Install games on a NAS - Play them on a pc ?

[Lean18]

Hello, as this is my first post, ill try to deeply explain what i want to do. So, i had an idea, to build a simple and 'low-power' NAS to be as my file server, for, lets say, school projects and etc. Also, as i recently started to use my steam account by buying CS:GO and playing it on there, i started to think about, is it possible, when i buy new games, to install the game files on the NAS, and still be able to play them on my school/gaming PC? If this is possible, i could store all my game data there, same with bigger projects for school, and still be able to use the space of my 1TB Seagate drive for other things that i might need sooner than those on the NAS. Also, i dont really know how to run the NAS, cause im not familliar with servers and Windows Server/Linux Ubuntu Server operating systems, later on, i might need an advice on that too. If my net speed and the parts for my School/gaming pc and NAS are needed to be listed, just ask.Firstly, i just need to know if this is possible.

[themctipers]

possible in theory, see if steam lets you install to a SMB folder. 

[Lean18]

It would be nice if you would have told that SMB short in full words. Thanks. 

[themctipers]

9 minutes ago, DxMoose said:

It would be nice if you would have told that SMB short in full words. Thanks. 

or else i dont get a notification

 

that is the protocol that windows uses to see network share folders.

 basically, get windows server to share a folder on your NAS, and see if your PC can access it. Then, see if steam can install to that. If it can, it probably will work. If it can't, no dice.

[Lean18]

6 minutes ago, themctipers said:

or else i dont get a notification

 

that is the protocol that windows uses to see network share folders.

 basically, get windows server to share a folder on your NAS, and see if your PC can access it. Then, see if steam can install to that. If it can, it probably will work. If it can't, no dice.

Okay, thanks. Ill try that when i actually get to build the NAS, ive yet to get a more powerful CPU and more ram, cause afterall, im building this NAS out of old pc parts. Probably being a Core 2 Duo E8600 ( with a little overclock cause why not ) Asus P5GC-MX/1333 and 4Gb of DDR2 ram and few HDDs, the first being a old Seagate 160Gb one as a test subject. All of the drives will be Sata ones of course.

[themctipers]

Just now, DxMoose said:

Okay, thanks. Ill try that when i actually get to build the NAS, ive yet to get a more powerful CPU and more ram, cause afterall, im building this NAS out of old pc parts. Probably being a Core 2 Duo E8600 ( with a little overclock cause why not ) Asus P5GC-MX/1333 and 4Gb of DDR2 ram and few HDDs, the first being a old Seagate 160Gb one as a test subject.

you dont really need that much powerful hardware in a NAS if you're not hitting it hard for a long time. i have mine with a i3 530 and 7gb ram and the speeds are bottlenecked by sata 3gbit speeds  

[Lean18]

Just now, themctipers said:

you dont really need that much powerful hardware in a NAS if you're not hitting it hard for a long time. i have mine with a i3 530 and 7gb ram and the speeds are bottlenecked by sata 3gbit speeds  

Thats still far more powerful than mine will be . Dude, you have a i3 and 7 gigs, not like me with a Core2 duo and only 4.

[themctipers]

2 minutes ago, DxMoose said:

Thats still far more powerful than mine will be . Dude, you have a i3 and 7 gigs, not like me with a Core2 duo and only 4.

only by slightly, thats first gen i3  

the ram is there because i can lol, FreeNAS is really RAM limited if you're doing transfers

[Lean18]

Just now, themctipers said:

only by slightly, thats first gen i3  

the ram is there because i can lol, FreeNAS is really RAM limited if you're doing transfers

Oooh, yeah, i know about FreeNAS and about it being a ram hog, i believe the min recommended was 4Gb.

[themctipers]

Just now, DxMoose said:

Oooh, yeah, i know about FreeNAS and about it being a ram hog, i believe the min recommended was 4Gb.

thanks zfs!

 

ZFS is amazing though. i love it, too bad i have repurposed my freenas pc into a bunsenlabs machine (think even lighter lubuntu with vsftpd installed)

 

also im using NTFS on that drive now as its my main 'usb' (yes its an ssd, external ssd bay to usb) 

[Lean18]

Oh boy, how i like CPUboss. In the first pic, the winner is the i3 with no doubt, but in the second one, they declare the E8600 as the winner. w0t ?

