 So, behind me is my son doing his, well, favorite pastime, playing video games. And as I've learned, as not only a father, but really as someone who's watched a kid play games in 2019 here, they play all the games all the time. That requires a lot of hard drive space when you have a big Steam account. And some of these games are absolutely massive. This is me not being a gamer and me thinking back to the earlier days of games when they were a lot simpler. But the point of this, I wanted to take a free NAS and use it as a storage server for all the games. Now, the first question might be is how do you connect a free NAS to a Windows box and use it for games? A lot of people might assume it might be an SMB share. While Steam does support that, that's not the way we did this. We did this with an iSCSI account set up on FreeNAS, so you set up iSCSI and then point it over at Windows, well, tell Windows to talk to the free NAS, and it presents as a regular hard drive. Now, using iSCSI as block storage also has some efficiencies because the Windows is controlling directly the writing back and forth over network directly to the box. This seems to be very low latency and quite fast. I was really impressed with it. This also allows very easily for the caching to have pretty high hit rate on the cache, which we're going to explore a little bit more. And I do have, for those of you wondering when I set this up, sync disabled. Now this is the FreeNAS Mini-E, the same one I reviewed, I'll leave a link to. The specs on it are a pretty low-powered atom, I'll leave the detailed specs below, so it's not a really fast machine. But that's part of the point of this, I wanted to do it on a not-fast machine. The hard drives I'm using are four Western Digital Purple 10 terabytes, and I do have, like I said, sync disabled on the ZFS, it's a RAID Z1. Now this is set up that way because, well, I don't have a dedicated SL-OG slog drive set up for the rights that would have been faster. And I've got some other videos where I talk about some of the performance challenges you have with setting that up. And I know for people that have mission-critical data, that could be a problem if you lost power or a drive failure while it was doing the rights, but this is just some games that can be redownloaded if necessary, so we wanted to check out optimal performance. The other reason for using a low-powered machine is to make this reasonable, because I mean some tech channels love to build the ultimate huge rig set up, and someone suggested I do a video like this using like, you know, a big RAID array of SSDs and a 10 gig or even bonded a pair of 10 gigs together, and that sounds fun, but I wanted to show that this works even if you don't have the budget. If you just want to go, hey, I want something a little less expensive, something more in a more reasonable price range, how effective is it? Will it work? Will it actually play the games, which he's playing ARC right now, which is apparently... I was told the biggest game I could load by a few of the staff at my work said, have them load ARC, see if it's playable using the FreeNAS in storage, so that's the first game we started with. Now we're going to jump over the FreeNAS and show the config and show the caching and show how the game loads and jump into that now. All right, so here's our FreeNAS Mini E, and we'll show this live while he's playing games. The game's loaded and cached, so it's not doing much right now. You can see there's not a lot going on over here with the bandwidth, so pretty low usage. But what we can see over here, and we'll switch over to the terminal, and we'll stop this and clear, this is ArcStat PY minus A1, and 1 just means update one second, A means all, and this will show the hit statistics. And you can see here, it's showing all the hits that are coming from the cache right here. So because the game's loaded and it's only making small requests for different game data, it's caching up quite well, so he's not dealing with any lags or load times when he's doing that. But I wanted to load Arc, like I said, because it was a big game, but then I want to switch over to another game. So we also know that the cache will be completely exhausted, and I'm going to have him switch games here and try another one, and we'll see how it loads and kind of run down the load times and show how that looks. So this free NAS right here is, like I said, only eight gigs of RAM. And let's jump over here to the memory usage. So you can see when we weren't playing till we loaded, it pushes a little bit more memory usage when the games are loaded and running. Once again, it's trying to put it all on cache. Adding 16 gigs of RAM would probably enhance this a little more, but for now, like I said, we'll keep it with just the baseline of eight. All right, Marcus, go ahead and exit out of the game and then let's switch over to Doom. All right, so he's launching Doom. Let's take a look at how this goes. These maps are when we, this is you launching ARC. These are you launching ARC over here. This is what it looks like. You can see the bandwidth. Let's go over to the dashboard. So we're looking at, like, 82. This refresh is kind of slow, the bandwidth monitor. It's not, like, absolutely real time. 103. 106. Wow. 108. This thing loads fast. Let's jump into a map with the arcade mode. So I'll split it like this and right now you can see that it's loading some of the same assets over again. So the cache hits are really high, 17, 19, pretty consistent, too, even more consistent than anywhere in ARC. And you can see up here at the top where we're hitting 103. I've seen a peak of 108, but, you know, pretty fast network transfer speeds. And now that he's in game, you can see the transfer has slowed down to 44, down to six megs. It's pretty, it slows down substantially once you get in the game. But there's still, even though they're not in the kilobits anymore, there's still some cache hits every time it has to load another asset or pull something from there. So it's still reasonably fast. And I still think this is a great way to store your Steam library. And so far, the games we've tested with it haven't had any issues at all. I don't haven't noticed any lag issues. I mean, at some point you may want to consider a dedicated network interface card for storage versus one for just networking. But I really haven't seen an issue with this. So I'm back in my office and I want to do a quick summary of all that. So my son continued on playing games and it's been working great. So I do consider the project a success. And I wanted to show you some of the hard drive statistics. Basically, this is the NVMe boot drive, the C drive that we have of the system. So you can see, you know, regular NVMe, well, it's a couple years old, so it's not as fast as some of the more modern ones, but reasonable performance on there. This is a one terabyte Western Digital Black and I did two tests. This first test is at 512, the next test is at one gig for the test size. And you know, you can see there's the performance numbers for it. And especially when you go down here, you're going down to like 242 IOPS. So not the best IO performance when it's the random 4K writes. So once you get to the nitty gritty of it, not that good. And I bring it up because this S drive right here, which is the SCSI drive. This one on par with the Western Digital Black spinning drive, I've seen that as fast like I said, there's an SSD or NVMe, but the random 4K is actually pretty amazing on these. So when you get down to these lower numbers, we're still seeing good numbers and someone's going to say, but it's cashing it and skewing the results and you're probably right. But like I had shown when Doom was playing, yes, cashing skews the results because a lot of times games load assets repetitively and they need those assets to be loaded each time when you revisit a part of the map that maybe got swapped out of memory. And you know, my understanding from, you know, I'm not a game designer, but my understanding from the back end way this works is because a free NAS holding onto that cache and holding it on a block storage level. It can just at the ready have that in RAM and go, Hey, let's just serve that up really quick. So this is the time when the statistics instead of just skewing it is going to actually kind of benefit because the type of rewrite movement you get from a game matches very similar to the way the statistics are run here. As I understand it, if I'm wrong, of course, leave me a link in a description to where I can read up and educate myself on this because you never as wrong as when you're wrong on the internet. But overall, like I said, this works really well. Like it's just ice because he presented with free NAS and I'm impressed. I mean, now I have a 10 terabyte. Well, I should say my son now has a 10 terabyte steam library because there's not too many games that I play too often, but I love building the whole thing on the back end and building up the server was a lot of fun and testing this out and doing the diagnostics. So once again, I'll leave links to the previous review I did of this free NAS box and links where you can buy these things or, you know, of course, you can build it yourself. I know someone's going to be matching a button. I like to build my own. Go ahead. I encourage people to tinker and build. Thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon. If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. If you want to carry on the discussion, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos or other tech topics in general, even suggestions for new videos. 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