Storing Games On A NAS: Genius Or Foolish?

After running out of disk space on my PC a bunch of times, I decided to try storing games on my NAS instead. Well, I actually have two NASes: a Synology NAS with mechanical hard drives, and a Homelab NAS with NVMe drives (and 10Gb networking). So I decided to install six games on each of them, and see how they performed.

Would Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Metro Exodus, Rocket League, Sniper Elite 5 and Battlefield 2042 run best locally… or on my Synology NAS?

Okay I think we all know the answer to that, but I WAS actually surprised at just how well my NAS devices done… in most games, as I discuss in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgNRdMdLups&t=1s&ab_channel=TechOverwrite

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone, my main computer only has half a terabyte of free space, which just isn’t enough anymore because after installing three or four games, I’ve literally maxed out all of that space. Luckily though, I have two NASes. I’ve got a Synology NAS with 4 terabytes of free space and a homelab NAS with 8 terabytes of free space, so I’ve always wondered what would happen if I installed my games on there but then played them ultimately on my local computer, so using the CPU and the RAM and the GPU for my main computer but then actually having the games ultimately hosted on my NAS.

Well, I tried exactly that out, and the results are actually pretty interesting. The TL;DW is that I could probably imagine myself storing most, but not all, of my games on my Homelab NAS, with one or two exceptions.

Local Experience For Comparison

So let’s dive into the results. I decided to play with six different games, and the first one I checked out was Cyberpunk, which obviously installed on my computer and the two NASes as well. And locally on my computer, everything is stable and GPU limited as you’d expect. And when I tried driving as well, just to see if that would hammer the disc more or anything like that, it didn’t. The FPS rates were fairly stable, and everything was GPU limited.

So that is Cyberpunk. The next game I tried out was Sniper Elite 5, which is a pretty good modern game but doesn’t stretch things quite as much as Cyberpunk does. But with Sniper Elite 5, one of the reasons I chose it is it does tend to hammer the disc a lot more. I don’t think it’s very optimized for PC. There’s a lot more read and write, so I was interested to see how that would translate to the actual networking side of things. Would that slow things down too much?

Next up was Rocket League, which is quite a simple game. You always get really high FPS rates here, and again I’m in GPU limited, and actually you don’t get many reads or writes to the disc at all, so networking shouldn’t be as much of an issue here.

My fourth game then was Metro Exodus, and actually this doesn’t run very well on my computer, so I had to dial it down to 1440p. But again, it’s a good game to actually benchmark and test things out on.

Then the fifth game I was looking at was Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. I never like how these characters look, but there you go. I run the benchmarking mode, which I know doesn’t stretch things as much as real gameplay, but I thought it was a good baseline.

Next was Battlefield, which obviously has these big apps reading and writing quite a lot from the disc, so I thought this was a really good test to include. If I could get it working, and we’ll come back to that later on.

So those are the six games I’ve chosen as part of this experiment, and I kind of feel like it’s a good mix of slightly older games and newer games. I got games that constantly hammer the disc for some reason, and yes I’m looking at you, Sniper Elite 5, and then you got games that only load data once, for example in Rocket League, when it’s loading in a level, and then it doesn’t do much after that.

Specs Of My Two NAS

In terms of my NASes, my Synology NAS has mechanical hard drives running in RAID 1, so they are slower because it’s mechanical hard drives, and also my Synology NAS has a 1 Gigabit uplink, whereas my Homelab NAS does everything the exact opposite. It’s got super-fast NVMe space. I don’t use RAID for reasons I speak about in another video, and it’s got 10 Gb uplink to my computer. So everything is super fast. So it’d be quite interesting to actually compare the results and see whether they’re faster on my Homelab NAS than my Synology NAS. So let’s take a look.

Storing Games On My Synology NAS

So this is me just deleting the M drive from my Steam folder, which is my local NVMe, and then I’m copying my Steam library over to my NAS – as you can see there, it’s mounted as the S drive. You can see the IP address there. It’s going to take an absolute age so I decided to quickly run out and buy a giant inflatable snowman, which is not as weird as it sounds. There we go, look how cute it is!

