How do i begin with a Home Server to store my Games and files and acces it from any pc in my house?

[Sanedish]

So, i am currently running out of storage, after eating up 3tb, and i dont wanna throw more drives into my pc since they dont really fit. i also wanna be able to acces my games from everywhere in the house since i use a few pc's. i have 2 8TB NAS drives and an low power server wich i'd wanna use for this.

 

I also have an Pi5 8GB and an Pi4 1GB if these are suited better for only 2 drives.

Edited January 28 by Sanedish
slight correction

[Eigenvektor]

Running games directly from a network drive may work for some of them, but generally isn't supported and will likely lead to bad performance. You could either replace the drives you have with bigger ones, or uninstall games you aren't actively playing.

 

If you want to store game installers on a network drive to save bandwidth, there are ways to set up a caching server, e.g. for Steam: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/building-a-local-steam-caching-server-to-ease-the-bandwidth-blues/

[unijab]

Do you mean you want a steam cache server?

[LIGISTX]

13 hours ago, Sanedish said:

So, i am currently running out of storage, after eating up 3tb, and i dont wanna throw more drives into my pc since they dont really fit. i also wanna be able to acces my games from everywhere in the house since i use a few pc's. i have 2 8TB NAS drives and an low power server wich i'd wanna use for this.

 

I also have an Pi5 8GB and an Pi4 1GB if these are suited better for only 2 drives.

You can't access games on multiple computers like this.

 

Technically, yes, you can, but you would only want to be able to access the game data from one PC at a time. And by that I don't mean "only play the game on one PC at at ime", I mean definitely don't have the other PC's on at all if using a game over the network like this. If steam decides to do an update or for some reason access a file while another machine does the same, you could easily end up with corruption, data loss, etc. But, typically, games will not work very well over a normal SMB network connection. Some may, some may not, its really just random. The better solution is iSCSI which presents the network share as a block device (as if it was a local harddrive) to the networked machine, but iSCSI mounts CAN ONLY be accessed by a single machine, so this doesn't really help your "I want to access data from multiple PC's" portion of the question.

 

The thing to do is use the NAS as a normal NAS... to backup files, pictures, videos, etc. Don't try and run games or programs off of it. If you really want to do something like this, look into LANCache. It would allow you to download games to PC's over the network, so you could uninstal them when not needed but be able to reinstall them very quickly.

[Sanedish]

Thanks for the replys, but the ltt Forum somehow didn't save my changes for that past days, wich would have been that I don't want to store the games in the nas since it was just bad main language to English mixed with some stupid ideas.

But I might look into some of them...

[Sanedish]

3 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

The thing to do is use the NAS as a normal NAS... to backup files, pictures, videos, etc. Don't try and run games or programs off of it. If you really want to do something like this, look into LANCache. It would allow you to download games to PC's over the network, so you could uninstal them when not needed but be able to reinstall them very quickly.

Wich was the Original intensions. I will just mark this as solved and make a new post ngl.