SMB remains slow and unreliable unless its the latest Samba build with vfs_fruit which did a lot to address the issues of folder traversal speed. Yes yes the marketing says that but its not valid in the real world.
Best nas for mac pc mi mac#
With an SMB NAS solution and your 5 mac clients, I don't believe you'll run into the historical problem that Toby points out. Keep in mind that Apple has moved away from AFP to SMB. This has never been able to scale properly and as a service on the NAS likely to max out with heavy loads. Using a NAS as a Mac file server presents some challenges, namely that most NAS units are running Netatalk to provide AFP service. This forces the protocol use on the Mac and has resolved any issues we had seen with using the Synology.Īny time I need to setup a NAS, and the space requirements dictate this many drives, I usually go for the DS1813+ (DS1815+ now) or the RS2415+. Instead, force the SMB connection by entering "smb:\\yoursynologyip". If you connect the Mac to the Synology share via SMB, don't let the Mac make the default AFP connection. I've used the Time Backup function which lets you recover your data from an incremental backup based on a specific snapshot so if you need to recover last week's file and not yesterday's file, you can. The backup target can be local or remote over WAN. The beauty of the Synology is its ability to easily backup to another Synology NAS. Most cases were running all 4 NICs in teamed mode and they were easily able to saturate the 1Gbps individual port speeds. The typical setups were simple SMB shares and never saw any issues. I've used the Synology DS1813+ (last year's model to the DS1815+) in many mixed PC/Mac environments and it works beautifully. To the OP, Whatever product you go for, I would spend a bit of time doing tests with each protocol and see which matches up to be quickest, then roll that out across the team. Where it becomes important is in the time calculations for the video guys.Īn extra 5 meg per second of write performance could shave off an hours rendering time during a day for the team across their different projects. Seems the NAS makers don't make all the boxes equal. Iscsi - Mileage will vary but I've found it quicker.īut the problem is.One of these protocols may work like lightning on a box made by X and another one will be slower on Y. NFS, I've seen it do some special things, write performance less than 10 meg even though read is 100.ĪFP, I've seen CPU usages spike on Synology boxes using AFP, I'm not clever enough to know why despite it all being made for Apple products. I was on about SMB :) the windows/mac compatible version. If they are using an Apple environment and use AFP or NFS it should work nicely with video files. SMB shares are not nice with video work-flows. Thoughts on NAS brands? Backup plan? I'm curious if anyone has done something similar Purchase a Synology DS1815+, move all data there I'm not too familiar with Mac servers, but if they aren't using the server to its potential (and will most likely not for the next several years) would it be wise to just scrap the server and buy a bigger better NAS? They are looking into getting another NAS mainly to increase storage. Which is why I want a second backup method Data as in large video and picture files for clients.
*edit Forgot to mention they are using the current NAS for both data and backups. The xRaid is pretty much maxed out and they only have the server for xRaid, they use no other features on the server. They are a video production and web development small business. I've got a small business with ~5 Mac computers, a xServe with an attached xRaid via fibre.