Add Games to Array or Dedicated Drive? (SOLVED)

[CodeEngie]

Hola,

I have a huge Steam library and I'm planning on moving it to Unraid but before I do I wanted to get some help answering a few questions. I'm currently running 5 6TB IronWolf NAS drives with one in parity, a single 1TB Sabrent NVMe for cache, vm's, and dockers. The majority of my storage is dedicated to my Plex media.

 

Here are my questions:

1. If I add my Steam games to the array, will it affect performance when streaming a video via Plex? I know I can tell the share to only use certain drives and it would be one way to separate it from my library.

2. Would using unassigned devices to dedicate a single drive for my Steam games a better option? If so, does the type of HDD I use matter? Meaning, should I use an IronWolf NAS drive or a drive geared towards gaming like a WD Black or FireCuda?

3. I'm assuming there will be bottlenecks, how can I try to ameliorate these (upgrading network to 10G, faster drive or using an NVMe)?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[testdasi]

1. Yes in the right circumstance.

 

2. Both options have pros and cons. E.g. UD will have better performance in general but capacity is limited to the single drive. Array uses the full array capacity but performance is limited by shfs (the magic behind Unraid shares).

NAS drives generally don't offer any significant benefits to consumer use cases. I would just pick the cheapest 7200rpm HDD I can find.

 

3. How are you accessing the steam library? VM to array / UD or over LAN to server?

If VM then you already use 10gb network.

A SATA SSD will offer better load time. NVMe offers barely any additional benefit over SATA SSD.

 

PS: "ameliorate" is a word rarely seen on here.

 

 

[tjb_altf4]

1. I've never had gaming impact my Emby or Kodi viewing.

2. Alternative is to isolate share disks of media and games so you steam library doesn't overlap with media disks

3.dependant on the games, some just aren't that intensive... For this that are you might consider moving installs to local drive... I often use steams interface to migrate between two library locations, which for me is 1 local SSD and 2 array share symlinked to a local folder ( added as steam library location )

[tjb_altf4]

iSCSI is the real answer here, but unfortunately not natively supported but may be once multi pool & arrays are implemented.

[CodeEngie]

On 7/11/2020 at 3:47 AM, testdasi said:

1. Yes in the right circumstance.

 

2. Both options have pros and cons. E.g. UD will have better performance in general but capacity is limited to the single drive. Array uses the full array capacity but performance is limited by shfs (the magic behind Unraid shares).

NAS drives generally don't offer any significant benefits to consumer use cases. I would just pick the cheapest 7200rpm HDD I can find.

 

3. How are you accessing the steam library? VM to array / UD or over LAN to server?

If VM then you already use 10gb network.

A SATA SSD will offer better load time. NVMe offers barely any additional benefit over SATA SSD.

 

PS: "ameliorate" is a word rarely seen on here.

 

 

I'll be accessing the Steam library once I move it to Unraid from a physical computer on the same network. At this moment I do not have 10G network but would consider upgrading if it would help.