🧠 ggRock Basics: How It Works

This article introduces the core concepts of ggRock, designed to help beginners understand the fundamentals of diskless booting.

What is ggRock?

ggRock is a diskless boot system. It allows you to run all your client PCs in an ESports center without hard drives. Instead, all data is streamed from a central server over your Ethernet network.

🔁 With ggRock, updates are made once on a shared Image, then automatically applied across all machines. This is made possible through a feature called Writebacks, which we’ll cover later.

💽 ggRock Array – Why Drives Matter

Since ggRock eliminates local storage on client machines, all data is stored on the server’s Array. That makes your server drives critical to performance and reliability.

Storage Requirements:

• Use only TLC SSDs or better.
• ❌ Do not use HDDs or QLC SSDs (e.g., Samsung 860 QVO). They are too slow for gaming performance.
• The storage array must be redundant. If a drive fails, the center should continue running without downtime.

We recommend RAID10 (Mirrored Stripe) for redundancy. This setup allows one or more drives to fail without data loss, but requires doubling your storage capacity.

Example:

If each machine had a 1TB game SSD before, you’d need:

• 4x 1TB SSDs in RAID10 = 2TB usable space.

Sizing Rule of Thumb:

60GB + Total Game Size + (Number of Clients × 10GB) + 15% free space

💡 For 40 machines and 1TB of games:

60 + 1000 + (40 × 10) = 1460GB
1460 + 15% = ~1717GB (~1.8TB needed)

🔗 Learn more: ggRock Hardware Specs | Array Types | Array Guide

🧠 RAM Caching – Why RAM is Important

ggRock uses RAM to cache frequently accessed data, reducing the load on SSDs and speeding up delivery to client PCs.

Without caching, a single SSD couldn’t handle 40+ PCs requesting files simultaneously. With caching, common data (e.g., Fortnite files) is stored in RAM for fast access.

• RAM works as a FILO buffer (First In, Last Out).
• Once data is requested, it’s stored in RAM for future requests (until all available server RAM is used, then the oldest is cycled out).

Key RAM Guidelines:

• The more machines, the more RAM is needed.
• Prioritize RAM volume over speed or latency.

Recommended RAM:

• 🖥️ 20 Machines → 32GB
• 🖥️ 40 Machines → 64GB
• 🖥️ 100 Machines → 128GB
• 🖥️ 200 Machines → 256GB
• Add 128GB per 100 machines beyond that

🔗 More: ggRock Hardware Specs – RAM

🗂️ Writebacks and Snapshots

The initial diagram doesn’t cover how ggRock handles OS and Game Images as mounted virtual drives on each client.

ggRock uses Writebacks and Snapshots to manage changes safely and efficiently. Writebacks capture temporary changes per client, while Snapshots allow you to roll back or clone system states as needed.

🔗 Learn more here: How Writebacks and Snapshots Work

Hold Up!

Updated on: 10/12/2025