Install Games On NAS And Run The Games On A Network COmputer

[JonesTechReviews]

I am thinking of having all my installed games on the home NAS and just run the games from a local network computer off the NAS files. Anyone have a simple way of doing it or is it more difficult than I think. Also, I want to use my computer's hardware to run the games and the NAS to just store the game's files.

[TheGeeker]

As long as the game does not need Internet you should be fine. I seem to have trouble doing it but it technically should work. 100Mb/s is fine for games. 

[JonesTechReviews]

After testing on fake nas setups, it really doesn't like it. I'd like to see if Linus could solve it.

[tt2468]

I have my nas' shared folder mounted as a drive letter. This allows me to download all my files to the nas, and have it as basically a virtual local drive.

EDIT: It works just fine with my synology. Not sure about other brands. Really, as long as the nas runs samba, it should work fine.

[BrightCandle]

Use a samba share and map it to a drive and it works just fine. In some games it wont perform very well because the Random IO performance of remote drives is truly awful and its going to peak around 100MB/s in the best cases but a lot of games on load spend most of the time on the CPU anyway so its not going to be material in a lot of cases.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, JonesTechReviews said:

I am thinking of having all my installed games on the home NAS and just run the games from a local network computer off the NAS files. Anyone have a simple way of doing it or is it more difficult than I think. Also, I want to use my computer's hardware to run the games and the NAS to just store the game's files.

Yes I do this for my whole steam library. Go in to disk manager on your desktop and create a virtual disk (VHDX) and set the path to the UNC of the NAS share, once created browse to that path and double click the VHDX to mount it. This will make the virtual disk look and feel like a real disk and applications won't be able to tell it is actually on the NAS. Note do not map the share only browse to it i.e. \\server\share\ etc.

 

You can do it by mapping a network share but not every game works which is why I use the virtual disk method.