A centralized Network-Attached Storage rig capable of running data archival and file-sharing tasks is a great addition to any user’s repertoire, regardless of whether you identify as a data hoarder or belong to the casual user base. Aside from their terrific backup provisions, modern NAS devices can double as excellent media servers, home automation hubs, and surveillance systems.

That said, turning a NAS into a storage machine for Steam games sounds nothing short of preposterous. But having attempted this wacky project on more than one occasion, I can confirm that storing games on a NAS is a viable solution for folks running out of disk space (and slots) on their gaming rigs. In fact, I recently made some modifications to my computing setup to reduce the loading times when running huge open-world titles.

Some initial preparations

iSCSI is the linchpin of this operation

When I set out to store games on a NAS ages ago, I went with the tried-and-tested Samba protocol. While it’s good enough for ordinary NAS operations, the file-sharing protocol resulted in micro-stutter and performance issues, if not outright refusing to launch certain games.

That’s when I turned my attention to iSCSI shares. For the uninitiated, iSCSI is a block-sharing protocol that maps the network drive as a local volume for the PC. While doing so effectively relegates the iSCSI dataset to a single machine, it was just the panacea needed for my performance woes.

TrueNAS Scale remains my preferred OS

Since I wanted maximum performance for this setup, I installed TrueNAS Scale on my TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus (more on that in a bit). While TOS has come a long way since its early days, the sixth iteration of the first-party NAS distribution doesn’t support the all-powerful ZFS.

Then there’s the fact that I’m more familiar with TrueNAS Scale than TOS 6, so configuring the NAS would be a cakewalk. Plus, I probably voided the NAS’ warranty ages ago by attempting to run ESXi (which is an entirely different story), so it’s not like I had anything to lose by picking my favorite ZFS-powered NAS distro.

All-flash storage and 10GbE NICs are a match made in heaven

On the hardware front, the TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus is an all-flash NAS. Although I have my qualms about relying solely on SSDs, high-speed drives are crucial for this setup. After all, during my initial attempt at this experiment, my NAS HDD was too slow at loading my favorite titles, even when compared to the hard drive slotted into my PC. As such, I went with a Crucial P3 1TB Gen 3 NVMe SSD this time around, and built a new dataset on the drive before sharing it over an iSCSI share. Another benefit of the TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus is that the NAS includes a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, which provides more bandwidth for an SSD to spread its wings than a 1GbE or even a 2.5G connection.

As for my PC, I’d already armed it with a 10GbE TP-Link TX401 card, so I was all green on the connectivity front. Since I wanted to provide actual numbers instead of simply relying on my lizard brain to gauge the iSCSI share’s performance, I added a 1TB Corsair P3 Plus PCIe Gen 4 drive to my PC. In case you’re worried that I’m comparing a PCIe Gen 3 SSD with its Gen 4 equivalent, I’d like to point out that the 10GbE interface is the major bottleneck in this setup. That’s because a single PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive is all I need to saturate a 10 Gigabit connection.

Comparing the loading (and fast travel) times

Open-world games pair well with a NAS-based SSD

With the theory part over, it’s time to look at the results of the experiment. I went with open-world titles right off the bat to test the loading times. Just so we’re clear, when I say loading times, I’m referring to the duration taken by a game to load a save file/checkpoint from the main menu. For the games that support fast-travel, I also charted the number of seconds required for the game to load into the map after using this functionality.

Since I’d conducted this experiment on Final Fantasy XV, it seemed poetic to test my enhanced setup with the next mainline FF title. On Final Fantasy XVI, the NAS SSD took 9.28 seconds to load into the game, while the PCIe Gen 4 SSD attached to my PC beat it by roughly 2.5 seconds. The fast-travel times were largely identical, though. Without a stopwatch, I probably wouldn’t even notice the difference between the two.

I probably would’ve complained about the ever-so-slightly longer loading times, but since you’re mostly going to boot the game once and rely on fast-travel to switch between areas, it’s not really an issue.

Other open-world titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Baldur’s Gate 3 were largely the same: the NAS SSD took a few extra seconds to load the game, though the fast travel times were barely noticeable.

Indie titles and less-intensive games perform even better

With my favorite open-world games out of the way, I wanted to go over a couple of miscellaneous titles I play these days. While Metaphor ReFantazio can’t really be called an open-world game, it incorporates plenty of semi-open areas and includes fast-travel, so it was quite demanding compared to the average AA or indie title I have in my library. And well, it fared just as well as the open-world titles from earlier.

However, Elden Ring Nightreign threw the trend followed by every game until now of the window. When I queued in separate lobbies for the current Everdark Sovereign (and no, I didn’t abandon the team just to focus on this article; we just died to the boss’ third phase in the dumbest way possible), the NAS SSD loaded the Limveld seed faster than the PCIe drive. This discrepancy can be attributed to the latency between me and the random players, so I conducted the test once again in single-player mode (and this time, I could quit the run without letting my conscience bother me). Sure enough, the PCIe SSD was faster, though I don’t really care about the 0.2 seconds I’d save by rolling with it. Likewise, the difference in loading times for Sunless Skies, Withering Rooms, and Hades II was so low that it didn’t matter which drive I used to store them.

So, should you transfer your games to a NAS?

Clearly, an all-flash NAS setup over iSCSI fares incredibly well for this project, and if you’ve got some spare SSDs lying around, it’s a fun way to put them to good use. I’ve got some spare slots for PCIe-to-NVMe adapters, but if I ever run out of storage-centric ports on my PC, I’d have no qualms about relegating my Steam games to a NAS. Heck, I’ve already got plans to reattempt this project on a couple of NAS-based HDDs armed with RAM caching and other performance-boosting features to see if I can reduce their loading times.