[SOLVED] Should I consider a NAS storage device

[danielm175]

Hey,


I was wondering is it even worth having a NAS drive inside your own home, to store your games on like steam game progress and any other games and even your local files?

As technically if you had a NAS drive, could you play your steam games off their online games and offline games and save your offline/single player game progress. Then you could access that on a different laptop to carry on the game?

So for example, could you play Minecraft let’s say on your desktop PC running from the NAS drive then you save your world on the NAS drive. Then you went downstairs onto your laptop which is connected to same router, then play Minecraft off that NAS drive and open the same world you saved before on the desktop PC to the NAS drive?

Thanks.

 

[jeremyj_83]

In theory you can have games installed on your desktop/laptop that link to the NAS for storage. This would be like how things are done in the datacenters of the world with shared storage across multiple servers. However, you will be severely limited by your NAS and network speeds. Odds are you won't get anything more than 5400RPM HDD performance using that, in fact it will probably be less than that.

I have used NAS storage for things like movies and played them without any issues. However, I had 1GbE directly connected and movies, even 4k, cannot saturate a 1GbE link. Now if you have something like a 4 or 6 bay NAS using RAID10 storage and a 2.5GbE faster LAN then you might be OK.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Yes, you can do this. I did this with GTAV as a "why not?" test and it worked fine. However, a lot of games save data in a specific spot in your user folder and it's something you usually can't change. What you can do is create a symbolic link where the game would've saved to and point it to a location on the NAS.

 

[kanewolf]

Hey,


I was wondering is it even worth having a NAS drive inside your own home, to store your games on like steam game progress and any other games and even your local files?

As technically if you had a NAS drive, could you play your steam games off their online games and offline games and save your offline/single player game progress. Then you could access that on a different laptop to carry on the game?

So for example, could you play Minecraft let’s say on your desktop PC running from the NAS drive then you save your world on the NAS drive. Then you went downstairs onto your laptop which is connected to same router, then play Minecraft off that NAS drive and open the same world you saved before on the desktop PC to the NAS drive?

Thanks.

Can you make this work? YES. Will you be happy with the performance ? Probably not.

 

[danielm175]

Can you make this work? YES. Will you be happy with the performance ? Probably not.

Does the performance all depend on how fast my internet is then? Also, what would the performance affect anyway, like would it just be load time speeds on how fast the game file launches. Or will it be the whole game itself in terms of FPS and all of that. As surely the FPS and graphics is all down to the hardware the game is played on right... And not the NAS/internet speed of how fast the storage can make the game load?


Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

I tried this as well, in response to someone here telling me : "No way, you absolutely cannot do that!"

Yes, you can.
And yes, the performance is....so so.

The reason is simply the LAN traffic. Moving everything across the LAN in both directions instead of internally in the PC.

 

[danielm175]

I tried this as well, in response to someone here telling me : "No way, you absolutely cannot do that!"

Yes, you can.
And yes, the performance is....so so.

The reason is simply the LAN traffic. Moving everything across the LAN in both directions instead of internally in the PC.

What would the cheapest way of doing this be then? How much would it cost to get a basic NAS set up inside your home?

 

[USAFRet]

What would the cheapest way of doing this be then? How much would it cost to get a basic NAS set up inside your home?

All depends on your needs.

Mine started out as a replacement for a PC "home server"
Replaced by a 4 bay QNAP NAS.
Which then grew to include 2x 4 bay external things connected to it....12 drives total, ~80TB.

This is the recipient of nightly backups from all my house systems, 30 days of security camera footage, movie and music library, etc, etc.

A 2 bay QNAP for around $250:
https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-231K-Home-1GbE-Port/dp/B086X7FVSM
Then, whatever drives you wish to put in it.

Synology and Thecus are the other 2 common brands in this space.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Does the performance all depend on how fast my internet is then? Also, what would the performance affect anyway, like would it just be load time speeds on how fast the game file launches. Or will it be the whole game itself in terms of FPS and all of that. As surely the FPS and graphics is all down to the hardware the game is played on right... And not the NAS/internet speed of how fast the storage can make the game load?


Thanks

The performance depends a couple things. First how fast your drives are in your NAS. If you are running a single 5400RPM drive in the NAS your performance is going to be terrible. If you are instead running say an 8 disk RAID10 with 14TB WD Gold (datacenter grade HDDs) then you will have decent performance from the NAS. Second thing is how fast your is Local Area Network (LAN). This is different that internet speed as internet is everything going from your computer to somewhere other than inside your house. Your LAN is everything from your computer to other computer inside your house. If you have a fast enough LAN you can have the data moving from the NAS > Computer for processing pretty quick. However, there is still the latency (delay) issues with getting the data. Anytime you are working with moving data across slow connections (most home LANs are only 1Gb) you are going to be very limited in performance for graphics. Your FPS will be lower as the GPU is waiting for the data, your load times will be longer, and the game will feel not as responsive.