Use your Gaming PC's Extra Power as a NAS Ultimate Guide

so we did a really cool project a little while ago we called it to gamers one CPU you can check it out here where we've got one gaming tower with a couple graphics cards in it extreme edition processor all that stuff and it runs two separate instances of Star Wars Battlefront and we used a software for that called unread that while they kind of came back to us and we're like yeah that's really cool they were also kind of throwing in hey but that isn't really the point for most people and so they decided to sponsor a video where we show off a more practical application for this virtualization technology that led us front to gaming rigs in one tower and this time instead of using crazy overkill hardware we're using I'd say enthusiasts but not completely over-the-top stuff to have a single gaming rig pulled double duty as a gaming rig and also as the file server for the rest of the household so stay tuned guys we're going to be doing a gaming rig and an AZ in one box the Logitech G 303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with delta0 technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting check out the link in the video description to learn more so let's go through the rationale of all the hardware while we assemble the computer itself for our CPU we chose a core i7 6700 case skylake processor in any case where you're going to be using virtualization you will a need a CPU that supports virtualization and B want one with more cores and or more threads so hyper threading on the CPU is a definite boon we're going to be installing that in easy 170 Deluxe motherboard from Asus it's a fully featured board and has lots of PCI Express Lanes and dual LAN if you you know wanted to team your NICs or something along those lines in the future and also has the virtualization support that we need in terms of RAM ddr4 is all you're going to be able to use in this case the speed doesn't really matter however the one thing to note is that the more virtualized operating systems that you're going to be using the more you will need in this case we're just demoing a gaming rig and an as so there's really no need for us to go completely overkill so we've gone with 16 gigs of ram the case was a pretty tough choice because I wanted something that would allow for more harddrive expansion remember this is an ass also in addition to being a gaming rig but that wasn't going to compromise the cooling and/or expansion capabilities of the gaming rig itself so I settled on the silverstone teto for BEW and then silverstone also sent over a 750 watt power supply giving us lots of room for hard drive expansion in terms of the power budget as well as this is cool so this is a brand new thing there FS 305 so this is a five by three and a half inch toolless hot-swap hard drive cage thing that we're going to be mounting in the front of the case this is very Naza whereas the inside of the case is very just normal gaming Tower II and I felt like this combo was a really really good one which brings us to storage now we're using Kingston's one terabyte KC 400 SSDs note that I say SSDs because we have two of them the reason for this is that while you could pick any other capacity of SSD that you want it is important to have two of them because this gives us two advantages one is it protects us in the event of a hardware failure and two actually that's really the main advantage on raid is going to really want you to have these protected so yes we'll be running them in a butter FS RAID one next up we've got our hard drives so we're using Seagate center prise capacity v5 SATA hard drives for NAS functionality these are about as fast and reliable and just generally ba as it gets but once again in terms of what you're going to be using you have a lot of flexibility in terms of both the hardware as well as the capacity that you want to go with in this case at least two drives is recommended again to keep your nas safe in the event of a hardware failure but you get much better scaling in terms of the capacity per investment if you go to three drives or more and use a parity setup versus a RAID one setup so we're going to have five drives so we can fill up that front bay device that we have the video card was an easy choice I basically grabbed whatever was on my test bench and threw it in our motherboard has onboard video so that takes care of running the web UI for unread and then that video card is going to be passed through to our Windows 10 VM for its full we hope functionality in games we could use any card AMD Nvidia it really doesn't matter one challenge we ran into was that our hot swap cage didn't actually fit in the front of this case without removing some small little tab shelf things designed for normal five and a quarter inch devices like optical drives but that was nothing that we couldn't solve with a little help from our friend mr. Dremel and our other friend mr. vacuum-cleaner okay so now that the system is physically constructed there's just one little trick when you're plugging in all your cables plug your display cable into the dedicated graphics card for now then power on the system for the first time press Delete to get into the BIOS and we're going to change a couple small settings here go to advanced system agent graphics configuration set your primary display to IGF X and I GPU multi monitor to disabled this will allow unread to grab the onboard graphics leaving the discrete card free for your gaming VM make sure that if you're planning to use the unread desktop GUI you've got your monitor plugged into the onboard graphics now after you make this change another small setting that you're going to have to enable is virtualization so go ahead and make that change as well go to another PC and create a bootable unread USB Drive according to the instructions on their site plug that into the back of the computer and get her booted up once you reach the web UI go into settings identification and rename your Tower