Gaming over network drives?

Randall8686 · 22 Aug 2017 at 09:00

so new HTPC build for the living room is just starting. I was thinking... how much does mapping a network drive and installing games on this compare to gaming direct from a mechanical disk?

I have a fairly pokey server with a hood few TB spare so was thinking small ssd for boot and maybe some load specific games such as gta but call of duty etc from the server, any one have experience of this?

Orcvader · 22 Aug 2017 at 14:22

Even on gigabit I would imagine it would affect loading times by a fair bit, and you may run into issues if the HTPC suddenly lost connection to the network drives. Have you considered running the HTPC as a steam link instead? Although that will require the host PC to be capable of gaming itself.

Steveocee · 22 Aug 2017 at 17:15

You'll bog down quite badly. Probably be better with a steam link.

Minstadave · 22 Aug 2017 at 17:17

I seem to remember last time it came up it actually worked ok over gigabit LAN.

Randall8686 · 23 Aug 2017 at 08:46

Minstadave said:
I seem to remember last time it came up it actually worked ok over gigabit LAN.

well the other option is to just buy a decent sized HDD and chuck it in but im being tight. I will give it a go and report back on my findings its a decent server connected via gigabit the server has aggregation link with 2 gigabit connections to the switch and i actually have 3 more ports on the server so could run upto 5 in aggregation lif i installed a multi port card into the PC that would significantly increase bandwidth and be a lot cheaper than a 1tb SSD etc. I might give it a blast for interest end of the day its only going to cost me a few quid for a 4 port lan card for the HTPC and have a decent bit of speed. I have over 1000 meters of lan cable sat up in the loft doing nothing

Semple · 23 Aug 2017 at 09:16

Have you tested the stability of your throughput. Across my 1GbE switch between 2 mechanical drives i can get 90-100 MB/s which is mostly saturating the link, and i believe that's close to max throughput for the drive, so i wouldn't actually expect to see a horrendous amount of lag, the biggy will probably be on things like disk latency, but will also depend on how the game is loaded - i.e. do they dump a lot of stuff to memory, or is it frequently loading from the disk.

neodude · 23 Aug 2017 at 17:33

My whole Steam library is on a Network Share and it works perfectly. Although my main gaming rig is a VM hosted by the same machine as the file server and they are connected by a virtual 10GbE bridge. Not sure how this would compare to a local drive but no issues for me.