Can i run games stored in my nas connected to my pc directly with an ethernet cable?

[loddio]

I have a nas with lots of storage, i was wondering if connecting it directly to my desktop pc with an Ethernet cable can handle playing games like having the drives directly on my desktop's motherboard. Bandwidth wise i know it is doable, just wondering if there will be some issues whatsoever.

[Needfuldoer]

1 minute ago, loddio said:

I have a nas with lots of storage, i was wondering if connecting it directly to my desktop pc with an Ethernet cable can handle playing games like having the drives directly on my desktop's motherboard. Bandwidth wise i know it is doable, just wondering if there will be some issues whatsoever.

You can map an SMB share to a drive letter and install games there, but you don't want to because that's much slower and higher latency than local storage.

 

Use the NAS as an archive for games you're not currently running instead.

[Kilrah]

Also some games/launchers will not accept to run from a network share.

[Slottr]

-Moved to Networking-

[LIGISTX]

If your NAS can do iSCSI, that would work just like it being a local harddrive. But iSCSI shares can only be accessed by a single network connected device, so you would want to create a separate dataset or storage area on the NAS and share that specific area via iSCSI. Bandwidth is “enough”, but latency and IOPS through the Ethernet stack are not “amazing”. It would work, but expect games to load and operate as if they were on an old school PC with OG (and slower) harddrives. Depending on the game, may not be noticeable, or may be pretty annoying. 

[voyager_]

I wouldn't, some game launchers won't support and those that do will probably run into issues with latency. Some things are best to keep stored locally. If you use steam you can pretty easily move games to another drive and you could point that to the network share then move them back to play if you don't play them often. We run into latency issues at work pretty often if large files are stored on a server. I regularly work with large scan files and project and the software doesn't like the latency and will cause it to be unstable, slow, or just fail to perform certain tasks.