What about "installing games on a NAS?" we tried it with Synology's "DS918+"! Deepl Translated Version.

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https://neovisionconsulting.blogspot.com/2022/04/nassynologyds918.html

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/sp/1172252.html

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Install popular titles from Steam and Origin text by Katsuaki Kato

Katsuaki KatoMarch 29, 2019 18:40

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Making the Most of NAS for Gaming

Many people may be operating a NAS to consolidate large-capacity HDDs to ensure high-capacity storage. So can the latest NAS be used as storage for games?

　Recent PC games, especially the more high-profile ones, tend to have larger installed capacities. Even for free-to-play games, 20 to 30 GB is the norm, and titles with more than 50 GB or more than 100 GB are not uncommon anymore.

　It would be fine to "put the games that are played heavily into the SSD in the PC," but if you put even the games that you will not play for a while into the SSD, it is inevitable that you will be squeezed for space. It is also possible to purchase a high-capacity SSD or use a HDD, but this may be difficult physically or in terms of price.

　This time, we would like to examine "using a NAS" as a new perspective.

　Today's NAS are quite fast, and when used over a Gigabit LAN, they can achieve speeds close to that of a sequential 2.5-inch HDD. However, NASs are not as fast as SATA-connected 3.5-inch HDDs or SSDs, but they can be used in an overall meaningful way when considering the merits of NASs, such as the ability to securely store large amounts of data using RAID and other functions.

　For example, backing up games is a good example.

　Depending on the contents of the game, it may be possible to re-download the game without backing it up, but the capacity of games is increasing, and in many cases, saved data is stored locally. Also, if the game has been customized with mods, etc., it is obvious that it will be difficult to rebuild the game if it is not saved, including the detailed environment.

　The normal process would be to "back up the game there (......)," but this time, instead of such "normal" use, we would like to experiment with "installing a game on the NAS" as an unusual use of the NAS.

　To give you an idea of the results, although the latency time compared to SSDs and 3.5-inch HDDs is naturally higher, the performance is sufficient for use as a "storage destination that can be used without uninstalling" on a notebook PC with insufficient storage, or as a "storage destination with a little patience" to cover a lack of capacity. There were.

　From the viewpoint of "NAS and games," it can be used not only for backup but also for storing play movies and screenshots, so "NAS for games" may be an interesting option for comprehensive use.

With the recent increase in high-resolution textures in games, the installed capacity of even free-to-play games tends to increase.

If you play a wide variety of games as I do, no matter how much internal storage space you have, it is not enough. In the case of SSDs, the secret to a long life is to have a certain amount of remaining storage space, so it is best to operate them with plenty of space left over.

Procedure for installing games on a NAS

~From the initial setup of the NAS to the Steam/Origin setup.

　To begin with, is it possible to install games on a NAS?

　I mainly enjoy playing games from Steam and Origin, but as it turns out, Steam games can have multiple game installation folders (Steam library) in different locations, so I was able to achieve this without any problems, but some Origin games were not allowed (as I will explain later). (This can be improved by using iSCSI.)

　First, let us briefly explain the procedure.

　In this case, we used Synology's DS918+ NAS with four WD Red 4TB (WD40EFRX) drives, and the NAS and PC are connected to the same Gigabit LAN. Although it can be used as a cache, since it is connected to a Gigabit LAN, the performance will not change dramatically, so only HDDs will be used in this case.

Synology "DS918+" prepared for this project. It is a 4-bay NAS with a quad-core Celeron J3455 CPU, and although an M.2 SSD can be installed as a cache, it will not be used this time. Actual retail price is around 56,000 yen.

Four Western Digital WD40EFRX units are installed in the DS918+.

Back of DS918+. It is equipped with two fans for cooling, eSATA ports, etc. The two Gigabit LAN ports support LAG (Link Aggregation), but a LAG-compatible hub (Layer 2 Smart Switch) is required.

Installation of HDDs is very easy. Simply place the HDD on the tray and snap in the fixing parts.

Orient the HDDs, push them into the bays, and you're done.

All that is left is to connect to the LAN and turn on the power. Configuration work is performed from a PC on the same LAN.

