SMB vs NFS vs AFP vs iSCSI - What are they and which should you use 

Thanks for all the protocol breakdowns, very interesting because I saw where you can implement them on a Synology nas but I never tried them out.

Thank you - I look for your videos whenever I'm trying to figure out anything with my Synology NAS. Appreciate you knowledge.

Been looking at this SMB versus NFS for my NAS to a bunch of micros services on docker… I think you’ve convinced me to go with SMB, at least for now

Thanks for the upfront notice about SMB, I still watched however, interesting topic. Thank you

Thanks! I love the explanations in this video; it's justttt the right amount of detail for me to understand the differences in order to rationalize the decision to go with one over the other without feeling like "I'm doing this just because some guy on the internet that I trust told me I should do it" and yet not tooo overly technical :)

Wow, excellent communication. Straight forward, easy to understand. Great teaching! Thanks

Good job here man. I gave you a sub awhile ago. Your synology videos are good and if I need an explainer on a feature you’re my first choice. Keep up the good work

This helped me alot for one of my components with my diy home server! Thank you Barry Allen!

Thank you! This was super helpful. Clear and good for notes.

Thank you for the quick explanation of samba just being smb on linux.

Best explanation! Very to the point. Thanks for the upload!

Thank you for the simple explanation!

Very good explanation! Thank you! :) Liked and subscribed.

Straight to the point, thank you!

I was just looking for the simple answer, thanks!

Thank you, this is just the information I needed to learn.

Thanks for the explanation. Through your video I came to know that iSCSI is a NBD with more control over it (but I must admit NBD is far more the simplest block device sharing option). I think I can try out iSCSI now.

Thanks for the simple but very informative video 😭

This is the exact video I was looking for. All these tutorials on YT and you are the first one I've come across to actually bother to explain when and why you would use one over the other. Thanks! Added to my long term reference list for linux info.

I think you made the only video that explains iSCSI decently 😭

Thank you. Very well done.

very great explanations

Very nice video, TNX.

Thanks for the nice video!

► An accurate breakdown of the rankings: 👍SMB for most folks. iSCSI for some enterprise deployments (and your Steam library). ►4:46 --- Fair commentary: . . . "NFS can be incredibly fast and incredibly slow depending upon . . . how well you are able to tune it for your exact need." Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.

I’ve been setting up VM’s and a new home network. Every time I need to search something your video comes up and you answer all the questions I had. Thank you!

Thanks you so much!

great explanation

Great explanation broh!!

Excellent video!!!!!

Not sure if you'll see or get to this but I hope you will, as part of the reason why I found your channel, and opted for Synology was for Lightroom related tasks. Would you opt for SMB or iSCSI for RAW storage which would be used to build smart previews from? I know (from watching your videos) that I can't store a Lr Catalog file on SMB, and I'm not even necessarily considering storing it on a iSCSI volume, but between the following scenarios which do you think would offer the greatest performance in terms of Smart Preview creation, and JPEG export? 1) RAW on SMB with Lr Catalog file on local NVME SSD 2) RAW on iSCSI with Lr Catalog file on local NVME SSD 3) RAW and Lr Catalog file on iSCSI If I had the space, I would certainly do it all on the NVME SSD, but the catalogs I create are all in the 15,000-30,000 image range with probably 2/3rds of the files being shot on 45MP bodies. If it matters, I have a DS1522+ with 5x 8TB HGST Ultrastars He8 drives (7200 RPM) Thanks if you read this. Your videos have been such a huge help, and I can't wait for your new Synology Lightroom video you had mentioned in your most recent video.

Thanks! Now I understand why SMB is so slow with git repositories; hundreds/thousands of tiny files.

thank you

Good video thx a lot

Your voice is soothing and you're giving me just the right amount of information-thank you!!

Great video

So I use SMB for the bulk storage, and then set up one of my SSDs with games as iSCSI. At least that's what I understood here, if I'm wrong I'll figure it out soon enough :)

Thank you Will! Best NAS videos on the net!

Hello and thank you very much for the useful video! Question : have you heard about files and folders' names corrupted while switching from AFP to SMB? (ex: ALDUVB~G) My DSM update warns me that I should now disable AFP because it's no longer supported by Apple. I did it and switched to SMB, but many of my folders/files names are mangled. Is there a way to fix this problems for all the folders previously stored on the nas? And is there a way to avoid the problem in the future? Thanks a lot for your help!!

