Dreamcast Performace with a network mounted drive

Shakz

Howdy Friends,
This is not so much a request for help as a what are your thoughts.
I did a little experiment over the weekend.

Pi 3
2tb external drive hooked up to netgear router (Samba Share) full of games

I wanted to have my nice pi in the living room so i could game etc from the comfort of the sofa and not have an unsightly external hard drive next to the pi and all the other crap around the TV.
The game I used was Star Wars Pod Racer for Dreamcast....best version IMHO....one of my favorites.
I had played it on my pi previous to moving it to the living room....it wasnt perfect (not much on dreamcast/n64 is) but it was very playable.
So

I setup wifi on the pi
mounted the external drive using cifs; added to fstab
Symlinked psx and dreamcast directories in the roms folder to the net drive
Rebooted ...all games on the external drive showed up fine

I then launched Pod Racer and it was totally choppy and unplayable.
I overclocked the pi (using wiki suggestions) just trying to squeeze a little more performance out of it. No change.
I then unlinked the dreamcast directory...created a local dreamcast dir and copied Pod Racer to the local drive....rebooted all is well...games are there.
Launched it running off the local drive and still choppy and unplayable.
I tried disabling samba in case its because of the constant samba reads...no change.
The fix was to unmount the network drive.....remove it from fstab....only then did recast perform normally. I was thinking maybe its some sort of power issue caused by having the wifi radio on but the wifi is still on. It seems to be solely caused by having a network drive mounted.....It would be nice to be able to pull this off as a network mount rather than a physical connection. Any thoughts? Anyone have a similar setup that is not seeing a performance issue?
Keep in mind the game was even choppy when run locally with psx roms still network mounted.....cant figure this one out.
Thanks in advance if you read this book!