Use your NAS as a Steam Library - TrueNAS + iSCSI Basics

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Game installs aren't getting any smaller. And while SSD prices continue to fall, if a game requires 250GB to install, a 500GB drive will only get you so far. What if you could use the extra storage space on your home server to install your game library?
But first... What am I drinking???
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[@CraftComputing]

Pay no attention to demon Jeff trying to escape at 12:10. Just go buy a pint glass from craftcomputing.store to keep him at bay.

[@easkay]

I was starting to wonder :D

[@tehbeard]

It wasn't an impression of Max Headroom? :)

[@CraftComputing]

@Benjamin O'Neal I'd recommend an Optane drive, or enterprise flash of some kind. But yes, you'll need a quick, write-endurant SSD for DeDup. Also, I do have a PO! Craft Computing 1567 Edgewater St. NW, #51 Salem, OR 97304

[@VeolonMedia]

steam deck is coming so show this in #ARCH with #KDE

[@ppkus]

@jeffgeerling has RED SHIRT JEFF, you have the demon Jeff hahahaha

[@massgrave8x]

Would LOVE to see a full-on series on practical home uses for server hardware :)

[@squeekymouse89]

My server sits in the media unit, it hosts pihole, file server, plex and gives output to the TV via a VM. My wife just thinks it's another pc ! Total wife approval factor.

[@3v068]

Do you own a lot of home movies that you would like to save? Maybe some videos of your grandparents gone? A server may be an excellent use case for that. (One of the many I ended up investing into a used enterprise server) I'm also a DJ in an underground scene where songs are called plates, which, to make an explanation simple, they are unreleased tunes that are played with a limited time span, and sometimes get brought back for a throwback tune in a mix. It is VITAL to me to have a way to keep those songs saved and backed up so i have my favorite, (and also very unique and exclusive) setlist. Sorry for the really long rant, but those are my use cases for having a server at home, just wanted to give you some extra insight!

[@mrljvb]

I have 4 ESXI virtual servers, and 1 server operating as the NAS, with 24 60GB 15k drives, and a external drive chassis with another 25 600 GB drives. The NAS server provides storage to the ESXI servers (they all boot of iscsi luns, so they have no physical drives in them), networking is provided by 2 Brocade/Rukus 24 port POE 1GB, 10 10Gb and 4 40Gb ports. All of my services, firewall, active directory, media server, virtual desktops, etc run as virtual machines. Using vlans, and VMwares features, I can move my firewall, AD, backup server, etc between the virtual machines without ever having any downtime. For me, as an IT security professional, it makes sense, and is fun to play with, and can setup environments where malicious traffic cannot escape.. Downside.. is around a $300 electricity bill every month..

[@praxis22]

Years ago people at work bought small HP home servers, as they were cheaper than buying a NAS enclosure. I never bothered, as I have all my rust onboard, I was planning to upgrade, but Covid pit paid to that. Ah well.

[@praxis22]

@@squeekymouse89 my wife learned the hard way not to unplug anything, as she unplugged the Pi-hole and "WiFi stopped working" :)

[@JaredSwets]

For people with multiple PC's that don't like the limitations, you can install a lancache server which proxies the steam connection. When you download a game it caches it on the server. Sure, your desktop PC won't save any space, but uninstalling and re-installing games will happen in a flash since all of the files needed for it are already on your own lan.

[@Gastell0]

I'm disappointed that they still haven't adopted the native Steam cache domain name that only need a dns server to fetch the IP for it

[@bacphan7582]

"In a flash", for example if you play a 120GB game, its size is equal to 960Gb, a common LAN speed is 1Gbps, so it takes you 960s =16min to download game, and more to install it. That's super annoying having to wait almost 30 min to play your favorite game

[@Gastell0]

@@bacphan7582 120GB games can be counted on one hand, and all of them are competitive so they are already latency focused, i.e. completely out of scope of this option

[@3v068]

Yes SIR! This comment needs more likes!

