Q:

How to access photos in network drive from Lightroom without slow performance?

I have my photos on a network drive, about 30,000 photos in about 500 sub-directories.  I would like to get access to these photos in Lightroom, so I added the photos directory as folder in Lightroom, but it took forever scanning through the photos, so this was not usable.
Is there a way to get direct access to many photos on a network drive?
UPDATE
Based on @CodyPace answer, I did some disk read speed testing.
The access time for doing MD5 checksum calculation of ~500 files (8 GB) is:

Local: 15 s
Network: 115 s

Thus ratio of ~7.7 .
The Lightroom directory import time for the same ~500 files (8 GB) is:

Local: 23 s
Network: 172 s

Thus ratio of ~7.5 .
So the difference in Lightroom import speed can be justified by the difference in disk read speed, and mentioned by @CodyPace... it just felt much slower ;-)

A:

If your photos are on a network drive then the speed you can access them is determined directly by the network.
All you can do is get a faster network speed, or keep the photos you want to work with on your local machine while you edit them. Then move them back when you are done.   

