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.
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.
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!
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.
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.