Playing Games Off NAS

[Judd]

This is completely hypothetical but let’s say I have a Pc solely for being a NAS. Multiple SSD’s and a 10GbE port. I what I was wondering is on a completely different computer, can I install games from steam directly onto the NAS? In my hypothetical scenario it would be connected over 10GbE. I understand you could not bring another computer in and immediately start playing. I know you need to install it from one computer. But, I would thinks this would work because it’s basically the same as installing a game on a different HDD.

[WereCat]

Yes, you can afaik.

[AMDNeko]

Add it as a network drive within windows, wire it up and you are off to the races. Since you mention GbE I assume you are not attempting wireless so I see zero issues.

[ProjectBox153]

As long as you’re on wired ethernet it should work. I think it might even work over regular Gigabit ethernet without the need for the fancy SSDs and NICs. 

[NinjaQuick]

So, one caveat is the latency NAS introduces. Games might make a lot of small read write calls, which get buffered, sent, received, read/written, buffered again and resent and re-received. Many NAS devices have decent throughput for large files, or one file at a time, but they are remote machines with their own OS that is actually handling all the requests, typically on pretty sad and slow hardware.