to something more recognizable on the network enable Network Bridge under network it's normal to lose connectivity here for a few seconds and then if it doesn't come back right away use that recognizable name that you set to navigate to it in a web browser next navigate to the main tab and assign disks to the array and to the cache the array is your slower larger magnetic storage devices your hard drives and the cache is those high-speed solid-state drives that we installed next start the array you can see that a parity sync is running we can start using the system immediately to continue setting it up but you should be aware that data on the array is not protected until the parity sync is completed this takes quite a while but it's worth it because it allows a failed drive to be replaced and the data to be rebuilt in the event of a drive failure format the unmount Abyss 'kz please note that this will wipe all data off the disks then refresh and it should be done within a few seconds next let's go over to shares and start creating we're going to do the nazzer first and here's some general rules if you're going to copy data over the network to this share then you'll want to enable this share to use the cache everything else can be default although minimum free space is kind of important to set you want to set this to a value that is larger than the largest file you could see yourself copying to the share this will prevent out of space errors so for example for a media share you might set this to 25 gigs next we're going to create another share for backups for this one we are going to enable the use of the SSD cache so we can take advantage of faster local network transfer speeds remember data from the cache moves to the array nightly we're going to create a shadow play share for gain footage you know this is supposed to be a gaming machine and all that but for this one there's no need to enable the cash because shadow play won't write more than five megabytes per second at a time and will never exceed the speed of the array even if we turn off the faster writing speed option another cool share to create is a game library share so if you predominantly use steam you can actually map a network drive in the OS later and we'll show you how to do this and throw all of your Steam games especially the ones that don't suffer from slow loading times or that are large or you don't play that often and throw them on to the magnetic storage rather than taking up space on your SSD the last thing that you'll see here is us setting up our domains and ISOs shares for VMs we're doing this manually the same way we did in the to gamers one CPU video but by the time six point two goes public beta this will be done for you and you won't have to worry about it please note these ones are not exported which means that they won't be browsable by other networks attached to devices this is fine we intend them to use them on the local machine next we're going to enable VMs in settings VM manager click the download button next to vert IO driver then we need to copy a Windows ISO this can be downloaded legally from Microsoft directly to the ISS folder using another networked computer in my case I've got it on a USB stick on this computer in front of me now this is an advanced and therefore optional step it's possible to not only manually assign plugged in USB devices to your VM before you boot it mice keyboards XLR audio interfaces etc but it's also possible to completely pass through an entire USB controller to your VM so we through a random dual USB 3 port PCIe card into our system and we're going to show you guys how we can pass it through to enable hot plugging in some cases you'll be able to assign some of the onboard ports on your motherboard to your VM while leaving others to unread to deal with but this varies from motherboard to motherboard and platform to platform skylake for example for the same reason we couldn't pass through our onboard audio can have trouble with this using putty a free tool login to your server using the unread username root by default then run this command to see all USB controllers in the system our NEC PCIe USB device is the one that we added ourselves the next command shows us the vendor Product ID which we've highlighted then we go back to the unread web GUI and in the main tab we click the flash device then put PCI - stub I DS equals and paste the ID we got from before and hit apply the system will need to be rebooted at this stage so stop the array and reboot once rebooted we can start the array then go to VMs and add our first VM just click Windows 10 change the name to what you want assigned CPU cores I generally recommend assigning the hyper threaded cores and the physical cores to the same assignment we've gone with 12 gigs of ram for our games and chrome we're going to pick our Windows installation media for storage we're going to assign most of our SSD space to our VM using just a little bit for our cache then we pick out our video card we pass through only the NVIDIA HDMI audio due to iommu issues with the onboard audio then we're passing through the USB devices that we recognize so you'll see three Logitech ones for our keyboard mouse and USB gaming headset then that optional step from before we can pass through our NEC USB controller which gives us those hot pluggable ports so we don't have to restart our VM to plug in a USB Drive or something along those lines all right so we are finally finally at the end of our journey but first this is very important this HDMI cable comes out of the onboard video and goes into our dedicated graphics card because otherwise when we boot up the VM there's going to be no video output because we assigned that dedicated graphics card to our VM so here we go oh yes twelve gigs of system memory tested ok is amazing so now we install Windows the way that we just kind of normally would mostly stay tuned ok so here's the trick you're going to get to the point where it asked where you want to install windows