Laptop Gaming from NAS

[19rockrose79]

Hi Everyone

 

I hope you’re all well given whats going on in the world atm!

 

Total newb here so please bear with me.  I’ve searched the forums and google and read similar posts and topics/videos. But they seem a few years old so wanted to double check for my situation at this point. 

 

I’ve never played a game on a laptop/PC but would like to set it up for the little ones while we’re on lockdown. I’m planning to buy a NAS drove for home - backups, video, audio, maybe CCTV etc and thought as I only have a laptop would it work for gaming too???

 

I have Cat 7 cabling in the house but the laptop doesn’t have a 10Gbe port and I’m not sure it can be added? So I’m assuming I can only work with max 1Gbe Ethernet.

 

Any advice on whether this will work?  If so, I’d be really grateful for recommendations of actual NAS drives and HDD I should consider buying to best suit this appliacation!!!

 

Many many thanks and stay safe!

[19rockrose79]

Apologies....my understandjnf is that I should install Steam to run games from and set it up on iSCSI (for which I shall rely heavily on your help and youtube)

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yea you can install games on a smb share(at least in steam), but why do this? Its going to be much slower than a local disk. WHy not just install the game on the local drive?

[Windows7ge]

If you're thinking of driving games for Steam off the NAS it's not going to be a great experience. They'll be much better off using the local SATA storage.

[Nick7]

I'm currently using such a setup.

Most of my games are over iSCSI, and 1Gbit network.

On NAS side it's Linux with 3x3TB drives in RAIDZ1 with ZFS, and iSCSI device as a file on ZFS filesystem.

I did create bcache layer under ZFS for some SSD speedup on NAS side, and this does help a lot.

 

Overall, it's working quite fine. It's faster than HDD, but ofc, slower a bit that SSD in laptop/computer.

I'm quite happy how it works, though having 10Gbit network would be nice.

With 1Gbit network you'll get upto ~100Mbytes/sec transfer speeds.

[19rockrose79]

Hi Everyone 

 

Thanks a lot for the replies. 

 

The reason to keep the games off the laptop is that it’s my work laptop and I’d rather have some separation betwettge laptop and the kids. But maybe an external SSD is a cheaper/better option. I think laptop can take a SATA SSD too. 

 

In terms of wireless games controller are there any u recommend?

 

Thanks again

[beersykins]

As per others you can install games via SMB/CIFS.  I had a similar setup for a while, although as per others the transfer rate is reduced to ~115MB/sec or so which is slower than most local drives.  A couple of games also had a huge amount of stutter on the main menu as they tried to load individual assets.

 

Otherwise, most things should work fine.