imagine it would also work on n but I'm not sure, maybe at a lower frame rate. There was a noticeable lag but that's to be expected, otherwise it was perfect.
Also, using a 2 or 4 port gigabit network card is only useful if you have multiple client machines which can utilise more than 1gbps total bandwidth between them. For streaming this isn't likely to be the case unless you have a lot of clients all streaming at the same time, like maybe a dozen or so. Your hard disks are probably going to struggle with that many simultaneous streams long before a single gigabit connection does. For the cost of setting that up (those 4 port cards aren't cheap plus you need a managed switch) it's not really worth it for a home environment.
Thanks for the quick replies again Kane! haha :D Hmm, ok well steam streaming sounds pretty good then, maybe i'll just have a smaller NAS for all my movies and stuff, like 5 2TB barracudas (coz i'm very weary about any 3tb and 4tb drives) and have 2 in redundancy, does that sound good? In the case of not getting the 4gbit nic, should i still purchase one of those good Intel 1gbit ones? Or should I just use the on board 1gbit?
Also I will reply to your post on my other post, i've just been slowly reading it over a few times just to let it sink in, but I haven't been able to do that today as i've just got over a head ache now D:
Also, what would the speeds be for a NAS with 5 drives on gbit with 2 redundancy be? Would it be faster than 1 regular 2tb Seagate drive? Thanks.
Ohh and one more thing! What parts should I use? Do I need an i5? or could I just use a i3 or celeron/pentium (4th gen) and still get the same performance? And 4 orGB 8GB of RAM? Cheers.
If you can afford it I'd go for the western digital reds or the seagate nas drives. They're made for 24/7 use and they handle being in a RAID configuration a lot better. Normal drives will still work though, but there's a higher risk of failure.
If you're going to be transferring a lot of large files around then getting an intel nic will give you a small boost in performance, but the on-board ones aren't terrible. If you're just streaming and stuff then I don't think it would really make a difference.
As for speeds, you will only get about 80 - 120 MB/s through a gigabit connection, this is slower than a single hard drive so even if you were getting higher disk performance you wouldn't be able to use it over the network. You will only get higher performance than a single disk if you were using RAID5 or RAID6. I wouldn't recommend doing this as it's easy to lose the whole array when using RAID set ups. They're designed more for availability and performance rather than data protection. If you use something like ZFS then you won't see any higher speeds than a single disk. ZFS is a good option if you want to have real-time redundancy, that is that it will calculate the parity is real time as you write to the array, as opposed to using a snapshot method. Personally I use snapshot redundancy, specifically a program called snapraid, it's good for media files and things like that which don't get updated frequently. The advantage of it is that you can add disks without having to rebuild the array, and if for example you have 2 disks for redundancy and three disks die, then in a RAID or ZFS set up you lose everything, but with snapraid you only lose the data on the disks which failed. Snapraid doesn't merge all the disks in to one volume though like RAID and ZFS does but you can get the same functionality but using AUFS in linux or something similar for windows or whatever.
But if you are writing to the NAS a lot, specifically if you are working from the NAS so files on it are constantly being written to and updated then using snapshot redundancy is not a good option and ZFS will work much better for that, but for static libraries that don't update often then I personally prefer something like snapraid, but ZFS will work fine too.
As for hardware, that depends on what kind of set up you go with. If all your NAS is doing is acting as a file server then you can run it on pretty much anything an i3 or pentium with 4 or 8GB of ram is plenty. I'd go with 8GB. Software RAID will need a decent processor if you go with RAID6 and don't get a dedicated RAID card. I'm not sure what the exact requirements for running ZFS is, but I think you need a decent processor, an i3 would probably be fine, or an i5. I know that it does like having lots of RAM though, I think it was something like 1GB per TB of storage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g_uPTLwfgE
Ok, well what'd the big differences about having a NAS vs just accessing files off of my own PC form other PCs?
Nothing, it's the same thing.
Oh ok. Can you have it so that only certain hard drives in your computer are available to the network?
Yep, you can share a whole drive or just certain folders.
Oh ok cool! I think I might do that then, for now at least anyway, thanks for all the help!
I was looking into building my own NAS from pc parts but I came across this.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859108164&cm_re=HP_micro_server-_-59-108-164-_-Product
It actually just came in the mail today so I'll do an update on how it works out. I'll be running FreeNAS and some plug-ins like Crashplan and OwnCloud.
I would rather just build a small computer since it'd be a bit more fun, but this is cheap and we use them at work so I know they're good quality wise.