Finally though, all the files copied over, so now we try out Cyberpunk. It was really slow and laggy just booting up the game. Then loading up a level took absolutely ages as well. I’ll skip ahead a minute or so, but actually I thought the FPS rates would be really bad, but they weren’t. This is on my Synology NAS, and again I’m being GPU limited. I think CPU usage might be slightly higher, so maybe there’s more work in coding and decoding the frames and things like that, but in general, FPS rates are fairly good. And that’s probably because all of the textures and stuff have now been loaded into VRAM and RAM, so it doesn’t matter as much about the actual disc on the Synology NAS.

I also tried driving around a lot, just to see whether that would pull more data down through the network and hammer the disc more and then result in more micro-stutters, but overall things were fairly stable. You can see the disc activity there, but FPS rates are fairly good in my opinion.

Next, move over to Sniper Elite 5, and everything took ages to load. That is usually almost instant. So you can see it is a lot slower. Then this lag, actually getting into the game. And I finally get into it, and I go over to the shooting range, and this is kind of interesting. The textures haven’t loaded at all, which is a bit of a concern, and actually I’ll come back to this point later. But no matter how much I tried, the textures just weren’t loading.

Usually on my computer, it takes one or two seconds and then they load, but here they just haven’t loaded. But then I thought I’ll go somewhere else and see whether the textures have loaded there. So on the right-hand side here, they still haven’t loaded. Or I guess it’s the left-hand side, isn’t it? But they haven’t loaded there. Let’s go back there, they still haven’t loaded. After a few minutes, though, the textures finally did load, so we can now see the nice man that we’re shooting at. And you can see this bandwidth coming down off the network is constantly hammering that disc on the Synology NAS, and I think that’s why we’re getting some of the slowness we’ve been looking at. This is a lot more bandwidth than we’ve seen in Cyberpunk, for example.

Next up, we come to Rocket League, which is at 1440p just due to a driver clash, but that doesn’t actually affect the results, which is that the bandwidth here is minimal. There’s barely any bandwidth at all because everything’s been loaded into memory. But when we actually switch to a new game or something like that, then you can see there’s a lot more network activity, and this is where the Synology NAS’s mechanical hard drives and also the Gigabit uplink will actually start being stressed, because you can see there’s a lot of network activity there, and that loading screen was quite slow. It’s usually very, very quick on my actual local computer.

Then we come to Metro, and it runs the same on my local computer when the files are stored on my local computer as it does on my Synology NAS. There was an issue, though, with the loading screens, where it did take ages for the game to load. Again, I get out of here, but basically, I’m not going to keep showing really long loading screens because that wouldn’t be very fun, but it did take around 1 minute to actually load up into this save game.

Next up, we come to Guardians of the Galaxy, and you can see that things look fairly smooth here. The FPS rates are good. I’m being GPU limited, and there’s not that much network bandwidth. But you can now see a loading screen appear for the benchmarking results, and usually this is quite quick, but here it’s taking ages.

Synology NAS Gaming Thoughts

So I kind of feel like I’ve been a bit too negative there, showing off the results on the Synology NAS, because overall, things were actually quite smooth. I was playing for multiple hours, and overall, I was pleasantly surprised at just how good things were, even with Cyberpunk. I was running around and driving around, trying to make it, you know, load loads of textures when driving fast, but it wasn’t too bad. And yes, there were some micro-stutters and FPS lows, which I’ll talk about later in this video, but in general, I was actually pleasantly surprised at just how well my NAS had done.

Battlefield 2024 DRM!!11!

However, there was an exception, which is Battlefield. I haven’t covered that yet, and actually, there’s a reason for that. I start playing the game installed on my NAS, and immediately it stops and then goes to validating, and you can actually see now my network traffic is really high, and on the Synology NAS, on the monitoring section, the disc is being hammered because Steam is checking everything, and that happens again and again. You can see the EA launcher came up there quickly, then it died, and it went back to validating, and it takes around 20 minutes to validate each time. And you can see that it’s definitely installed on the Synology NAS, but it just will not run. So that sucks. It just wouldn’t load, and every time it went into that verifying stage, it did that for at least 20 minutes, and I did that multiple times, I think three or four times, and I just couldn’t get it working.

