Comment by steelbrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steelbrain | Hacker News Reader

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This is really interesting. I've been researching some viable options like this. I have a beefy Network Attached Storage (NAS) server that I actively look for excuses to make use of. I have connected with some 40g and 10g interconnects for it across the house. I also have a PS5 & XBox that use USB hard-drives for additional storage.

I looked into whether I could expose my NAS storage to PS5 & XBox. Turns out that it's possible! It's possible by mounting the NAS shares over iSCSI or NFS, and then emulating a USB storage device using the g_mass_storage module that exposes said storage to USB hosts.

Besides time and cost, one major blocker for me right now is the bandwidth that such a system would provide. It's just not that big of an upgrade. Raspberry Pi very famously supports USB-OTG (similar/same as xDCI), but it only does so with USB 2.0 speeds, and so do all the other SBCs in that class that I found, except for one, RockPi4. RockPi has a Gigabit ethernet port, so if you max out ethernet, you can provide stable HDD speeds to both the PS5 & Xbox.

It would be really interesting to explore a solution where you have the ability to plug in a custom PCIe network card (or an express card) that lets you go beyond 1gbe because then you can really saturate the USB 3.0 interface.

I have a similar homelab setup and have been playing with USB over IP via https://www.virtualhere.com

It does require a client to talk to the server but seems to work pretty well. My thought is to setup a "thin USB client" on my desk that I can attach USB devices to which then are attached or switched to whatever metal or VM host I want in my lab.

This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Unfortunately the consoles don't allow installation of such a USB over IP client so I can't use this, but for other usecases where the clients are running general purpose OS, this could be great!

How are you physically connecting the PS5 to the NAS?

I’m guessing NAS->SBC->PS5. Or are you connecting the NAS to the PS5 directly with a USB cable?

Also how does content play on the PS5? I know the internal NVMe has support a certain speed. Does this not apply to external drives?

You guessed it, it's NAS -(Ethernet)-> SBC -(USB)-> PS5. This is partially because they are on different floors and partially because the NAS server doesn't have any OTG ports.

> Also how does content play on the PS5?

As far as the PS5 is concerned, it just has a USB hard drive plugged into it. It doesn't know how it works under the hood.

Raspberry Pi 5 has a gigabit ethernet port, as do a number of other SBCs, like the NanoPi variants from FriendlyElec for example. In fact the NanoPi R6S has two 2.5G ethernet ports in addition to a 1 gigabit port.

Raspberry Pi 5 still has a USB 2.0 OTG port. So the bottleneck is USB in that case

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