PC games are so large these days that
you can very quickly use up all
available discs on your PC or laptop
this can be more of an issue with
laptops some of which only have a single
empty drive or no 2.5 inch drive bays
for larger and cheaper hard drive
storage so let's see how a nurse can
help and find out how well we can
actually play games off one over the
network and as or network-attached
storage is basically just a box that
contains a bunch of hard drives that you
connect to your network you can then
access this larger storage over the
network for this testing I'm using the
asustor as5 344 bae knows the key
features other than it's got to 2.5
gigabit ethernet ports for drive bays
quad-core CPU and 4 gig of memory
interestingly this one also has a HDMI
2.0 a port allowing you to stream video
directly from the nose the guys at gear
seekers have covered the steps to set up
this same model you can find more
information on that in their video if
you're after it in my test setup i've
got 4 16 terabyte iron wolf hard drives
from Seagate and these are designed with
24/7 as operation in mind which is
perfect for me because I never turn my
nose off I leave it on overnight backing
up everything to the cloud which in my
case is about 10 gig of 4k video that I
shoot each day you of course don't need
to start out with as much space as this
you could start out with one or two
smaller drives and expand from there in
the future if you need more space you
could also go for a smaller tube a nose
and this is sue Stahl one actually
allows you to connect additional
expansion units for up to an additional
192 terabytes
although you can save some money by
using cheaper drives if you're storing
important data I'd highly suggest
picking nas drives like Seagate's
iron wolf series as they'll be less
likely to fail in an AZ environment over
time basically they're just made to run
all the time and also deal with the
increased levels of vibration you get
when running multiple drives so close
together regardless of which knows
you're using you'll likely have a few
raid options to choose from I usually go
for raid 6 which means the array can
survive two disks failing at once but in
this case I've chosen rate 10 for a
mixture of redundancy and performance I
want to try to put the 2.5 gigabit
connection to use after all luckily I
happen to have the Isuzu mothership in
for review as it's got a 2.5 gigabit
ethernet port here are the results from
crystal disk mark when reading and
writing to the NAS with the 2.5 gigabit
connection weigh close to 300 megabytes
per second for both the read and riot
which is well above typical gigabit
speeds in this test I was fully
saturating the network connection both
ways
so the raid 10 array was sufficient for
a single connection I also manually set
the network speed to 1 gigabit and
performed the test again just to show
what a standard connection would get and
as we can see the results are a fair bit
lower compared to the 2.5 results the
asou smother ship also has Wi-Fi 6 so if
I also had a Wi-Fi 6 access point I
would be able to access that as really
fast wirelessly to I'm still living in
the past with a Wi-Fi 4 access point
here's how long it took to load up a
game watchdogs to in this case from
different storage options loading from
the SSD was the fastest as we'd expect
it's fast local storage but it also
costs more and we're limited by how much
we can fit into our device the 2.5
gigabit connection from the NAS was next
though realistically in this test it
wasn't even that far behind the SSD and
load time and then the gigabit
connection was slower still I'd expect
loading from a 2.5 inch hard drive in a
laptop to be around the gigabit
connection speed as the reads and writes
from a single hard drive are typically
around that speed it will of course vary
by disk third a 7200 rpm Drive should
outperform a 5400 won for example
unfortunately I couldn't test that here
as the asou smother ship has no 2.5 inch
drive bay to install one a good example
where your only option is expensive and
smaller MDOT - SSDs well maybe not as it
has 3m 2 slots but many other laptops
just have one the assist GX 701 comes to
mind it will also depend on the specific
game - I also tried The Witcher 3 and
had the same 23 second result to get
into the game regardless of where it was
loading
from I was rebooting between tasks so
unless it caches the local storage this
confirms that it will vary for the most
part game load times of what will be the
most noticeable when you're storing the
game files on different media such as an
as as this is when the bulk of data is
read the actual frame rates while
playing games will see no changes in
most cases so you shouldn't lose much
performance while playing generally once
a game is fully loaded everything within
the area will be cached in memory so
you'll only experience slowdowns when
assets needed to be loaded from disk
I've actually tested this in an older
video with more games but just for
example with this single game we can see
there are no real differences to
framerate its margin of error stuff
although most people today don't
currently have two point five gigabit
capable network devices as we've just
seen in terms of FPS the network
transfer speed doesn't really matter it
only affected load times as we saw
earlier for every laptop that arrives
for me to test I need to test around 1.5
terabytes worth of games on it as I live
in Australia land of the crappy internet
downloading this much data multiple
times a week every machine is not
feasible so for me and Naza is essential
i copy my games from the nas over to the
laptop and then run them off local
storage rather than the nas this is
because for my benchmarks i want to
provide as close as to the results you
actually see if you bought the machine
yourself plus when i have to open up 20
games multiple times this is greatly
sped up if the machine has an SSD for my
personal workflow having a local
centralized repository for games that
are kept up-to-date saves me a lot of
time as I can just copy them over when
needed this could be a good option for
you too
steam has a good option to let you move
games between drives so you could just
map the nas to a drive letter and then
move games back and forth as needed the
copying process does still take quite a
while with standard Gigabit Ethernet
although the asou store knows that I've
been testing with here does have two
point five gigabit support most laptops
I get in for testing don't have this
I've only seen it in more premium
options so far but presumably that will
change in future the times where I have
had it there like with your soos
mothership I can get started testing
sooner
- the faster network speeds and as
solution definitely isn't for everyone
it really depends what you do and how
you access your data for me it works
very well and multiple people access it
from the home network to get files
especially games so we don't need to
worry about getting large drives in all
of our PCs and laptops I basically just
get a fast nvme and up to SSD for a boot
drive and use the NASPA Mass Storage
there's so much more it can do - I've
only just scratched the surface here as
I think these use cases are probably
going to be most beneficial for most of
my audience you can install different
apps to do pretty much whatever you need
another quick example would be if you're
a game streamer and also save copies of
your stream to disk you could have these
save to the large in their storage and
not have to worry about your machine
running out let me know if you run in as
at your place and if you just store
everything locally on your machine is it
something you'd consider upgrading to in
the future if you need more space let me
know in the comments and if you're new
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