I tried uninstalling the game, doing a fresh reinstall, but every single time, the EA launcher would pop up, it would crash, and then ultimately, that verifying step would kick in again, which is really annoying. Now, I wasn’t sure whether that was due to the mechanical hard drives because ultimately, the game specs do say that an SSD is recommended, although I kind of doubted that to be honest, but let’s have a look at the Homelab results and see whether anything improves.

Homelab NAS Game Storage

Now, we look at this loading screen, yet another loading screen, sorry, and it is fast. You can see the progress bar actually works, and I can get into the game. So that was immediately a lot snappier than my Synology NAS. And again, I’m looking around inside the game, and as we probably already know by now, things are going to be really snappy, not because it’s Homelab NAS, but because at this stage, everything’s been loaded into the RAM and the VRAM, so I don’t have any issues with my FPS rates or anything like that. I’m going to look around, and everything looks quite good, and my GPU is the limiting factor here. You can see it’s pretty much maxed out. So I’ll just run down this hill, and again, everything is stable, and at this point, you’ll see my FPS lows actually go back to a normal level because at first, they were affected by loading the game.

You can see here, I’m not really getting any FPS lows or stutters or anything like that. It’s all fairly good. So now, we can come to Sniper Elite. I’ve just joined the game, and you can see we have the texture issue again, which sucks. But let’s see if it actually does load. On my local computer, it would have loaded by now. On my Homelab NAS, there we are, it’s now kicked in. So it is a lot quicker than the Synology NAS, which took 2 or 3 minutes. Here, it took around 10 seconds. There is that delay, but it’s not too bad. But you can see the network traffic here is going nuts. It’s massive. That’s quite a high usage. It’s probably just about above a Gigabit networking level, so it is actually downloading quite a lot of data, and it’s constantly doing that. It’s just constantly hammering the bandwidth and hence the NVMe discs on my NAS.

Next up, we come to Rocket League, and everything was absolutely fine here, other than my terrible, terrible technique. There, I don’t even think it’s going to go in. No, it won’t. Other than a terrible hit, though, everything was super smooth in Rocket League. As you can see there, the gameplay is completely normal. I’m getting really good FPS rates. If I now change to another level, no, not there, go on to training. If I change to a different level, let’s see how quickly it loads. So my Synology NAS would have taken ages and been loading, but you can see it’s now gone in. So again, with my Homelab NAS, things are a lot quicker, and the network activity now is slowed down. There’s barely anything being taken down through the network because it’s all been loaded into RAM and VRAM.

Then we come to Metro, and again, things are fairly good. We get standard FPS rates, which you’d expect because, again, once everything’s been loaded in, the GPU will be the limiting factor. And you can see there’s a decent amount of network activity. It’s not super massive, either, considering this is kilobytes, not megabytes.

And now, we come into Guardians of the Galaxy, the end of the benchmarking section, and the GPU is the limiting factor here. The FPS rates are fine, and then the benchmarking results need to actually be displayed. You can see some network traffic, but unlike my Synology NAS, which took quite a long time, after a little bit of a delay, you can see the results on the screen now, so they came through a lot quicker than the Synology NAS.

And now, we come to Battlefield, and we had the exact same issue. I was hoping that maybe it would magically work better, but I just had constant issues with verifying and disc errors. You click play, and then it would crash again, or the EA launcher would appear like it’s doing now, and then after thinking about it a little bit, it would die and go back to validating. So in the end, I just given up and deleted the game.

