Steam library on a network drive: Unexpectedly fast load times

Jackson Turner 09/09/2026

Like most PC gamers, the joy of expanding one’s library only seems to bring more frustration. Every year, the Steam catalog grows, but often, the underlying performance doesn’t keep pace. The culprit, for many, seems to be the persistent lag associated with modern NVMe drives, devices touted as the future of speed yet still delivering performance that feels decidedly sluggish during load times.

I recently took a different approach to tackling this performance bottleneck. While most people focus solely on maximizing the speed of their primary drives, I decided to look at how external storage could be leveraged for better overall efficiency.

A little while ago, I established a home lab environment, installing an 8TB ZFS mirror on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. This setup was primarily intended for handling backups, organizing media files, and storing photo collections—tasks where raw speed was secondary to reliability and capacity.

However, I wondered if this powerful storage could serve a more critical function: managing the game library. The initial instinct to simply move the game files to the NAS didn’t immediately solve the loading issues.

But by diving into the configuration and understanding how the ZFS mirror handled the data, I discovered a clever workaround. Instead of fighting the limitations of the NVMe drives, I managed to offload a significant portion of my game library onto the NAS.

The result was surprisingly transformative. While the underlying hardware remained the same, the noticeable increase in load times was significantly mitigated. It turned out that by utilizing the stability and capacity of the ZFS array, the storage system could handle the massive file requests more efficiently, smoothing out the overall experience.

This experience reinforced a key lesson: sometimes the fastest path to better performance isn’t about simply upgrading the hardware, but about strategically rethinking how data is stored and managed. For those of us who live in the world of high-speed storage, finding creative ways to utilize storage infrastructure is often the key to unlocking true, seamless performance.