Quote Originally Posted by 'Fursphere',index.php?page=Thread&postID=163298#po st163298


Quote Originally Posted by 'turbonapkin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=163245# post163245
When we are considering the common domestic form of network attached storage which is becoming more prevalent in households every day, are we not simply adding further processing between source data and memory in the form of network and application level protocols and therefore encouraging increased latency and introducing new potential bottlenecks?

Considering the intensely bursty nature of wow's read requests my gut feeling would be to stick with direct attached storage but I would be very interested to see how joe bloe's acme nas handles five instances of wow loading into dalaran. Gigabit would be a must, I reckon.
Household NAS =/= Datacenter NAS

Sure, they do the same thing, but they aren't even remotely comparable performance wise.
This is very very true. Most enterprise level NAS equipment has 2+ gigabit ports onboard. Let me rephrase that: The better performing units that would work for this application would need dual ethernet ports. The rack mountable units I've seen cost $6,000.

I would say it's almost not worth it, but that depends on one's annual income. We do play (and pay for) multiple copies of World of Warcraft, y'know. We're a little crazy at least.

A cheaper way to do it would be using a Dell PowerEdge server. Some of those have dual ports, also. You can find those for way less than $1,000.00 on fleaBay.