[@kyedav]

​@@bacphan7582 If its your favourite game though.. You wouldn't be constantly deleting and reinstalling it. You'd keep it installed. :P I use lancache.. Yeah its not perfect but if you have multiple gaming pc's in your house then its pretty useful, especially for win updates too. For example: If all of us buy a new game and need to download it. Technically only one of us will have to download it which takes roughly twice as long or more than the other systems downloading it straight from lancache. (Also good for people who are limited on bandwidth but not really relevant to this) So it still cuts down download time and makes a big difference. I'd prefer this rather than having to download a 100GB game on 5+ computers. Yeah... This video would probably be more useful in some situations but due to also having a few gaming laptops in the house. I'd rather not expose my server publicly just because my games are hosted on my server. Secondly, if I go somewhere where the connection is not great, trying to play it from your server on a slow connection wouldn't be the best idea but if you had them locally installed, then you might just about get away with it. Both solutions have their own benefits. I'd definitely recommend this video if you don't game anywhere other than your home but if you do, I'd probably recommend lancache. I'd still recommend lancache for other benefits even if you don't use it for caching your game downloads.

[@AlexKiraly]

From experience I can also mention the following: - BattleEye games such as Warzone will work from the iSCSI drive but won't work from network drives, huge bonus to iSCSI - The SMB share can sometimes be faster because the protocol is "simpler" (compared to full-blown NTFS) - For sharing the same drive across multiple computers, the solution goes like: Create a BTRFS/ZFS Volume snapshot (with CoW) based off the actual steam library. Have each client use a snapshot. This has some drawbacks indeed but with a list of pre-defined games it works wonders. - Another alternative to iSCSI is using Dokany. Run the mirror sample to the UNC path and you'll have an almost-right alternative to iSCSI. Some Anti-Cheat solutions will still complain about this, though

[@gazsoimi]

i played destiny 2 over smb 2-3 years ago, so maybe not amm battleeye games. or did you meant activision's RICOCHET, bc cod uses their own, and not battleeye

[@MasonzeroDigitalWorks]

This is really cool. I do remember putting a Steam game on my NAS to see if it would work and not being too surprised when it didn't. Had no idea it was as simple as how Windows reads network versus local disks. Thanks for making this super simple. I might have to try this purely for fun, or perhaps as a different storage config in the future.

[@jsncrso]

My entire Steam library has worked perfectly for over two years on my NAS as a normal network share.

[@revrndcast3918]

@@jsncrso Yep. just create shared folder on NAS, map shared folder in Windows, install and done.

[@1armbiker]

Most of my games work fine but there are certainly exceptions; a lot of MSFT games for example seem to take offense, Halo and Forza in particular seem to not much like being on the network. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just doesn’t at all.

[@revrndcast3918]

@@1armbiker Ahh. ok. thanks for the warning. I've been using Steam and Epic Games stores. Anything M$FT I'll keep local (or buy through the other stores).

[@markmulder996]

we need a few sequels to this for sure, focussing on at least two different scenarios. 1. One steam account that accesses the network attached steam library from multiple pc's 2. Several steam accounts accessing a single game from different pc's simultaneously (this will certainly need ssd's as storage medium server-side) Great video though, keep it up!

[@teetertech]

*Connect to the iSCSI on each other computer and you should just be able to search for the game files in steam, verify, and play them. As f* or muti accounts it (in therory) would work the same process jsut with a different account. I can get a buddy of mine to test his account from my seocnd comptuer next time he is at my house. I will say it still could fail since scuzzywasn't really made for 2 connectsions. But since they are really only reading it may work fine.

[@teetertech]

Okay I ran a test using famly sharing with an old steam accout we call that PC2. PC1 is my main rig with my main steam profile that I installed all the games with and orignally moved the to the scuzzy with. I was able to start up a game by borrowing using famly share on PC2 connected to the same scuzzy. I was able to play it for a few min on its own then started the same game on PC1 from the the scuzzy and it ran fine on both for the 5 min until steam kicked me out because once the owner starts the game while family sharing they kick you after that time.

