Noob Question: Steam over NAS?

[MikeB]

Is it possible to store the steam folder on a NAS without performance degradation of the games, my folders growing to a stupid size and I wonder if by buying the NAS on special this week I could chuck the folder on there and use it across my pcs

 

[Makhaira]

You'll get marked performance degradation I'm afraid. For the cost of a barebones NAS unit you could get a 2Tb drive to lob into your system, which should handle any Steam folder!

 

[AbsenceJam]

If you built your own NAS then you'd be able to get close to full Gigabit speeds but off the shelf NAS boxes are mostly far, far from this.

 

[KIA]

Only if you're prepared to stump up for a NAS with very good performance.

 

[MikeB]

ok, thought so

Thanks for answers (BTW reason my thought was a NAS was because it would be accessible form any of my PC's then (3 of them), and save having to update steam on each

 

[bledd]

What I do (we have 3x machines with L4D / TF2 on) is update it on one of them, then manually copy/paste the files from the steam folder across the network to the other two machines

 

[MikeB]

can do that, do thats a waste of storage IMHO, I know it's cheap but i got a lot of steam stuff

 

[R.C.Anderson]

it would probably actually be cheaper to buy a 1TB drive for each of your PCs to store the steam stuff on, than to buy a decent NAS to do it, and you will get better performance, and like bledd. says, just copy the files over the network when you update.

 

[Azuse05]

Cheaper yes, but any excuses to buy a decent readynas and a stack of drives is worth considering ^^

 

[KIA]

Homemade NAS + a ton of uber SSDs in RAID0 = win?!