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      ggRock Hardware Requirements and Hardware FAQ

      This article helps the users make a right choice when it comes to hardware.

      Below you can find links to the up-to-date ggRock recommendations and configurations.  Otherwise, you can use our community's knowledge in the #ggrock-community-channel Discord channel.

      Hardware Specifications and Recommendations

      Main recommendations

      1. Hardware RAID controllers are incompatible with ggRock. Instead, utilize HBA mode/JBOD so that disks are presented individually to the operating system. In most cases the built-in SATA Controller on the Motherboard is enough. RAID mode in BIOS must be disabled.

      2. Cores/threads count is more important than CPU frequency. For that reason, CPUs like Intel Core i3/i5/i7/i9, Intel Xeon E, AMD Ryzen or AMD Threadripper are not optimal, however it’s possible to use them too.

      3. RAM with ECC (error correction) is highly preferred, since there might be situations where you can damage all the data on your disk due to RAM errors

      4. Do not get QLC drives or HDDs. Both have critically low I/O speed for the ggRock purposes (50-60MB/s) which may lead to game throttling, freezes, game crashes and BSODs

      5. SATA SSDs with PLP (power loss protection) are better suited for PXE/iSCSi purposes than consumer SSDs, because they prevent data loss on power failures.
        Since there are a lot of SSDs with PLP on the market that have the same price as consumer SSDs, they are more preferable.

      6. Your NICs for the client Machines should be compatible with PXE boot and the NIC for the server should be compatible with Linux

      7. Redundant RAID levels, like RAID1 and RAID10, are highly recommended for data protection. RAID5/RAID6 and their variations are not generally recommended, because they have worse random IO performance than RAID10, unless we’re talking NVMe drives. RAID is set up in ggRock UI

      8. ggRock should be installed on a bare-metal server, running ggRock in a virtual environment is not supported

      9. Your networking gear (switches) should avoid using managed features, since in this case a lot of load is diverted from powerful ggRock server hardware onto comparatively less capable networking processing units

      10. For better performance and longer lifetime data drives should always have at least 15% free space. Please consider this when you choose the size for your data drives

      Hardware FAQ

      Q: Can I replace PLP SSDs (Micron 5200, 9300, Samsung 883) with consumer SSDs (Samsung 860 EVO, etc)?

      A: Yes, you can use consumer SSDs if the "Enterprise" SSDs with PLP (Powerloss protection) are hard to come by or are too expensive for the budget you have.