[@PoignantPirate]

@@teetertech FOr anyone who decides to try this, be aware that the drive is showing up as local, so things like "last access" times and permissions (user/owner) information are going to be edited by the system even if you are 'only reading'. In a lot of cases that won't cause issues, but if you have a game with a large data file being read from multiple machines you *will* eventually run into file corruption from conflicting file updates. Again, it's just a steam library, so it might not cause you a ton of headaches to have to reinstall things or verify files on a regular basis, but it's still a problem to be aware of.

[@teetertech]

@@PoignantPirate yeah I had a game update and it disappeared on the other. So it definitly is a big no no but it was cool to see it work but long term it will just ruin things.

[@adamisko]

That was the last straw for decision to build 10gbit network - thank you.

[@mrmotofy]

Some used Intel NIC and a Microtik 5pt 10Gb switch and DAC cables is a cheap easy way to get 10GB

[@timadkins7794]

Hi Jeff!!! Love your content. I've used many of your videos for my homelab, especially with the chenbro 1u servers. I built a truenas server with the chenbro 12 bay server and was able to achieve read writes in the same ballpark that you achieved in your video!!! Thank you so much for your time and your expertise. can't wait to see what you come up with next!

[@NateFromIT]

This by far even today is the best video for getting this setup smoothly. I am using Cobia and even with the few changes I followed this guide today and worked like a charm. Thank you!

[@popcorny007]

A deduplication video would be awesome. Just showing the space savings by having 2 similar iSCSI steam libraries on the same ZFS pool sounds like a great demonstration

[@jonatansteuernagel1264]

This!

[@LampJustin]

Yeah true, but ZFS deduplication cannot be recommended!!! It only sort of works if you a don't reboot and can store the deduptable in RAM or b you have a really fast persistent L2Arc like an Optane drive. Tbh it's not worth the drawbacks right now. The only dedup that works alright without those drawbacks is vdo. Also deduplication isnt really required for the space saving in this instance as you can just install all the games and then just snapshot that drive and make another share of off that

[@ReturnJJ]

Modzilla how would you go about that? Install games, create snapshot of Steam dataset for each user/computer, have each user’s iSCSI point to their respective snapshot? What happens for game updates?

[@LampJustin]

@@ReturnJJ yeah that's where it falls apart a little. You'd need to a another clone/snapshot. But I think that would be a fair trade since all the save states are stored somewhere else and this way you don't need to download updates more than once.

[@ReturnJJ]

@@LampJustin I just had an idea, what if the Steam Library has its games installed and updated using a VM but there is no actual gaming down on there, and then have snapshots for each user and a snapshot for the Steam Library VM so that the VM can commit game updates and installs? I don’t know why I randomly thought of that while I was bored, but there’s that.

[@ShiftyEyedKirk]

I've been subscribed for months and just built my first home NAS out of an old tower I had lying around. Then I find out you already made the perfect tutorial for EXACTLY what I wanted to do! I never uninstall games for fear of losing something, but I can only fit 2 hdds in my itx gaming computer. Now I've got more than enough space. Would be interested in seeing if an existing SCSI pool can be expanded with extra drives in future.

[@ewenchan1239]

I'm finally at the point with my Steam library (where I am having multiple copies of the same games installed on multiple systems) where this video actually came in REALLY handy. Thank you!!!

[@it3963]

I love you. I discovered your channel about 2 weeks ago because of looking for a decent video how to run a 1-GPU-2-Gamers-System. You're definitely my guy. This content is gold 4 me.

[@Paul-Carson]

Having been a nerd all my life and worked in IT. and telecoms I genuinely learnt something tonight when watching your video! I now have iscsi working on my truenas core server to my pc. been using freenas/truenas for about 9 years and never knew what it was! Thanks :) subscribed.

[@3v068]

I... need to think of what I need to say here. You are doing everything that my mind has been dreaming of for the last decade. Im 23 and still fairly young and inexperienced in the job market so money isnt easy to come by as far as jobs go. Now that i finally have the gaming PC I want and a server, with your channel, I will have the godliest tech setup before I even own a home XD But seriously. Every video of yours I watch has answered some sort of question, or put to the test some sort of theory ive wanted to try, but up until now, never had the computing horsepower or experience to try. Your videos are AWESOME and very helpful, plus its nice to enjoy a beer with someone over the internet! So Cheers to the future bud! Glad to be a subscriber, and I cant wait for more gaming, and server content.

