Has Anyone Been Able to Store and Play Game Files in the Cloud?

Surragard

For hard drive capacity issues, I usually keep my game files on an external hard drive and play from there. I was wondering if anyone has been able to use a cloud service to hold their game files? I am currently using Microsoft OneDrive and I am interested if I can download the client to OneDrive and play from there.

Has anyone else been able to get this to work successfully? I've heard of gaming software from Razer that can do this off of Google Drive but I honestly don't know a lot about it.

KhajitFurTrader

I don't know about MS OneDrive, but Cloud services like DropBox keep a local copy synced on the computer. You would not win more free space this way.

Anyhow, data transfer rates via network are several orders of magnitude slower than via local HDDs. The graphics card would never be able to get all of the assets it needs to display the ever-changing scenery in time. Like, you would have to count your FPS in SPF (seconds per frame).

So, not a good idea. At all.

Nestor

Surragard wrote: »

What about something like the Western Digital My Cloud line? I've been using a WD external thusfar but I'm interested in cutting the wire from my setup if possible.

USB transfer rates are all over the place, from slow to decent. Then there is also eSata which can give you SATA speeds on an external connection.

But, really, 1TB drives are less than $60, 3TBs are less than a $100. Most laptops can take a second drive and any desktop can take multiple drives. Add another HDD to your rig.

KhajitFurTrader

Wikipedia has a great chart for comparing maximum possible bandwidths in ideal circumstances.

Gigabit Ethernet (1000BASE-T) has a maximum bandwidth of 125 MB/s, but you will never reach this exclusively for any one application like, say, ESO. There will also be losses due to TCP protocol overhead, and the rearranging of data blocks from quite small Ethernet frames into something more suitable (mass storage protocols over Ethernet like iSCSI or FCoE diminish these losses to gain better throughput).

Then there's the matter of IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). Depending on an application's access pattern, sometimes being able to access small amounts of data really fast trumps raw bandwidth. MMOs belong to these applications. I ran LOTRO for years from a SDHC card with UHS-I bus (probably connected to the chip set via USB 2.0), and the game was way snappier than running from the HDD of that system.

YMMV. Of course, internally connected devices on mass storage interfaces are always best. Nowadays, peripheral protocols like Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 give them a run for their money, but they may yet not be available everywhere. Compared to these, NAS is still slower.

Surragard

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

I don't know about MS OneDrive, but Cloud services like DropBox keep a local copy synced on the computer. You would not win more free space this way.

Anyhow, data transfer rates via network are several orders of magnitude slower than via local HDDs. The graphics card would never be able to get all of the assets it needs to display the ever-changing scenery in time. Like, you would have to count your FPS in SPF (seconds per frame).

So, not a good idea. At all.

What about something like the Western Digital My Cloud line? I've been using a WD external thusfar but I'm interested in cutting the wire from my setup if possible.

Surragard

Thanks for the info!