 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about using a FreeNAS Mini as a ice guzzie on a Windows machine for Steam. This is actually a follow-up video to that video I did a little while back. I'll link to that video as well. If you want to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. And if you'd like to hire short projectors, a hires button at the top. If you'd like to reach out to us other ways and have a chat, absolutely. There is the forums for that as well if you just want to talk about video suggestions and such. Also if you want to support the channel in other ways besides pressing the like button which does help a lot or subscribing, there are some affiliate links down below that give you discounts and deals on products and services you talk about on this channel. So FreeNAS Mini E. This is in no way a high-powered machine which was actually part of the point of using it. It's nice, it's quiet, it sits in my gaming room and my son's Steam library is on here. I did this video a little while ago and I wanted to follow up to say how is it going? So currently it's running the latest release of FreeNAS 11.3. This is an Intel Atom C3338 at 1.5 gigahertz with only eight gigs of RAM. So not a whole lot. There are four hard drives in this and they are Western Digital Purples. Not because I think they're the best drives or maybe the Reds might have been a little better. I happen to have these from another project that didn't get used. So I had four 10 TB purple drives, the 5400 RPM ones. So these are not fast drives either. And that's also part of the point of this. I mean there's plenty of videos that can be done on super high-end hardware and build NVME arrays, but that's not affordable for everyone. This for the most part, building something with a low-powered motherboard and some reasonably priced drives, that is something a little bit more attainable and I want to see how it performed. It's actually performed quite well. So the system, my son has about TB so far moved over there and we're going to talk about first the performance. Now there is a boot drive in this system of NVME and there's a Western Digital Black, which was the drive that was getting full because, well, games are big. And I don't play a lot of games. My son does and it was constantly running out of space so we're doing the shuffle of what game do we have to get rid of. So by setting up a iSCSI and 10 TB of iSCSI spread across the drives, I was able to provide a very nice platform by which to install a lot of games. And I wanted to show the performance. And the performance because this is only connected at one gig is dramatically going to be affected by that. This was the beginning point. Later, my plans are to upgrade this to maybe a faster system with a caching drive and a 10 gig setup. But for now, this is all being performed at one gig and it's not bad. So here is what the 64 megabyte test performance looks like on the Western Digital Black right here, which is the D drive and we meet S for SCSI, the drive that controls the system on FreeNAS. So you can see not too bad. We get faster read performance here, faster sequential performance here. So 193 IOPS versus the 104. So yeah, we are faster with the onboard drive until you get down to the random 4k, then it slows down substantially. You just don't get that same lower performance you get. Now you do, of course, on the NVME drive, which is the boot drive, the C drive here, but the Western Digital Black, it doesn't quite do as good. You know, of course, it's spinning rust. Everyone can point out that you'd be better off with an SSD. Yes, you buy a bunch of SSDs are obviously more expensive. And 10 terabyte of SSD is going to cost you quite a bit of money. But when we get down here, this is where things really fall flat when you go to the one gig performance. So now we start looking at the sequential the sequential in here, we're actually even better over on here. And you can see, especially when you talk about random 4k with ZFS and the caching, you get quite a significant boost comparatively, not still as fast as an NVME, but compared to a spinning drive and having 10 terabytes of storage, I'm pretty impressed with how it performs. And I want to dig a little further into that to talk about like, so to speak, the real world performance of this. And if you haven't seen this tool, it's called wonder stat. And I'm remote it in, I'm here at my office, remote it into my computer home, which is why it's taking a second to redraw the screen. But what you can see is when you start looking at different games that are installed, different games have different ways to lay out the asset files. And when you start looking at like arc, which has a absolute crazy number of files, there's a 115,000 files files in here, around 11,974 folders, that's where those tiny little reads and writes kind of go crazy. Arc loads, I didn't do a timer with a stopwatch, but arc loads substantially faster and plays better, running off of iSCSI than it did on the Western digital black. So that's where it is, I started really thinking about like, what's the differences on there? Now DOOM seems to distribute things a little differently. They only have 542 files for the 668 gigs they are. But of course, when you look at some arc, it's 187 gigs. And it's the way they do the asset files. So it seems like games, and it's been my experience so far, that some of these games, like DOOM doesn't seem to be any different arc substantially faster. And I think the reason why is some of these games, my son did say Gary's Mod got a lot faster too. But the commonality is there are 47,833 items in Gary's Mod, even though it's only 34 gig. So that comes down to tons of tiny little reads and writes and lots of seeking. This is something ZFS handles well, this is something that's going to get cached into the RAM quite well. And one of the things I had showed right here at the beginning, was how much right now is in ZFS cash, we got 3.8 gigs, that's in cash, ZFS will cash where the location files are a lot of that read information. Now I was thinking about I may add an SSD to this as well, which will probably increase performance even more. So that's going to be upcoming. But my long term test with this kind of basic, really relatively low budget system, and low powered system has been really impressive. And some of these games borderlands as well. There's 6000 assets in there. It's impressive how much better some of those run, I don't see like I said, much of a substantial difference with doom, it seemed to load the same. But I've also had just generally no problems since been running this. It's been several months ago that I installed all this. And it hasn't any problems. So I like to do these follow up videos to say, is that system he built to working or did you just trash it because it fell apart? No, I didn't trash it, it didn't fall apart. It still works well. The only disappointing thing is my son has so far only added 873 gigs of games to it. He didn't move everything over. And some of the EA games, and some of the other game owners that aren't steam, don't have as easy of a method to transfer things between there. Some of the games actually require a reinstall. And you don't have to say re download it, you got to move this move that there's a couple processes. And one thing I'll say for steam is they've eliminated all those headaches and you can just grab a library and move it somewhere else. But gamers are going Tom, we know that well, I'm not a gamer. This was interesting to me that you could just move the install filter through through steam and with relative ease to move to another drive. So overall, I'm still happy with this setup, I will be expanding on it. I might even try setting up as I we built another gaming system, and I may put two systems on one free NAS, but I think it may exceed the ability of this particular free NAS to do that. So I may have to upgrade that as well to make that work with some efficiency. But from a one to one standpoint with this low power machine, I'm overall really happy with it and press that it works. And this is just a follow up video on that. And if you haven't heard of winder stat, it's a great utility. It kind of helps you visualize what I'm saying here about games that have like crazy amounts of files, like ARC and some of those, it's just when you look at ARC, I can't believe how many files they chose to build out the assets like that versus some of the other games. And some are more uniform than others. All right, and thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like 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'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to LawrenceSystems.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. 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