November 19, 2019 Gamecache Hardware Software Storage Technology 2

I came across an interesting use case for FreeNAS.  My eldest daughter likes games that are huge.  Like 100-250 gigabyte huge.  I simply cannot afford to keep adding SSD storage to her machine.  I will not do hard disks as main storage..under Windows 10 it’s too painfully slow.  What Lawerence had done was taken a FreeNAS machine, sliced off a portion of the raw storage, and presented it to the workstation as a hard drive over his network.  His son now run his large games from the FreeNAS zvol as if it was local.  What’s neat is the games initial load time is a bit slower(the NAS is hard drive based) but once it’s loaded..there’s no perceptible difference in gaming performance despite a constant stream of data from the server…usually less than 150 megabit/sec.  Since I have multi Terabytes of free space i am doing the same thing for my eldest.  I am also doing what is called thin provisioning so it initially starts at zero usage and goes up until she reaches her cap of 1 Terabyte.  Let’s see how this works as my quad core Xeon cpu is light years faster(with 4 times more ram at 32 gigabytes) than his FreeNAS mini dual core atom and 8 gigs of ram.  If this works…i have a new idea for future computer builds here at the house..<G>