[@michaelm6964]

This video damn straight may have solved my game storage dilemma! Been using my Razer Blade for gaming since the main pc gpu died and the RB only had the 500gb nvme and 1TB HD. I would use an external ssd to transfer games. I’m getting ready to switch my home network to 10gbe at the new house! I can get ssd loading speed on the laptop through a TB3 dock and access my whole library this way now!

[@praxis22]

For years iSCSI has lurked provocatively in the background as "what's next" yet the first time I see implementation details, Jeff is installing his Steam Library to it Fantastic!

[@MrMackster01]

Great video, Jeff! And great timing I,ve been wanting to build a steam game sever 😎

[@originalradman9491]

Your timing is great. I figured I would just use a mapped drive on my fresh NAS for steam games. Thanks for saving me the headaches!

[@Theshadowfang]

Haven’t noticed any lag from my server! Saved me so much space, thank you.

[@nissedhulla]

I have been running like this for several years now and it has worked flawlessly. One added benefit is that, even if you run on spinning rust, TrueNAS will cache the data in memory (or L2arc). So after a couple of days you will probably not even hit the disks. Windows does the same off course, but presumably you run some other thing on your Windows host (or reboot/turn off) and then the cache is lost.

[@LuisAlonzoRivero]

Amazing, you're always making my dream projects. I get satisfaction by proxy.

[@masoodulh417]

Dude, you rock man. Very straightforward instructions.

[@andrewhofmann5453]

What a great tutorial. I really am thinking about switching over to TrueNAS. Great job!

[@MrPipDarty]

Im so glad im not the only person doing this for their home network. I havent really run into many issues doing this via networked attached storage pointing to an unraid share, as i need multiple clients to access the same Library, but excited to see your video on de duplication though as I hadn't considered it as an option.

[@CA.papaBear]

For the iSCSI share, you can use RDMA enabled hardware (10gigabit sfp+ Infiniband mellanox connectx2 in IT mode) with a modified hosts file that points directly to the iSCSI share (or truenas server) so that both devices can communicate without any overhead. NOTE: both cards must be in IT mode if they are the same and also it's a good idea to add the IP address of the client that's requesting the connection of the share.

[@lux2031]

It's cool to finally see someone else do this. I ran my game library off my NAS for about a year and half. Eventually when NVMe got cheaper and I needed my NAS storage fore more projects I moved my games back to local drives. Here are some things of note I ran into: -Windows ISCI can be temperamental. Had to set the service to wait before making a connection, since my network drivers weren't loaded fast enough on boot up. -Some newer game with anti-cheat detect something isn't quite normal. Either the game won't launch or runs awful, since the anti-cheat does intrusive scans in the background. -Unlike SMB, ISCI doesn't do any integrity checks when transferring. File corruption is possible but fortunately steam has its verification tool to fix this. -DON'T USE EPICS LAUNCHER! The final nail for my ISCI partition was when I installed UE4 to do some development. It filled the drive with cache files and failed to clean up after itself.

[@TheRainzy]

Super informative and to the point! - Keep up the great vidoes mate!

[@michaelrichardson8467]

You're videos are so good I almost had this memorized after one watch. To bad I'm dumb and forgot it needs to be a zvol not a dataset with quotas (face palm) Great job man!

[@bbay1977]

I was thinking the same thing. Them MEN that carried that and all the ammo for miles while still fully dressed out set the bar high. I always enjoy sitting around and listening to war stories from the older generation. I'm 44 now and still can't get enough of the stories. Thanks for sharing this and keep up the great content.

