[SOLVED] Building a home server to play and store games on.

DavidVioMC

Honorable
Apr 25, 2016
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I had this idea for a while to build a 1U server or something on those lines with about 10TB Raid 1 storage (20TB Total) to store and play games off it. This idea came after I had to buy 3rd 1TB M.2 SSD to store games on as games start to get bigger in size and I have a lot of them and not having an easy way to play games on my laptop without installing it on my laptop and then copying a save game to my laptop and when I'm done, copying it back to my PC so I have it updated there. It's a bit of a pain sometimes. Havinng the ability to simply connect an ethernet cable to my laptop and be able to play a game with the same save game between my laptop and desktop would be such a cool thing to have.

I'm not sure where to start as I am no network expert and I never built a server in my life, so I'm hoping someone could point me in the right direction. The only logical thing to me would be to have it in Raid 1 because it has better read speeds and I have lot of older games that are only on "discs", so if one drive would to fail, it would be a task in it self and who knows if that game will be obtainable in the future, so I would like some redundancy, plus, I will probably end up storing picturs on the server as well and maybe some documents from time to time so redundancy is a must.

Other thing that to me would be a must is gigabit internet so the load times are not too slow, I am hoping for SSD type read speeds if possible. In the perfect world, I would like to match my M.2 speeds that I have right now but I will be happy with SSD speeds. Not sure if 10 gigabit connection would be overkill? My motherboard supports gigabit so I would have to get a 10 gigabit card.

Other thing, budget is unlimited, hence why I don't mind spending 20TB in SSD storage but I also don't want it to be expensive and overkill without a reason, something that will get the job done.

Thanks!
 
Solution
The "play games" part of this fails.

Games that live on the 'server' WILL be mostly unplayable coming across the LAN.
Accssing 20TB of SSD is little different than accessing 20TB of spinning drives, when coming across the gigabit LAN.

Other than that...nothing really special needed.

And 'RAID' is not a real backup. RAID 1 only protects against a physical drive fail. It does nothing for all the other forms or data loss.

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
The "play games" part of this fails.

Games that live on the 'server' WILL be mostly unplayable coming across the LAN.
Accssing 20TB of SSD is little different than accessing 20TB of spinning drives, when coming across the gigabit LAN.

Other than that...nothing really special needed.

And 'RAID' is not a real backup. RAID 1 only protects against a physical drive fail. It does nothing for all the other forms or data loss.
 
Solution