I was looking for a way to use my old PC that still works well. And I saw a video on YT from Craft Computing. I knew at that moment that this is what I wanted to do with my old PC!
Simply put, it's using a pool in TrueNAS which is shared via the iSCSI service and used as a local drive on a Windows station on which a Steam library is installed.
The guy clearly explains how to do it but assuming that we already have TrueNAS installed and an existing pool.
I installed TrueNAS on my old PC and figured out how to create a new pool. It worked but it was slow and some games crashed. I redid the pool configuration a second time and it was faster and the games no longer crashed. But I still didn't really know what I was doing...
I would first like to say thank you to the members of this forum ChrisRJ (for his recommended readings) and Cyberjock (for his powerpoint intended for beginners). It helped me a lot!
I would like to configure my old PC as best as possible with the components I already have on hand:
- Motherboard: EVGA X58 SLI3 (PCIe 2.0)
- CPU: i7-920@2.66Ghz
- RAM: 24GB DDR3-1600
-LAN: 1Gb/s
-Drives:
1x 6TB HDD SATA3
2x 1TB HDD SATA
2x 2TB NVme SSD PCie 3.0 (each installed with a PCie X16 adapter card)
1x 60GB SATA SSD
1x 32GB SATA SSD
I created a pool as follows:
1 mirrored vdev with 2x 1TB HDD SATA.
1 mirrored vdev with 2x 2TB NVme SSD.
1 L2ARC/ARC cache using 1x 60GB SATA SSD.
I chose to use L2ARC/ARC cache because I will share a zvol with iSCSI and I estimated its size based on the Cyberjock presentation:
- The size of the ARC must not exceed 7/8th the size of the memory.
- The size of L2ARC no more than 5 times the size of ARC.
- A 60GB SSD should not use more than 12GB of memory and that leaves another 12GB of memory which is larger than the bare minimum requirement of 8GB that must be available for TrueNAS.
I used the other 2 disks (6TB HDD and 32GB SSD) on another pool for backups (replication task).
Do you have any recommendations? I haven't installed the games yet. I can easily redo my pool base based on your expert advice.
Do you think a jumbo frame (mtu config change) could improve network performance to make it worth it?
Thank you in advance,
Annick
Simply put, it's using a pool in TrueNAS which is shared via the iSCSI service and used as a local drive on a Windows station on which a Steam library is installed.
The guy clearly explains how to do it but assuming that we already have TrueNAS installed and an existing pool.
I installed TrueNAS on my old PC and figured out how to create a new pool. It worked but it was slow and some games crashed. I redid the pool configuration a second time and it was faster and the games no longer crashed. But I still didn't really know what I was doing...
I would first like to say thank you to the members of this forum ChrisRJ (for his recommended readings) and Cyberjock (for his powerpoint intended for beginners). It helped me a lot!
I would like to configure my old PC as best as possible with the components I already have on hand:
- Motherboard: EVGA X58 SLI3 (PCIe 2.0)
- CPU: i7-920@2.66Ghz
- RAM: 24GB DDR3-1600
-LAN: 1Gb/s
-Drives:
1x 6TB HDD SATA3
2x 1TB HDD SATA
2x 2TB NVme SSD PCie 3.0 (each installed with a PCie X16 adapter card)
1x 60GB SATA SSD
1x 32GB SATA SSD
I created a pool as follows:
1 mirrored vdev with 2x 1TB HDD SATA.
1 mirrored vdev with 2x 2TB NVme SSD.
1 L2ARC/ARC cache using 1x 60GB SATA SSD.
I chose to use L2ARC/ARC cache because I will share a zvol with iSCSI and I estimated its size based on the Cyberjock presentation:
- The size of the ARC must not exceed 7/8th the size of the memory.
- The size of L2ARC no more than 5 times the size of ARC.
- A 60GB SSD should not use more than 12GB of memory and that leaves another 12GB of memory which is larger than the bare minimum requirement of 8GB that must be available for TrueNAS.
I used the other 2 disks (6TB HDD and 32GB SSD) on another pool for backups (replication task).
Do you have any recommendations? I haven't installed the games yet. I can easily redo my pool base based on your expert advice.
Do you think a jumbo frame (mtu config change) could improve network performance to make it worth it?
Thank you in advance,
Annick