[@akoyanetworks]

Excellent and informative video. I used the steps outlined in this video to accomplish the same thing using a Synology NAS. Interestingly, I've found I'm getting much better and consistent read/writes to the iSCSI disk versus a mapped drive via SMB. I was always getting wonky performance via SMB with file transfers, only sometimes maxing out my 1Gbps network connection and more often transfers were in the 150-250Mbps range. Tweaking the NIC parameters, drivers, etc...nothing helped so I chalked it up to SMB. Making the same transfers via an iSCSI mounted disk on the same NAS is almost always maxing out my network connection. I'm a happy camper with this solution.

[@Digi20]

Yes, the difference with smaller files is immense. Even a 10gbit connection can feel totally wonky over SMB when you transfer f.e. a games folder. with iscsi it just chucks along at whatever the NIC can transfer.

[@jeremymansfield3487]

Thank you so much for this video i have been trying to figure this out for a long time

[@origin248]

Thanks for this!!!! This was exactly what I was looking for (not for Steam but other use cases)

[@RandomBSOD]

You can also do this with portable applications where you can set a NAS as your pool resource and any computer on the network (with access) can open the executables. I do this with Office, some of adobe CC, and even roms for my Rpi's. But if your bandwidth is good enough you can even switch it to a SAN or iScsi

[@555hadowhost]

Greatly informative, I like how you break it down.

[@555hadowhost]

🤔 I think I watch your other channel, Redneck computer geek?

[@DeadStar12018]

What a timely video I'll be setting up one of these very soon

[@gueroloco8687]

Jeff thanks so much for the awesome video!! This helps me to learn very quickly!!!!

[@TrialMacameau]

It's working ! I was using SMB but after watching this video I configured iSCSI Service in my TrueNAS server and in the iSCSI Initiator app which are connected directly through PC to PC hence only me has access to it.

[@freefall96]

Thanks for this video!! Also wanted to say I love your content but somehow missed this video until now.. setup is almost identical in TrueNAS Scale for those wondering..

[@itsdeonlol]

This is cool Jeff! Thanks for sharing!

[@Darkk6969]

Hey Craft, great video! I have noticed the UPS in your rack is showing 94% continuous load which is bit high. I'd plan on splitting it up with another UPS to give your servers longer run time and less chance of UPS failure. It's best to keep it under 75% load.

[@CraftComputing]

Well aware....

[@ryanmalone2681]

That was so easy and worked like a charm!

[@ellooku]

Finally, I remember I personally requested for this. Thank you sir.

[@krazyhartin]

This is exactly what I want. Thank you for this video! 👍

[@NerdonWheels]

Great stuff! Immediately went and did the same using my Synology NAS spare capacity -- surprisingly crystaldiskmark was able to write/read at 118MB/s over a simple gigabit network! I will personally only use this new drive for very large install, for games that require one very large loading at the start (e.g. flight sim), vs. those who have frequent smaller loading (e.g. MMos)

[@MrMackster01]

Which diskstation do you have?

[@NerdonWheels]

@@MrMackster01 an old 916+ with 2x 4TB WD RED -- nothing fancy. Just tried running Flight Sim 2020 from it and loading time were just fine

[@benj0Smithers]

This is truly awesome! Thanks a lot :)

[@frankiepoindexter445]

I appreciate you putting this video together. I'm going to attempt to create an iSCSI host and initiator with Linux servers and PCs.

[@cyrilthefish]

Going to have to try this out at some point :) I do have a steam library set up on a standard smb share on my NAS at the moment, but i use it to archive games i'm not playing recently instead of actually running games from it. (use steam's move folder feature to move games from one steam library to another, so i just move a game from the NAS library to one on my local SSDs when i want to play)

[@jabolko1k]

Very nice tut. Thanks.

[@stefanejegod8644]

Hmm, this wasn't what I was looking for, but definitely gonna get back to it. iSCSI definitely sounds relevant.

[@JasonFowler]

Great video! Love to see more about the topic

[@mdiaztoledo]

This was really interesting, thanks a lot for your videos ^^

[@protator]

I like the approach ... instead of stressing out, simply enjoy your pc tech hobby with a good beer cheers mate

[@tljstewart]

thanks for the great video, at about @13:30 you discuss the Z drive and the E drive, however you only show the Z drive read/write speeds, would be interested to compare that to the E drive you set up

[@Surly1966]

Gotta get me one of those oyster IPA. Got a guy that always drops by and scams my beer. It’s Revenge time. Thanks Jeff!

[@jasonthomashorn4794]

Well done, good explanation on the differences between attachment. And you really, really, reeeeaaallly don't have to drink a bad beer. But it was interesting seeing a somewhat positive review of something that sounds oh so very bad. Well done! :)

[@juanpablo-vn1xo]

this is awesome....this method could mean my dropbox sync could be allocated to this drive and then backed up as required and mean it is on my server and not my desktop....how good is that!....could come in handy for all kinds of things to be honest.....thanks for this jeff 👍👍

[@kenhuffmanjr9919]

Just found this video. Overall, this is a nice video and is useful. Couple of things: iSCSI LUNs can be accessed from multiple servers simultaneously, and if you move an iSCSI LUN from one server to another that can mount the FS then the permissions will be maintained; the SIDs may not be resolved by the new server but it will, in fact, see the SIDs in the ACLs. Also, you created an E: drive but then benchmarked a Z: drive. And SMB is not commonly referred to as SaMBa; SaMBa is a free software implementation of the SMB protocol. Thanks.

[@KunouJS]

Wow! You're right! I'm still new to iSCSI, so I tried connecting a Windows VM to the same iSCSI LUN volume I made for my laptop...and it worked right away! Awesome! For those that have an Asustor NAS, this works! It seems we can't share Btrfs snapshots, but this LUN alternative seems way better anyway.

[@emrod38]

another awesome tutorial. keep up the great conent

[@easkay]

Good point about spinning disk performance compared to SSDs. It can take some config tweaking, but old hardware can still be remarkably capable. I've been able to push arrays of ~20 2.5" 15k SAS drives to about 500 MB/s write. For the speed test, the iSCSI-backed drive has a filesystem mounted on E:, but the volume being tested was the SMB network share on Z:? It's also nice to see that the iSCSI sharing settings of TruNAS are more beginner-friendly now! From my days as an ESXi admin, I remember iSCSI being very fussy about latency and heavy packet loss or interruption. Have you noticed any issues like that, or have you put measures in place (e.g. QoS/CoS) to mitigate them? Man do I wish I had Gen9 HPE kit in my lab 😅 EDIT: reordered content.

[@ComsicQuestGG]

How and where do you do the tweaking for your network speeds? That's my next task for my TrueNAS lol. I'd like to be able to utilize the speeds I'm paying for.

[@klkcruzklk]

Nice tutorial! I was wondering if there was a benefit to using iSCSI vs mounting a virtual disk across the network? I currently have my steam library in a virtual disk in a shared drive on my NAS, and sometimes I run into an issue with the windows task scheduler not automatically mounting it, which is kind of a pain.

[@DaemonForce]

That 4TB/5TB ~$60-70 argument used to be something I considered until power+packaging became my main concern over a non-hotswap rack that goes down every year for cleaning, every 2nd year for upgrade and every 5th year for fan/PSU replacement. Last week I picked up a 16TB Toshiba MG08 for $320. That's roughly ~$20/TB but the 9 platter packaging is so dense that I might pick up a few to make my first RAID volume and use my 60GB refurb SSD for failover journaling. I'm still getting everything settled to make this new disk my main video storage replacement and migrate my other disks to move deploy volumes for apps, games, backups and non-Win platforms. So considering power and disk health, the only thing I really worry about is the moment my disks reach 100K hours. What is your main health concern with your equipment and how do you retire your disks after they reach a certain age?

[@chromerims]

5:37 -- iSCSI downside. Great video 👍 I slammed into this "2 initiators, 1 target" conundrum this week. Came here to get another viewpoint confirming this challenge. I am not going to do filelocking or a cluster-aware set up.

[@FilSapia]

This is especially a good idea for Mini ATX/ITX builds with the newer 2.5Gb ethernet standard; you can easily run your OS from an M.2 disk and not have to worry about mass storage :)

[@TheFlyingCrocodile]

please do a video on de-duplication this info was very useful and i love your tutorials

[@teetertech]

I did this with my game libary a few months back good how-to man!