[Lean18]

6 minutes ago, themctipers said:

thanks zfs!

 

ZFS is amazing though. i love it, too bad i have repurposed my freenas pc into a bunsenlabs machine (think even lighter lubuntu with vsftpd installed)

 

also im using NTFS on that drive now as its my main 'usb' (yes its an ssd, external ssd bay to usb) 

Ive tried to install FreeNAS on the same mobo but with a E2200 Pentium and 1Gb ram ( far less that recommended ), but failed. I dont know if i was doing it right, but it didnt give me any ip to go to and configure it as shown in some pictures on google.

[themctipers]

Just now, DxMoose said:

Ive tried to install FreeNAS on the same mobo but with a E2200 Pentium and 1Gb ram ( far less that recommended ), but failed. I dont know if i was doing it right, but it didnt give me any ip to go to and configure it.

you need to configure it so that it takes one from DHCP on your router (usually 192.168.0.1) or that it makes its own and tells the router go fuck yourself this is MY ip dont use it

 

its done in the setup process, i think. i did it 9 months ago.

[Lean18]

1 minute ago, themctipers said:

you need to configure it so that it takes one from DHCP on your router (usually 192.168.0.1) or that it makes its own and tells the router go fuck yourself this is MY ip dont use it

 

its done in the setup process, i think. i did it 9 months ago.

Yeah.... Then i think i might have done something wrong, by the way, that ip is the default gateway of my router, so i cant really use it. But thats different for each router, so its ok. If i understood you correctly..... I could build a PC, and thats what i like to do, but im a complete noob at networking things. I only know how to port-forward things.

[themctipers]

Just now, DxMoose said:

Yeah.... Then i think i might have done something wrong, by the way, that ip is the default gateway of my router, so i cant really use it. But thats different for each router, so its ok.

you have to manually input which IP is your router so it can communicate with it and say hey im a thing please acknowledge me and give me an IP so i can send boops and you can beep back at me

[Lean18]

1 minute ago, themctipers said:

you have to manually input which IP is your router so it can communicate with it and say hey im a thing please acknowledge me and give me an IP so i can send boops and you can beep back at me

Okay. Thanks for all the help,  i may try to download FreeNAS again tomorrow and try it with the 1gb of ram and a super low power dual core. Hopefully everything works like it should.

[79wjd]

16 hours ago, themctipers said:

Then, see if steam can install to that. If it can, it probably will work. If it can't, no dice.

Steam has no issues installing to a networked share. I installed a game on my NAS onto an AFP share, although I never actually ran the game from the NAS. 

16 hours ago, themctipers said:

you dont really need that much powerful hardware in a NAS if you're not hitting it hard for a long time. i have mine with a i3 530 and 7gb ram and the speeds are bottlenecked by sata 3gbit speeds  

Unless you have a 10gb NIC on the server, desktop, and all networking devices in between, the limiting factor will be your network, not the drives or the cpu speed. Even a POS cpu can handle 125MB/s transfers. 

[Lean18]

1 hour ago, djdwosk97 said:

Steam has no issues installing to a networked share. I installed a game on my NAS onto an AFP share, although I never actually ran the game from the NAS. 

Unless you have a 10gb NIC on the server, desktop, and all networking devices in between, the limiting factor will be your network, not the drives or the cpu speed. Even a POS cpu can handle 125MB/s transfers. 

Talking about net speeds. mines 100mbps upload and same for download.

[jkirkcaldy]

The 125MBs is internal transfer speeds from your computer to the nas. (Theoretical speed if both ends are wired via ethernet and the drives on either side can read/write at a sustained speed of 125MBs or greater.)

 

It doesn't matter what your Internet speed is. Even installing games onto a nas you won't be able to play them over the Internet or wifi. You will need to be plugged in via ethernet either 1gb or higher. 

 

I think you can in theory play games from a nas. Although it may be worth looking to iSCSI if this is something you want more stability. This in laymen terms let's you mount a network drive like it is a plugged into your computer directly. It's a bit more complicated than that but for simplicity sake I won't go into it any deeper. 

 

You will have to read up on setting up an iSCSI drive though as it's quite a bit more complicated than a normal shared folder on a nas. 

 

To be honest, although not quite as interesting or fun to do, you may be better off getting normal usb3 drives for your games and using the nas for file storage. 

