I'm planning to take a small, low powered system, make it as quiet as possible and then dropping an infiniband/10gbe card into it with a straight cable connection back to my main case.
The box would be multi-homed with a regular gigabit networking card in it for the other pc + laptop etc to use as network storage. I plan however to mount some of the network paths on this box a local drives for my main games machine (as far as subst command in windows so they really DO look like local drives - this a good idea or keep is a regular locally mapped network drive?).
How feasible does it sound? Not really played much with higher end network kit but a pair of (probably crappy/old) infiniband cards on the bay are about £25 each and a short run of cable seems to be in the £40/50 range so it doesn't seem like a bad setup (probably have the other parts spare).
I can do the hosts file edits etc to get that side smoothed out (as the NAS would share the same network my gaming box uses to get internet access) and I'd probably use something like windows home server on the NAS end of things.
The reason for all this is to move my hardware raid 5 out of the main games box (where it gets a little warm, causes massive delay in booting the system and causes a fair bit of noise) to a network drive without loosing any speed from it. The raid 5 in my rig at the moment can happily do about 400MB/sec r/w so gigabit ethernet isn't really going to cut it to keep the speeds up. Using some form of fibre networking isn't really going to add MUCH noticeable delay (would be keeping SSD's etc local so I can live with 15ish ms access times between network and seek at the drive end) is it?
The idea spawned from this:
http://davidhunt.ie/wp/?p=232
So any additional info/tips would be appreciated
Edit:
There seems to be a fairly significant CPU hit for running SRP. Considering the gaming rig is a 2600k I could probably mess with processor affinity a bit on games run to leave 1 core to handle it?
The box would be multi-homed with a regular gigabit networking card in it for the other pc + laptop etc to use as network storage. I plan however to mount some of the network paths on this box a local drives for my main games machine (as far as subst command in windows so they really DO look like local drives - this a good idea or keep is a regular locally mapped network drive?).
How feasible does it sound? Not really played much with higher end network kit but a pair of (probably crappy/old) infiniband cards on the bay are about £25 each and a short run of cable seems to be in the £40/50 range so it doesn't seem like a bad setup (probably have the other parts spare).
I can do the hosts file edits etc to get that side smoothed out (as the NAS would share the same network my gaming box uses to get internet access) and I'd probably use something like windows home server on the NAS end of things.
The reason for all this is to move my hardware raid 5 out of the main games box (where it gets a little warm, causes massive delay in booting the system and causes a fair bit of noise) to a network drive without loosing any speed from it. The raid 5 in my rig at the moment can happily do about 400MB/sec r/w so gigabit ethernet isn't really going to cut it to keep the speeds up. Using some form of fibre networking isn't really going to add MUCH noticeable delay (would be keeping SSD's etc local so I can live with 15ish ms access times between network and seek at the drive end) is it?
The idea spawned from this:
http://davidhunt.ie/wp/?p=232
So any additional info/tips would be appreciated
Edit:
There seems to be a fairly significant CPU hit for running SRP. Considering the gaming rig is a 2600k I could probably mess with processor affinity a bit on games run to leave 1 core to handle it?
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