[@CrazyRamUK]

Guess you'll be off the Alaskan brewery Christmas card list with that review. Brave of you to try and keep on drinking it.

[@CraftComputing]

The first couple 49th State I had were wonderful. And there's always ANYTHING from Anchorage....

[@CrazyRamUK]

@@CraftComputing I'm not a stout drinker so I'll take your word on them :)

[@30housewright]

100% answered the question I had. I mounted my iscsi target to VM thinking I could share the lun between my main computer and the VM. this explains why that failed.

[@Medieval_Arpad_cooks]

aand done! Thanks, this was refreshingly easy!

[@ProliantLife]

Awesome guide i used this and added the drive to my steam deck and the read write speeds rival the SD card speeds.

[@robtongue]

What a trooper. "Nope... nope... *headshake*. Don't like this. *sips again*. Nope. *sip*".

[@mrljvb]

And aside from my other comment.. You can take it one step further, and take advantage of all the features of ZFS and Truenas. Boot from an iSCSI lun, you gain all the advantages of ZFS and Truenas as you noted, but that extends to the boot drive as well, and you can use replication and cloud sync to backup your entire environment, not just the Steam library, and you gain significant performance bumps. Add to that the use of cheap Infiniband cards (can be had for less than $50) and Infiniband switches (found a 36 port one for $100), and you have a 40Gb or 56Gb infrastructure depending on which version you get).

[@mrmotofy]

But those speeds are irrelevant if your storage can't transfer that fast

[@mrljvb]

@@mrmotofy I have 2 25 arrays, most of the disks are mirrored stripes.. the storage can easily keep up.

[@yonson_racing]

Nice! Been waiting for this...

[@Digi20]

Very interesting. Didnt know this was so easily do-able before, thank you for the video. Now i am thinking of attaching my whole NAS (which actually is just my way of plugging a huge 10 disc storage array directly to my photo and video workstation anyway) this way. are there downsides in terms of data retention and safety when doing it this way? for example, would the storage be more subsceptible to a faulty network cable in comparision to using SMB and letting the NAS handle all the filesystem stuff?

[@DangoNetwork]

Something you may also want to check out is the diskless config that use by gaming cafes in Asia.

[@phalinangel]

I did roughly the same thing however I used a virtual hard drive and then mounted it locally from the network. It seemed to work just fine but every once in awhile it would hiccup and I had to tell steam where the game library was. I will be doing this

[@CyberBlaed]

This was my method till the vhd crashed.. 8tb of my games lost. Inc 3tb of mods and configs.. it HURT! Def go the iscsi method

[@OlivierMyre88]

I have a very basic pool on truenas, 12tb (4x4tb) ZFS and it works great as a network drive holding my steam librairy. I opted out of iSCSI for the very specific dealbreaker you mentioned as I would have a hard time accessing my saves from different PCs (I game on 2 different rigs depending on time of the day as I work from home too!)

[@stale2665]

If you use Steam, you should be getting the appropriate save files through the steam cloud. With the de-duplication, you can just set up two iSCSI drives and fill them with the same games, and the NAS will take care of de-wasting the space.

[@MrGranMarco]

Great video!

[@abes.4040]

Good video, thanks!

[@BWGPEI]

Very nice - Thank You!

[@VV-nw4cz]

The suggestion to get some beer was a good one. I did just that and it is satisfying.

[@tYNS]

thanks for doing this.. I have been looking for a good solution to share truenas and steam across several computers... I had no idea of ZFS deduplication across iscsi volumes.. can't wait for that video.. One issue with iSCSI is MacOS. It has terrible initiator software. Daemon tools works but is crippled in speed. Other 3rd parties are sketchy with support. If anyone has a suggestion for a Mac iSCSI initiator I would love to hear it.

[@nukedoom]

This is really cool. I was suffering running launchbox from a network drive. It would freak out every time. I ended up buying a ssd to add the retro collection to it (I have 2 firecudas nvme for main system in raid and now 2 cheap wd ssd in raid on my pc) I think I will move the ssd to truenas and do this. I have a 10gbe link but no drives fast enough to test it hahahaha.