Thoughts On Homelab NAS Gaming

So there you have it. Everything is faster and smoother with my Homelab NAS, which isn’t completely unexpected because I’ve got 10 times the networking on the Homelab NAS, 10 Gb, not 1 Gb, and it’s also got NVMe drives and not mechanical hard drives. So if you were going to choose a system that would be running smoother, it would be the Homelab NAS. And the Synology NAS wasn’t bad. It’s just the Homelab NAS was a lot better. The loading screens were all really fast, pretty much on par with my main computer, and I didn’t get as much micro-stutters and things like that. The FPS lows in my Homelab NAS were generally a bit better than with my Synology NAS. So that’s kind of all interesting, but of course, there were some issues throughout.

Issue #1: Game Crashes

The main issue was that I couldn’t get Battlefield running with either my Homelab NAS or my Synology NAS, which completely sucks. And I think, looking online, a lot of people moan about the DRM inside Battlefield, and I think that’s probably the main reason because, effectively, Steam had no issue with launching the game, which in this case was loading the EA launcher, but then the EA launcher will be checking all the DRM crap as part of one of the first things it does, and it crashes at that stage, and then Steam has to verify things again and again, and I just couldn’t get it past that stage. So that is the first issue.

Issue #2: Loading…

The second issue when I’ve touched it, right, especially with the Synology NAS, is the really slow loading times. With the Synology NAS, we did see loading screens take absolutely ages, with Cyberpunk one time, it took almost a minute to actually load a level compared to my Homelab NAS and my main computer, which loaded it in less than 10 seconds. And of course, that’s not entirely unexpected. I’m not trying to beat on my Synology NAS because, ultimately, I chose to put mechanical hard drives in it as opposed to, like, SATA SSDs or something like that.

Issue #3: 1% FPS Lows

The third issue I actually noticed with gaming on a home network compared to locally is that you get more micro-stutters. So essentially, you’re playing the game, and things just briefly lag or just stop working, and effectively, your FPS rate might dip down to like one or two frames while some new textures loaded or things like that. And obviously, we’ve seen that a lot more with the Synology NAS and the Homelab NAS. Actually, my Homelab NAS’s FPS lows were quite similar to my main computer, but again, with the Synology NAS, partly due to the mechanical hard drives and partly due to its networking, it just had a lot of issues with FPS lows and things like that.

Issue #4: Texture Glitches

And that brings me on to the next issue, which is textures loading and weird glitches and things like that, and again, this was an issue I noticed with the NAS, but not actually my Homelab NAS. There, sometimes, you’d be walking up to some rocks, for example, in Cyberpunk, and suddenly, the textures would change in the Synology NAS, and that’s because they’re kind of streaming and loading in the background, and finally, they get applied. And again, yeah, it’s not the end of the world, and certainly, if you have a mechanical hard drive in your computer right now, you’ll probably notice this all the time.

Issue #5: Gigabit Isn’t Enough

But that brings me up to the final issue, the fifth issue, which you can have with storing your games on a home network and then gaming on the computer. The home networking setup is actually a key factor because my Synology NAS only has a 1 Gb uplink, and that wasn’t actually enough. Often, my Homelab NAS was reading more than this, and also, my disc, when I was gaming originally, was using more than 1 Gb, so that’s actually a key point in this video, is that you need at least SATA SSDs and at least a 2.5 Gb switch, and also an uplink, and that means that on your computer as well, you’d also need to have at least a 2.5 Gb port on your motherboard or networking card or something like that.

So… Should You Do This?!

But actually, I think the results here were quite interesting, and my Homelab NAS performed pretty much the same as my local gaming did. I didn’t get loads of FPS lows. My average FPS rates were really good, and my games’ loading screens were really fast and snappy as well. So I could actually see myself storing most of my games on my Homelab NAS and then at least that will give me more disk space on my main computer. Other than Battlefield, of course, because that has the horrible DRM that completely sucks and meant that I couldn’t run it on my Synology NAS or my Homelab NAS, which is rubbish.

If you know the exact details of why this is happening, please let me know in the comments because it would be really interesting to know. But in general, I feel like this was actually a really good experiment, and certainly, my Homelab NAS performed just as well as my main computer in my opinion. And I hope you found this video useful. If you did, please click the thumbs up button, and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching.