I just wanted to get people's opinions on running games over a network using Connectx on FreeStyle Dash. I was wondering if it seriously slowed down the loading of a game vs. having it on a hard drive. I don't mind a slight delay but if it takes forever then I don't think it would be worth it. Thanks.

Well, in short- yes, it is slower. Just how much slower depends on your network. Are you connected wirelessly or wired? Either way, your fastest throughput networked is only going to be 300Mbit/s tops (100 Mbit/s via fast ethernet, or 300 Mbit/s theoretical max via wireless N)... which is far slower than any hard drive I know of.

Just for comparison- the average SATA hard drive these days is capable of anywhere from 1,500 Mbit/s to 6,000 Mbit/s. You would only see a full 100 Mbit/s via wired ethernet in the event you have no other traffic on your network. As far as wireless N goes- I have yet to ever get a full 300 Mbit/s with that...

To be fair, most laptop hard drives won't transfer more than 800Mbit/s, and are usually a fair bit lower than that in average. I have never seen a desktop hard drive go above 1200Mbit/s, though it is certainly possible.

Loading from the hard drive will likely be 4-8 times faster (depending on a number of factors) as compared to a 100Mbit connection. Wireless N can theoretically improve that speed, but that depends on a number of external factors including channel interference.

I would recommend testing it our yourself. Run a few tests with a couple of games comparing their loading times over Connectx and installed to hard drive. That will be better advice than anyone here can give.

I was just worried that I'd go through the trouble of setting this up only to have it be GOD AWFUL slow or something. I was just curious as to whether this is more of a proof of concept or a viable option to consolidate multiple hard drives into one location. As for myself, I run four modified boxes in my house and transferring games to all four drives gets tedious. Doing it once would save me some headache...at the same time, the last thing I need is for my wife to start complaining that her damn Katamari is taking forever to load...first world problems

Well it's pretty easy to setup...and I wouldn't mind actually knowing how it works / how fast it is too... so if you want to give it a shot and report back that would rock! I may do it myself later this week. I have all my games backed up on a very large NAS device and it would be cool to not have to transfer them to the Xbox when I want to play them.