[@anitquahharlom6143]

playnite is way better

[@conquistidor11]

Look at the ccboot software, single image with writeback caching with iscsi targets. I am hoping there is a hamelabbed version of this that could be built. It would be awesome to spin up a new instance every time someone connects and only maintain the master image for updates for the cloud gaming server.

[@falxie_]

I can't believe I didn't know what iSCSI, definitely going to use that when I get a NAS again

[@84Actionjack]

Good Stuff. Thanks!

[@TheTechnicalMiracle]

Thank you for mentioning the facts about ISCSI, I've seen so many misleading videos about this solution. I'm trying to build a network setup with some SSDs in raid 0 connected to PCs all over the house equipped with 5 to 10 gigabit network cards/adapters. When I get a game working right, the latency is not much worse than a local SSD. The problem is getting third party launchers working with it. Battle Net (blizzard games) will not work anymore, doesn't support NAS setups, GOG can be solved with some writing in command prompt and a registry edit, Origin can sorta be solved but only if you're playing games right from Origin. Some anti-cheat games, specifically ones with battle eye (rainbow six siege) and Origin games bought and launched through Steam but still using the Origin DRM WILL NOT WORK. I think it's a matter of inputing some kind of permission in the command prompt and having it start with extra permissions but I for the life of me cannot get the syntax right. I'm using SMB right now. Anyone have any ideas?

[@EnigmaticCipher13]

I mount a vhd on startup that is stored to my nas. Blizzard works just fine this way and while I haven't tried Origin I have used Ea Desktop and that works fine in my limited experience. I oy play 2 games through EA

[@Catge]

Good video Jeff

[@HoshPak]

I haven't tested this myself but if you run virtual machines and connect the iSCSI target to the hypervisor you might be able to use the disk on multiple VMs in read-only mode. This will show you a warning though as you are sharing resources between VMs which are not meant to be shared. However, I would view it like mounting an ISO file of which I used some to install multiple systems simultaneously, before.

[@willis936]

In a follow-up video could you cover iscsi snapshots? Specifically, if there is some way to have scheduled snapshots from a golden volume. The idea is to have one machine that keeps a golden volume up-to-date and once a day the client volumes get replaced with another snapshot of the reference. This might not be perfect though since I think the steam library folder may also house some saves, and those would be overwritten. I'm just not sure. I think maybe mapped samba for most games is best, then iscsi for the games that complain, then local install + samba link saves for the games that complain and keep the saves in the steam library.

[@Arfiess]

A quick question, would this affect the loading time of the games I installed? I assume it will load up slower due to it being a network drive running on hard disk format.

[@paulnolastname9422]

Most apropos. I have a new TrueNas setup and I need to do this.

[@Sovereign1992]

I didn't know that iScsi couldn't be used across different windows installations. Thanks for the heads up :) The only two games that didn't like being on an iScsi share in my experiment was Watch Dogs 2 and Space Marine. I think for Watch Dogs 2 it was down to Easy Cheat DRM software. For Space Marine somehow it randomly deleted the .exe file.

[@harshbarj]

The was perfect timing for that glitch! Almost looked planned.

[@paulpetzar7401]

For anyone it may help, if you use capital letters for the target name, the wizard won't complete. This is in TrueNAS-13.0-U3.1. Great tutorial and videos.

[@hughsparks4572]

This is too tempting. I don't have a budget for this. I want it.

[@Mayhem6633]

A more simple approach is to create a veracrypt disk on your server. When you mount one on your computer it works like a local disk. I just checked my crystal disk mark speeds and they're similar to these results so the performance is comparable.

[@CoalitionGaming]

this is super cool

[@iguandae]

I have my steam library on a share on my server running unraid, on an unassigned 2TB SSD, been doing this for about 3 years works perfectly I can play games from whichever gaming machine in my house, cool video though!

[@theangelofspace155]

Bet you cant install blizzard games....

[@rytek4274]

Perfect timing 👌