DCS files - NAS storage installation

Hi all,

Has someone already tried to install DCS files on a NAS home server ?

I'd like to use my office laptop (i5 2520 + 8Gb ram + win8.1 64) as a DCS server sometimes (let's say twice a week, when I play with friends).

Thing is I have a limited amount of free space in my laptop's SSD.

I have an external USB hard drive but my laptop only has USB2 ports, I'm afraid about transfert rates with this solution.

So I'd like to use the free space available in my Synology NAS drives to store the game files, and just keep the C:/user/saved games/DCS files locally in my laptop.

If anybody already managed to achieve this, then :

- How about loading times ? Ingame, any stuttering due to TCP/IP latency ?

- Can the DCS installer / updater manage to deal with files stored on a LAN drive (using Windows file share service / I could mount it as a network drive though) ? (considering once again my DCS user files will be stored locally on my laptop) ?

I could try without asking, but If can avoid to download the 10Gb installation files again...

Thx in advance !

I haven't tried it but I can imagine this would be very laggy. If it even manages to start up.

From a theoretical standpoint, your only issue should be loading times. To make compatibility less of a problem, I would create a folder shortcut for it on your local drive (IE: C:\games\DCS or whatever) that points to the desired location on your NAS. If you do this, then as far as windows (and therefore the game) is concerned, you have installed the game onto your C:\ drive. The only issue should be loading times.

I'm switching to another solution : virtualization.

I'm used to use Vmware Workstation for various applications, got it installed in my laptop, which has 16gb of RAM.

So basically the idea is to run a virtualized win 7/8 64bits on my laptop, assigning it 8Gb RAM, and storing the virtual HDD on the NAS. Then it's all about proper traffic routing :smilewink:

Already did that a few years ago for a couple of heavy game servers (minecraft for instance), it was working very well.

Loading times indeed won't be as fast as with my gaming PC SSD...but once the game is running and loaded, this shouldn't be a big issue.

Once again this is for a temporary/occasional DCS server , to play a few hours with 10/15 players. Server performances have to be fair but not exceptionally good.

On a Gigabit LAN network, with optimized network stack, transfert rates and access latency are very good.

I'm gonna have some tests and i'll let you know here how it goes.

It works, but I found it a bit slow, but then I find it slow on an ssd.