tribe fan Posted December 4, 2016 Share Posted December 4, 2016 Hello, Is it a bad idea to use a network drive to store my video files? Does it slow Big Box down? Would I be better off installing everything to the network drive and booting Big Box from there? Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted December 5, 2016 Share Posted December 5, 2016 I use some games from a network drive but they are 8 and 16 bit games so it has never been an issue I have however tried loading more advanced emulators with games from the network drive and it showed performance issues compared to moving the game locally. I would suggest trying it out 1st if you already have the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted December 5, 2016 Share Posted December 5, 2016 Actually, video over a network wouldn't be all that bad. Think of Plex, Universal Media Server, or Kodi over a network. Now granted, they're optimized for this, and a regular homegroup or network connection might not be the greatest, but my wife has played video from my PC on her PC in Media Player Classic over the homegroup before, and it played fine. 720p and 1080p content. The videos from EmuMovies generally max out at 480p, so I honestly think it will be fine, but like Derek said, it's best to test it out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 If your network storage device has the ability to run an iSCSI server and you create a connection to this with the Windows iSCSI client, I think the performance will be fine if you have a wired gigabit connection between your PC and iSCSI storage server. iSCSI is way faster than plain old SMB network shares and also allows you to trick the OS into thinking the connection is a local drive, so there are no restrictions on installing/running apps or anything else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 How expensive is the proper controller for it? There's a network bay I've been keeping my eye on, and it's $100+ for just the bay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 controller? are you asking me @SentaiBrad? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Yes, the iSCSI controller, not a controller as in a gaming controller but controller in the sense of the thing that controls x hardware. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 I used free openfiler and freenas the last time i setup an iscsi server. Its just software. Those are free OS images you can install on your storage server PC. I built using PC parts and installed the free OS i mentioned. Then you set it up with your drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 I guess I should have noted @SentaiBrad, in case you're not familiar, that iSCSI might not be a good solution for you if you want more than one computer to access the data on your iSCSI target (server). It's really just for making the remote network data available as a local drive(s) on one network connected system. If you want multiple systems to access that data, you might try looking into using the NFS protocol instead. Openfiler and FreeNAS offers both. However, I think only Win 10 Enterprise includes NFS support and I don't know if there are any 3rd party NFS clients out there for non Enterprise Win 10. Another good option that might be interesting to you is a Synology or QNAP storage server as I believe they offer iSCSI and NFS and are probably simpler for users to setup and manage. What I like to do for network storage servers is build my own computer, usually a Supermicro tower that has LOTS of good hot swap drive bays and just throw in good cheap hardware parts that are adequate for a file server, like a <$100 intel motherboard, 4-8GB RAM, a usb stick or other small internal storage for the storage OS itself, a cheap multi threaded intel cpu with builtin GPU (here, more cores is better than higher clock rate as opposed to emulation and gaming), a good Intel only gigabit nic (dual nic is better but not necessary), a good power supply capable of all the drives you plan to support, a bunch of big drives. Depending on your performance and redundancy needs, you can opt for a hardware RAID (LSI is best) card, or you can use software RAID from Openfiler/FreeNAS, or you can use no RAID. You will get a much better storage server this way for less than buying any prebuilt storage server. Also if you want to get crazy fast, you could use a 10Gig network card on your PC and storage server and connect them directly with cat 5e or cat 6 cable. Should be able to get them fairly cheap on eBay. I have set these up for VMware ESXi servers using iSCSI so the VMs can run off of the network storage server, but it would work great also for media and game emulation storage. Media and game emulation storage would be much less demanding than running VMs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Unraid looks very interesting also. It has a really nice feature in that you can add any number of drives, that can even be of different sizes), and it will create a single volume from them all AND it will provide you with RAID protection from any single drive failure as long as you designate your largest drive as the "parity" drive (the parity drive should be a drive size that is the largest you think you will ever add to this storage volume). The parity drive is not part of your usable storage. The coolest part about this is you can use varied size drives and you can add single drives to the system any time you want and it will automatically add that space to what is available to your connected systems. So you get RAID protection plus the ability to expand anytime with no extra work. That is very cool. I have no idea how the performance is, probably nowhere near iSCSI and NFS, but I think it's interesting enough that I will look into it myself for a possible home network storage solution. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) If you are interested in having a pooled drive and duplication but not raid you can also check out StableBit DrivePool it has a free 30 day trail I use it on both of my servers to pool my drives I couldn't live without it. Edited December 8, 2016 by DOS76 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Pretty cool @DOS76, although for me, with that much data, I couldn't see myself using it since it has no parity drives or software raid. If just one of your drives go bad in that pool, I think you lose it all, assuming it's striped data (maybe it isn't). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 (edited) It duplicates all your files on different drives if you lose a drive you put a new one in and it will copy all the unduplicated files to the new drive it has saved me a few times only risk is if you lose more than one drive at once.. The drive remains in the normal windows file system it just creates one folder on the drive that is part of the pooled drive Edited December 8, 2016 by DOS76 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 so its a raid 1? you lose half your total disk space? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Its like it but it isn't you can unplug any drive move it to another PC and it will work just like a regular drive anything outside of the pool folder on the drive is just on the regular drive not on the pool it is very versatile. It is set to duplicate files at least twice so yes it eats half your space you can also set specific folders to duplicate more time or the whole pool but it isn't like raid because you can't really lose your data with one drive missing. There are tons of post about it on WeGotServed.com the lead mod over there is actually the tech support guy for StableBit he is a really smart dude who knows his shit if you run into issues. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ckp Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 Ok, good info. I guess the doubling of used data is a tough one for me to swallow, aside from the way it works in general. I can see it merits and where it could be useful, although personally I wouldn't use it instead of a SAN or NAS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 I run Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials I have like 14 PC's and the one server makes backups of all of my systems the other server has all of my media and runs my Plex and Subsonic servers. I just like the add features Windows offers over NAS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted December 8, 2016 Share Posted December 8, 2016 You can also turn off any duplication that you don't want either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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