We've talked before about reasons for you to get a NAS, but here's a novel purpose for having one: running your games through it. While it might sound crazy to run an application as heavy as gaming over the network, it can be convenient if you're juggling your games between several PCs and you don't want to (or can't) keep a copy on all of them. The downside to the convenience is that running off a network is slower than running on local storage, but for some applications, this might not be a terrible trade-off. We'll show you how to set up your network folders so that they can be used to run games from, and talk about our experiences running some games this way.
This doesn't apply to only games, but for the purposes of this article, that's what we'll be focusing on.
How to set up network directories
Before you can run games from or install games to your NAS, you'll need to set up its network directories so that your computer can use it like a local directory.
Setting up network drives on Windows
Verify that on your network connection, Windows thinks you're on a Private Network. You can do this by right-clicking the network icon and selecting "Open Network and Sharing Center."
Alternatively, you can open Control Panel, go to "Network and Internet," then "Network and Sharing Center."
If for some reason Windows thinks you're on a Public Network, there's a relatively quick fix. Go to Control Panel → Network and Internet → HomeGroup. Click the "Start the HomeGroup troubleshooter."
Skip the "Troubleshoot Network Problems" step. After running its course, the troubleshooter should ask to change the network to private. Apply the fix and verify the network is private.
If all is well and your NAS is set up properly, open Explorer and go to "Network." You should be able to see your NAS in the "Computer" section.
If you don't see it here, you can try accessing it by typing up the NAS's name, prepended with "\\", in the file directory text box at the top. For example, using this NAS as an example, it can be accessed by typing in "\\NASF68703" in the directory text box (without the quotes). In most cases, the name of a NAS can be found on its interface page when you configure it from your web browser.
When you've accessed the NAS, you should see folders with pipes on their icons. This indicates that you can map them to a network drive. Right click the folder where your games are, then select "Map network drive…."
Next, it will ask what drive letter to assign the folder; it will default to the last available letter in the alphabet. Input any login information required. If you're doing this on multiple computers, then you may have to use another account on the NAS for each computer to access the folders and mount the drive.
If successful, the network folder will be in Explorer → This PC under "Network Locations." It can be used like any other drive.
Mounting network folders on Linux
As with most advanced features of Linux, you'll need to use the command line to set up a network folder. Open a command line terminal and input the following commands:
showmount -e <IP Address of NAS>
This is to verify what folders on your NAS are being shared. If a folder is not being shared, you'll need to add it to your NAS's shared folders
mkdir /mnt/<name of folder>
This is to create a mounting point. It can be anywhere, but convention is it should go to /mnt
id
Take note of the "uid" and "gid" fields. You'll need these in order to have read/write privileges on your network folder
After you've done all that, do the following actions as root (either login using "su" or prepend "sudo" to all of these). This is also assuming you're using a Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
apt-get update
apt-get install cifs-utils
mount -t cifs //<IP address of NAS>/<Shared folder> <mount point> -o username=<username>,uid=<uid of account>,gid=<gid of account>
As an example, the final mount command looks like this:
mount -t cifs //192.168.1.42/Public /mnt/public -o username=admin,uid=1000,gid=1000
This will bring up a login prompt for the password. If successful, the mounted folder now acts like any other local folder, even to install new games.
The experience of playing games on a NAS
The NAS we're using to test this is Q-NAP's TS-251 with two 4TB Western Digital Red drives in RAID1. This is hooked up to a ASUS RT-AC68U router, which has gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac speeds of up to 1.3Gbits/s, and 802.11n speeds of up to 600Mbits/s. We'll be testing gameplay over Ethernet and Wi-Fi. For the wireless tests, the computer was placed in a room about 25 feet away from the router, a typical distance in an apartment setting.
The games we used for testing were a mix of modern and older games, going all the way down to a DOS favorite:
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Civilization V
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Grand Theft Auto
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
MotoGP 15
Ultimate Doom
Of all of these, we had the following issues.
Skyrim wouldn't run off the network, at least on our setup. It went into a loop of needing the NAS's login credentials.
Ultimate Doom had a hiccup or two initially, but played fine after we fixed them.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 stuttered while loading on Wi-Fi, and for some reason, wouldn't let us skip the mission briefing cinematic even after appearing to finish loading. This was run several times to be sure.
GTA V had the most interesting issue. Playing on Ethernet or 802.11ac was similar to playing locally, but 802.11n was where the lower bandwidth started to hamper the gaming experience. There were occasions when the game would freeze, and there were many times when portions of the map wouldn't appear as the NAS was trying to keep up, as shown here:
With that in mind, here are the loading times from the main menu (or similar) for starting a game session for the games we got working. As Skyrim wasn't working and Ultimate Doom loaded more or less instantly on all interfaces, they are not included in the graph.
It's like a media center for games, if you're patient
If you can imagine the convenience of a using a NAS to store all your movies and music so that they can be accessed from your networked devices, this solution is akin to that for gaming PCs. However, if you decide to go this route you may want to stick with Ethernet, as it showed an incremental increase in loading time. If you go wireless, then your load times increase dramatically, which limits the usefulness of running games from a NAS. While you can decrease load times using 10 gigabit Ethernet, the NICs alone would cost nearly as much as a diskless NAS unit.
So, what's the point? For older or less-demanding games that you play often, running them from a NAS would make sense if you're running a pure SSD system with not a lot of room to spare. There's also the option of running the same game for multiple users, but you may want to limit this to your less-demanding games.
If anything, you can also keep the games on the NAS drive at the ready to copy onto your computer. It'll be a lot faster than downloading it from the Internet.
This works for any program
While the focus of the article was on games, it's worth mentioning that many programs can be run in this manner. The only caveat is that programs that require activation or in some way care that they were properly installed might not work. But if your tools and utilities are small, it wouldn't hurt to keep one copy on the NAS and launch it from there on the computers that use it.
