I have FreeNAS on a gigabit network and wanted to know if anyone else has done this? I want to move the Steam folder off my machine to the NAS box.
So what do you think? Is there any problems that you come across?
Well.. I would say with this, your games will be ridiculus slow. Because the GPU have to load new Textures and other data while playing it could come to a total crappy graphic and long loading screens.
Even if you have a Gigabit network (i have one too) you wont really get this speed for file transmission.
And be aware of the speed of the HDD's in your NAS. If you have a SSD in your PC i would stay with this at a steam folder (it really makes a different when playing. Example? Insurgency. Fast Map loading times => i am one of or the first in my group that gets to the squad screen and i can pick any class i want to play. Instead of choosing the free slots like before i build in a SSD)
But you can try ít of course. Maybe you want to try it with one not Steam game to check if the latency and the speed is playable.
If you are trying this, please reply so i know if its really that bad or if its ok.
(Info: All the informations are generated by common sense. I have not tested this and there is a chance that i am totally wrong and everything works fine!)
I've done it and it works for the most part. Loading screen videos run like crap but the games run okay, a few jerks here and there but it works okay.
What I do instead is install each game to a virtual hard drive and when I'm done move the virtual hard drive on to the NAS for storage. This way I save space on my ssd while not having to reinstall/download games when I want to play them again.
I use virtual hard drives for ease and because of the way my backup works, you could just copy the directory across.
Thanks for the replies. I'm copying the Steam folder to the NAS now so I can experiment later. And to be honest file transfers are very fast... Moving the folder at 95 MB/s.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes.
Considering your average drive has a transfer speed around the 1gbit mark I'd be surprised if you saw a significant performance decrease. Depending what else is on the network or if your nas is configured properly.
Well after some experiment I realised the following.
Steam won't run from a network attached drive, or at least I couldn't get the client to run from NAS. So I resorted to running the client from my C drive, which is SSD, and moving the game data to NAS. This worked. Loading times seemed a little slower I think but I will run more tests. But in game it ran fine.
So I'm gonna see how I get on with this set up for a few days.