and there's nothing there so you want to load drivers click browse and then you're going to navigate to your CD drive Verte IO win 0 point 1 point 1 then go to the vio store folder then you're going to go to Windows 8.1 AMD 64 and press ok then next yes third time's the charm now we can install windows next so now that red the desktop you have to install drivers for any devices that are missing them so for any of the stuff you don't recognize you're probably just going to navigate to your Verdi OU and manually add drivers and then you're probably going to want to throw some graphics drivers on and then actually there's some other post windows installed tuning things that you might want to check out from to gamers 1 CPU but other than that that's pretty much it so I'll show you guys how to utilize your array shares to make mapped network drive so that you can have all your shadowplay stuff go to one place so that you can have all of your Steam games install in another place but really the sky is the limit here you can create as many shares within unright as you want and then you can map as many network drives as you want as well any time you want to make changes you just go into a browser go to gaming as in our case or whatever it is that you want to call it and then you've got access to the entire unread console to create more shares change any settings or do things like oh hey I'm gonna for stop my VM I wouldn't recommend doing that that'll shut down the computer you're using immediately so all that's left now the day-to-day usability so you can set your VMs to auto start by just going to the VMS tab and going yet any time I turn this machine on I want my gaming rig to start up and I monitor to turn on and all that stuff and then yeah I guess there's a couple little things that you might want to invest in to make your life a bit easier like having an extra keyboard and mouse as well as an extra display cable so you can use the multiple inputs of your monitor to switch if you're desperate and you have to get it the GUI because you can't access it over the network or whatever else but the cost of those items compared to if you had to buy a standalone Nazz for your household is much much lower but of course that would all be meaningless if the performance of the finished machine wasn't still you know pretty much on par with the gaming machine that you intended to buy for yourself so let's have a quick look here boom Crysis 3 my friends and check this out I'm going to initiate a file transfer to myself gaming as media and check this out no framerate dip copying at 100 megabytes per second and if we tab out check this out we can even see real-time stats of what's going on with our storage and our networking and the transfers done already so that was fast so there you have it guys it actually worked there is more - unread than this especially if you want to start tinkering with other virtual machines and all that kind of stuff but I thought that this use case scenario was super applicable to our audience where you've probably only got you know one be a gaming rig in the house you probably have a use for network attached storage and sharing a off-site backup a lot of the other functionality that you can dig a little deeper and get at with docker containers and stuff like that so being able to combine that functionality rather than buying a separate motherboard separate CPU separate case separate power supply being able to do all of that off of one single high-quality machine I personally think is pretty darn cool so let us know with a comment and a like below if you agree which I guess leads us pretty well into our sponsor for today's episode Logitech we've actually had a lot of logitech stuff going on in here we got the g9 10 or I in spark we've got the g502 proteus core but the focus today is the g6 33 Artemus spectrum headset it's been completely redesigned by Logitech from their previous headsets to be better in well pretty much every possible way it's USB with support for surround it's more comfortable it's more durable it sounds better and with the that's actually that's a lot better and monitoring is on so I can hear myself talking and with the fold out and extend perfectly positionable microphone you will sound better to your gaming friends as well we've got a link in the video description where you can learn more about this puppy you can be like oh yeah I want to know more about the you know 40 millimeter Pro tuned drivers and I want to know more about the you know comfort and the shape of the ear cups that is actually the shape of ears I mean does anyone on earth actually have round ears I don't know I've never actually seen one so check out that link in the video description alright thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you know where that button is but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe even consider I don't know supporting us by shopping on Amazon we've got the instructions for how to do that up there you can also buy a cool shirt like this one or you can give us a monthly contribution through our four and get yourself a nifty little contributor badge now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next and hey how about you go back and watch to gamers one CPU if you hadn't already it's also using on raid but in that case we actually ignored the nez functionality entirely and did to gaming VMs off of a single machine both with pretty much bare to the metal performance it is pretty darn impressive

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,327,099

Keywords: NAS, gaming, pc, rig, guide, build, tower, unboxing, review, virtualization, storage, media, player, hard drive, video card, NVIDIA, AMD, Seagate, WD, Western Digital, cloud, personal

Id: dpXhSrhmUXo

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 27 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/giggles91]

Not a very good idea IMHO, the whole pc will be running at all times and consume way more power than a regular NAS.