　When four HDDs are installed in DS918+, Synology's proprietary "SHR" RAID5-based RAID standard is selected by default. Although it is possible to choose RAID0 for speed or RAID0+1 for redundancy, we chose SHR for simplicity. 4TB x 4 SHR configuration provides more than 10TB of storage space.

　The following is a brief explanation of the process of configuring an SHR with DS918+, creating a share for Windows, and assigning a drive letter as a network drive drive.

Configuring the NAS

Turn on the DS918+, and when it beeps, access "find.synology.com" using a browser on a PC connected to the same LAN. It will then find the DS918+ on the LAN. Now click "Connect" to start the setup.

First, initialize all HDDs embedded in the DS918+ and deploy the "DSM" management tool. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete the process, so be patient.

Set up an administrator's account and password. The "Server Name" at the top is used to identify this NAS on the LAN. Use alphanumeric characters and something easy to understand. This server name will be needed later.

After setup is complete, the system will be in this state. However, in this state, the HDD is just initialized, so let's start preparing the storage space.

Click on the "Windows-like icon" in the upper left corner of the administration screen, and an icon called "Storage Manager" will appear. Let's click it.

There is nothing in the "Volume" column (i.e., no HDD is registered), so click "Create".

Then follow the wizard. This time, I built a RAID array with Synology's recommended SHR and set the file system to BTFS. 4TB HDDs were allocated, giving a total of 10.9TB of storage space.

Now open "Control Panel" from the top left menu and go to "Shared Folders" -> "Create". (It is advisable to fill in the "Name" field using only one-byte alphanumeric characters for clarity.

Follow the wizard, but it is recommended to enable the "checksum" option.

Select the created shared folder and go to "Edit" > "Permissions". Check the "Read/Write" checkboxes for the administrator account (kkato in the figure) and "admin" that you registered first. If necessary, you should add users, etc., but in this case, let's assume that only the administrator (i.e., you) will be using the system.

Mounting a network drive in Windows

Right-click on "PC" in Explorer and select "Assign Network Drive

For the folder, enter "\" followed by the name of the first NAS + "" + the name you gave to the shared folder. In this case, it will be "\nasHomeShare

The NAS HDD is now registered as drive Z. You may copy the Steam game itself at this stage.

　Once the drive letter is assigned as a network drive, it is time to set up the Steam side. Create a Steam library folder in that drive and put the game itself there.

　Next is the Steam and Origin settings.

　With Steam, it is easy to create Steam library folders on multiple drives and assign each game to a specific folder, but with Origin, you must specify the folder to which the game is to be installed. The difference is that you can only install games in a folder (but previously installed games can still be used in the old installation folder).

Open "Settings" in Steam, go to "Downloads" -> "Steam Library Folder" -> "Add Library Folder" and select the network drive you just added (Z in this example). If you put the files directly under the drive, they will not look good, so create a "SteamLibrary" folder in "New Folder" and select it!

When installing a new game with the Steam library folder registered, you will be able to select the destination drive.

Even if a game is already installed on the C drive, the game data can be moved by selecting "Properties" -> "Local Files" -> "Move Installation Folder". Steam is very easy to manage in this respect.

　In the case of Origin, there was a case that "although it is possible to set the installation destination to the folder that was mounted this time, an error occurs when the installation actually starts. As a solution, we tried to create a junction under "Program Files" (see below), but this also worked for "Battlefield V", but not for "Apex Legend", and we could not get a network drive using NAS file sharing to work. (This was also verified separately with iSCSI.)

Example of the installation procedure using the junction we tried this time.

With Origin, it is not as easy as with Steam. There are games that do not work well this way, so this is not the correct way to do it.

Install the game on the C drive.

Copy the installed game folder to a network drive.

Uninstall the game from the C drive in Origin.

Create a junction

Switch the installation destination to the network drive.

Install the game again

Measuring Basic Performance First

　Now, we would like to verify how long it takes to start up a game when the game is actually installed on the network drive provided by DS918+. Below are the PC specifications used for the verification.

Verification environment

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (8C16T, Base 3.7GHz/Boost 4.3GHz)

Motherboard: MSI X370 GAMING PRO CARBON (AMD X370)

Memory: G.Skill F4-3200C14D-16GFX (DDR4)