Hi,

I have an old pc that I would like to use as an storage to install games on. I know about parsec and moonlight for streaming games, but it probably won’t work in that case since GPU on that PC is pretty crappy, so I would rather use one from my everyday PC. The possibilities I see here are to either use this PC only as external storage and read files from it via some kind of protocol, or connect to it with something like remote desktop and “borrow” my everyday PC GPU’s power. It would be nice if it wouldn’t be super slow solution when using over WAN since I would like to give a friend access to it. Would something like this even be possible?

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  • kmikesmart@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I think you would be better off removing the drive from the old PC and just installing it into your new PC to access the drive that way. It would be much faster since you would get rid of the network bottleneck. If you don’t have the room to install the drive into your new PC, I would just share the drive over the network and then map it to your new PC.

  • racegeek93@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I would recommend using something like truenas that supports iscsi. Sometimes games need to appear that they are installed locally and if you use something like that it will appear as a local device. Network drives are not great from my little experience.

    Something else to consider is that some games “require” ssds so if you do not have a fast connection you might run into other issues.

    1 NVME pcie 3.0 ssd will saturate a 1Gb easily. From my understanding and low math skills you would need a 10Gb connection to get this speeds from one drive. Factor in overhead for processing and networking and you should be fine. You can get cheap cards and switches for this.

    • Weltschmerz2137@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I though about using iscsi but isn’t it very slow and unsafe over WAN? At least thats what I read so far.

      • racegeek93@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        If the port is just labeled “WAN” then no. Unless you are talking about your router which is a different discussion. You are just talking about your local network. You are not talking about opening your internal network to the world.

        • Weltschmerz2137@alien.topOPBEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          I mentioned giving access to a friend and he wouldn’t be connected to my local network so I guess it would be kind of exposing it to the world. There’s always possibilty to use VPN, but I’m not sure if it’ll solve all the safety problems, and there’s still speed issue. That’s why I was wondering if there are any alternatives

          • racegeek93@alien.topBEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            You could set up a vpn. They would need the cert on their side. So if you are allowing someone on the outside connecting in, there is always a chance. But it’s up to you. Sounds like you have it figured out and you just need to pull the trigger and do it

            • Weltschmerz2137@alien.topOPBEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              Thanks, I’ll try it out then. Btw. do you know maybe if there are other file transfer protocols that doesn’t require downloading files to the client machine, that would be worth experimenting with in that case too? I’m rather a novice to networking stuff, but it would be nice to explore this topic a bit more

              • racegeek93@alien.topBEnglish
                1·
                11 months ago

                Smb is supported. So if you have two PCs that can see each other you can have permissions on folders that you want shared. It’s up to you.