my NAS are my servers. i have 4 servers, 2 workstations, 2 domains…mostly for software/server/network testing purposes.
all the servers run raid 1 and mirror data using backups. more effective than a single raid 5. plus, a NAS box would just add more hardware which i don’t need.
both of the workstations run raid 0.
my setup is simply as follows:
profiles are stored on a DFS share, the DFS share is a UNC path.
to which the my documents folders are redirected using group policy.
the client is windows 7, so my documents is a ‘library’.
basically, folder redirection allows you to use recycle bin on a network drive. there are workarounds, but this is an out of the box GPO.
you can do it without a GPO using local policy if you have a ‘pro’ version of windows, not ‘home’. or registry settings.
DFS with a mirror using robocopy allows me to provide a fail-over solution without deploying a cluster. since i don’t have the servers for that. clusters plus domain controllers = bad idea ;\
in fact i used to have a separate subnet with a SAN, using iscsi. the problem with is it requires network offload cards, or the performance is worse than simple SMB. like half the performance… but you can basically create a raid over your ethernet.
the only other game i’ve come across that has a problem with this setup is BF:BC2. forget what the issue was, but either it was causing unnecessary network traffic or latency when reading the config file repeatedly (and i mean hundreds of times over in a minute)… or it simply had problems saving to that location (it didn’t use the my documents location, it just used the user profile path and appended \my documents\etc… to it and saved it to C:)
in any case, there were no issues creating the other folders in the network redirect… the other config files, etc all exist for my documents\starconflict…
it’s just the screenshot folder is not created on install, and when the screenshot is performed, the error handling routine doesn’t properly detect that the folder was not created, and just notified you with ‘success saving screenshot to \folder\share\etc…’ when in fact it hasn’t been saved.
i should mention this was a steam install. if that makes any difference.
anyways, easiest workaround is probably just to create the folder on install, and deal with this issue later. not the most pressing of items.