Can You Play Games From A NAS ?

Modern games are taking more and more storage but can you play games on your NAS or from a server?

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[mhyteeL]

4 years late but with the release of the Steam Deck this has become a GREAT option. I mounted a NAS to my steam deck using SMB&CIFS (so that the deck thinks the drive is installed locally) that is full of ROMS and play them all over the network. Everything has been running great!

[victorjohnson]

Short answer: NO with a but,
Long answer: YES with an if...

[meshuggah]

would be awesome to have a huge NAS to run Plex and Games from, at least 12TB combined storage with RAID 10 (4x 6TB drives) or maybe 18TB using Raid 5 with a bit of sacrifice in speed.

[andrewskaterrr]

125MBps is the max theoretical bandwidth. You have to take into consideration that packet headers take up bandwidth. So the actual payload size that contains the game data will be lower.

From my 1TB Mushkin Reactor SSD or my 500GB 850 EVO I get 112MBps to my 6x4TB RAID6 NAS. Max burst I’ve seen was 115MBps. This is at the saturation point of a 1Gb connection.

Btw, having Raid1 Mirror is a bad idea for this, RAID0 would help a lot with game loading speeds due to the terrible 4K read/writes of mechanical drives. I know it was already set up this way but just a FYI.

[SilenceGProd]

dude show comparisons. before-after, a baseline... these graphs are useless without a baseline and a comparison

[nissedhulla]

I think the performance numbers you're getting are a little underwhelming. I have been using my Steam library via iSCSI for several years now, and the performance I'm getting is like a slow(ish) SSD, rather than a spinning disk.

Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 5) : 121.245 MB/s [ 29600.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 5) : 121.409 MB/s [ 29640.9 IOPS]

Obviously it won't go faster than 122 MB/s on a 1G network, but the only time a spinning disk will beat that is in sequential read/write, which you will almost never have when loading games.

[n_kliesow]

I guess the idea using a custom NAS (with high redundancy for Transfers) or SAN for lower latency would be great. The performance will increase because your CPU needs less lanes to get data and is fully concentrated on keep the game running. The lack of downstream can be solved in a redundant network or maybe two networks (one private for NAS and one public for internet routing). In fact it will mostly profit by those who share their hardware for more computer "terminals" playing. The latency will be the most problem, as I said SAN would be better if you can trust all "private" users in the network.

[tazking]

Sounds like steam uses some sort of lock file in the folder where your game is installed. i.e. creates/edits a file in a given location, should that edit/file be present, it wont run.

Unless you are installing mods or somehow permanently changing game materials, If you can run the game in a read only mode, barring save files, you should be able to run multiple instances from the same install location.

[AgeCrash]

I dont use a NAS. but the Link from Steam work very fine. 6$ @ the last Winter Sale.

[Cragst]

I want steam on 55tb nas, and cache, but buying 10gb nic

[noobulon]

I'm using nfs and there is a mount option to cache reads to local storage. I have a 500gb ssd in my rig and everything else is stored on my homebrew nas, with the caching load times are pretty near instant (assuming you've loaded the game recently)

[hayzeproductions]

4 1tb Drives in Raid 5, and 4 64gb solid state drives, 2 in raid 1, and the other 2 Raid 0, (Will Explain Raid Setup Later) Dell Poweredge R720 24gb of ram, 2X 12 core xeon's @ 2.6ghz, and 2X 4-port gigabit Ethernet cards, HP Procurve 2510-48g Smart Switch, server and switch configured in LAGG (Link Aggregation 802Ad) can put out a hell of a lot of speed over lan plus distribute over a lan network for not just 1 but multiple. pcs playing games (WITH NO LAGGING ISSUES). Where your pit falls are in your configuration from the start is equipment and software. Your speeds are very shotty, this is not to put you down but in pure honesty. I live in america and when it comes to networking in my life, its either GO BIG or go home.
The reason for my Raid config
4X 1 Terabyte drives - Pure NAS Storage for your games network storage etc,
2X 64gb SSD Raid 1 - Operating system for your Virtual Machine server 1 drive goes down you wont be at a loss, just buy another cheap 64 gb ssd put it in there without even restarting the server.

2X 64gb SSD Raid 0 - This is your hot swap storage for your data to pass through, drive cache for faster loading games and provides reduction wear on your 1tb drives running under raid 5.
If 1 of those ssd drives fail both drives in the raid 0 will go down, but only 1 needs replaced, it wont be an emergency if they do go down because its just your hot swap memory. the server will be able to just retrieve the original data from the 1tb drives until your hot swap drive is replaced and rebuilt inside the raid config settings in If the right Virtual machine server software is installed you cant go wrong with avoiding downtime with amazing well respected performance.

[MusicOfTheNight]

Would you be able to run multiple steam libraries off one NAS for each user to avoid corruption issues? I realize this would be ridiculous because it would take up double the space if each user has all of the same games installed but if it works then it works, right? Has anyone tried this?

[GraveyardGrog]

Threw all my roms and emulators on my NAS and played them with no issues what so ever : )

[FlaxTheSeedOne]

big pro you can share the same library among multiple pcs