[Lean18]

16 minutes ago, jkirkcaldy said:

The 125MBs is internal transfer speeds from your computer to the nas. (Theoretical speed if both ends are wired via ethernet and the drives on either side can read/write at a sustained speed of 125MBs or greater.)

 

It doesn't matter what your Internet speed is. Even installing games onto a nas you won't be able to play them over the Internet or wifi. You will need to be plugged in via ethernet either 1gb or higher. 

 

I think you can in theory play games from a nas. Although it may be worth looking to iSCSI if this is something you want more stability. This in laymen terms let's you mount a network drive like it is a plugged into your computer directly. It's a bit more complicated than that but for simplicity sake I won't go into it any deeper. 

 

You will have to read up on setting up an iSCSI drive though as it's quite a bit more complicated than a normal shared folder on a nas. 

 

To be honest, although not quite as interesting or fun to do, you may be better off getting normal usb3 drives for your games and using the nas for file storage. 

or to be honest, i just started to think, why would i need to store my games on a NAS, same with some school projects, if i could just get a 4Tb drive, install it in the pc, reinstall all my steam games and there i go. One 4Tb drive on a well-known online store ( in Latvia ) costs 115 Euros - A Seagate barracuda one, tho its only 5900RPM

[Blebekblebek]

I've doing it for years

1Gbps is more than enough to deliver data constantly, but even then most of the time it's rarely hitting 1Gbps, if you can afford 10GbE network go for it.

SMB or iSCSi or even both what ever method you desire, in my case it's SMB, Add network drive and done.

On steam client, just add default folder to your NAS Drive folder, and you're good to go.

Now as other client such as origin/uplay and probably GoG the network drive method doesn't work

it just won't load or simply fail when you've tried to locate your network folder.

The software insist only to use local drive which is very annoying since my SSD is only that much., but iSCSi will work fine, since it will emulate as local drive instead network drive.

 

Unlike other people, instead using freenas/nas4free and I use windows 10 for my NAS simply because it works, easy to setup, and very straight forward with all the feature and setup for my needs. The only drawback of Windows 10 as OS for NAS is 20 concurrent users, which I would never hit that limit.

I've use it for storage, torrent, web proxy, and in the future I also want to add NVR as well.

[Lean18]

Okay, thanks for that wery good  detailed answer, but as i said, im bad at networking, and if a make a NAS even with simple windows home version and few HDDs stripped to it, how can i make it show up like that ?? Im talking about the DrivePool (Z:)

[Pixel5]

there is no advantage to storing games on a NAS, there are only disadvantages and nobody should do this unless he has full 10gbit networks setup.

[Blebekblebek]

19 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

there is no advantage to storing games on a NAS, there are only disadvantages and nobody should do this unless he has full 10gbit networks setup.

I have family, my wife also a gamer, there are 4 machine I can use in my house.

Sometimes my friends also come over to play, our favourite game is Dota2

 

instead Installing each machine the same game, the game is stored in NAS, load up to 4 machines at the same time.

Sure more speed is great, but most games files are not just 1 single big file. often it's thousands smaller file to load, so even at 1gbps it's rarely hitting that number.

No advantage? wow, so much credibility for someone who never done it.

 

This is 1gbps diskless (yes diskless) on 100 unit game center (or net cafe, or whatever you want to call it)

 

[Pixel5]

42 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

I have family, my wife also a gamer, there are 4 machine I can use in my house.

Sometimes my friends also come over to play, our favourite game is Dota2

 

instead Installing each machine the same game, the game is stored in NAS, load up to 4 machines at the same time.

Sure more speed is great, but most games files are not just 1 single big file. often it's thousands smaller file to load, so even at 1gbps it's rarely hitting that number.

No advantage? wow, so much credibility for someone who never done it.

 

This is 1gbps diskless (yes diskless) on 100 unit game center (or net cafe, or whatever you want to call it)

 

i actually have done this before and had some games installed on my NAS, when you are dealing with a stationary PC there is no advantage beside that you maybe only need to install the game once.

But with disk space being so cheap that doesnt really matter.

 

also the video you linked is something entirely different, these are just think clients booting their OS on a server and displaying the result on the thin client.

Good system if you have a low latency network setup and network speed doesnt really matter cause all you send are inputs from the user and compressed video streams to the thin clients.