Does anyone use a NAS for both? My sons PC hard drive is rather full rather than upgrade that for Christmas I’m wondering whether a NAS would be a good option for his gaming and also ripping my cd collection. TIA
I’m sure it would work fine, although the demands of gaming are very different from music storage and serving, which places a low demand on the NAS, so a lower spec model would be sufficient, and possibly generate less electrical noise than a powerful model better suited to geming.
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It’s certainly an option; my NAS contains the primary copy of the whole music collection, backups of 25 years worth of photos and is a repository for numerous other little used or old files that don’t need to clutter up the desktop HDD but aren’t ready for deletion. It exists as a mapped drive to the PC and also on the Pi that runs Asset UPnP that feeds the Naim app. It’s never seemed to have any adverse effect on sound quality and still works fine after about 7 or 8 years.
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Might depend on the game - some require decent throughput to the disk and a NAS might be a bottleneck for that - it’s more a networking issue than the power of the NAS, however.
Perhaps if all the other stuff was moved off the PC to the NAS then there would be sufficient space there for the games with no issue, so problem solved albeit in a different way?
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I would say no. Don’t use a nas for gaming. If his pc has no options for another drive get a usb one
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Thanks all 
What exactly is the issue with “gaming?”
If it’s the game itself – it may not be satisfying trying to run many games from a nas vs. the local HD. Anything where timing is important, the latency could ruin the experience. You’d need to try and see, but if it’s a nas on a home wifi network, it might yield poor performance.
As for ripping your cd collection – what do you intend to do with the files on the nas? If you want to install an UPnP server package on the nas and stream files to a streamer player over your home network, yes that’s a very common use case for a home nas.
A nas could be used for gaming if all the network is 10 gigabit, all network including the nas, the switches, the cable’s and the pc that will be running the games must be 10gb.
Some NAS devices can create iSCSI virtual volumes that can be used as disks in any windows PC as a normal local hard drive. But on a gigabit network this is not fast, even if all devices are connected by cable you are limited to 117mb per second, you can get this easily if no other devices are taxing the network in a normal router or switch.
In a 10gb network with all the right hardware running at 10gb you can easily get 700mb second and not tax the network fully.
So when you consider the elevated cost of 10gb a good server with very fast disks, ssd boot volume and ssd cache, some fast hard drives, the cost can escalate to a lot, forget a nas for gaming.
For áudio any entry level nas could serve you well, for gaming is better buy a good and bigger internal or external directly connected ssd or hdd. The Samsung t5 or t7 are interesting external drives, they are small and have good performance.
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I think linus tech tips may have done something on this. The reality is, for the average user you ain’t gonna be gaming from a NAS. Modern games especially are constantly accessing gigabytes of data and it wants it fast. In a typical home set up and assuming you have not fallen for the old Cisco network switch from way back in the day as promoted here, you may get speeds of tops 100 megs a second on nas. If you are lucky.
A rusty spinner will be 3 times that an SSD 10 to 30 times that. Nases are not for gaming, full stop.
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