Thanks! SMB it is!

I’d like to add. NFS is a pain in the ass when it comes to authentication and data in transit encryption

Thank you for the explanation! I was able to solve (I think?) a problem I had. I bought a Terramaster for home use with an iMac. I connected using smb at first, but something weird happened. After I coppied some files to the HD, they looked 'buggy' when I oppened them from there. For example, if I opened a JPEG, only the top third of the image would load. The rest would look weird or not display at all. Maybe a loading issue? But when I switched to afp now everything opened correctly. Maybe I was doing something weird before?

So what is the fast service for MacBook ? is ssh fast? thanks to your return

@spacerex would you recommend nfs for synology to synology connections on the same LAN?

What are the points only working with AFP on Mac? Please make a video for a complete system backup and restore with Time Machine on Synology!

Good video overall, but I do think it over emphasizes the difficulty of setting up NFS. NFS isn't that hard to set up and tune and even tunnel through a VPN. Personally, I would only use SMB in an all Windows environment or on a Linux/Unix server serving Windows clients.

if I want to work on my .DWG file from Autocad, do I have to copy paste to my computer then work on it and upload it again to my NAS after i finished working? or I can work directly from NAS without having to download and upload it every time I work on it?

Is an additional argument for iscsi that it may be more reliable than disk images for network backup?

Could you please make a video how to fix SMB in the new dsm7 a lot of people are having problems with the connection.

I thought NFS would be better for in house streaming but the fact it doesn't work well when trying to setup on my 1621+ and the Nvidia shields I'll stick with SMB. This cleared it up for as most the videos are 8gb to 75GB video files.

If you use Sonos S1 gear, unless you want to throw out all your old gear and buy new Sonos gear, you MUST leave SMB v1 active. There are workarounds (such as using a Raspberry Pi as a gateway between SMB v2/3 and Sonos) but not easy unless you are familiar with Linux, Raspberry, and so on.

Thank you for this explainer in regards to the differences between the different data transfer protocols. Stupid question then: If you had a VM or a system for example, and the NAS presented an iSCSI device to the VM, can you then put SMB on that so that other systems can use/access the data? Take, for example, the example that you used with a Steam library. You mentioned that with iSCSI, you can't have concurrent access but with SMB/NFS, you can; and because Steam doesn't let you put said Steam library on a SMB share, are you able to then layer SMB on top of the iSCSI that the VM is using so that you would be able to have only one copy of the Steam library that's shared between systems or would each system need to have its own Steam library? Or is there a way to use TrueNAS and/or ZFS to deduplicate the multiple copies of the Steam library data at the NAS level? I'm trying to figure out when would it make sense to use iSCSI (which sometimes can be faster, but doesn't allow for concurrent access) vs. when to use SMB/NFS which is slower, but DOES allow for concurrent access. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

What's that very complex setup for SAN To shared same volume on multiple client

Hi . I wanted to know is there any way to bring smb on the internet to access it from anywhere . If yes can you pls make a vedio about it using trurNas or link any related article .

@4:58 you're wrong, I just setup my Win2K16 Server for NFS Datastore.

Wow, 5+ explanation. I just wanted to know what is actually NFS means, and now I undrstand it on human laguage. Thanks so much!!

@9:09 is actually incorrect. I personally run my Steam Library from SMB and it's just fine! Sometimes the load times are quite long but then it's just like local gameplay.

Do you have a video like this on file systems?

You say there's great Android Apps to access SMB Shares. Do you have any recommendations? Because the apps I found are all kinda sketchy and look like they were made in the 90s.

I gotta problem, I'm trying to learn Linux, using a proot install of Debian on top of android, I want to be able to mount a windows directory in the Debian system so I don't use all the memory on my phone, I also don't have root on the android.. if you are not familiar with proot it allows an apparent root install of another operating system on top of Android, problem is it reuses the kernel and a lot of the base file system, mounting on top of it for it's own uses, so if you don't have root on Android you don't get permissions to change anything in those directories. That means of course you can't install kernel modules. You would think I could use a fuse file system because it's user mode but apparently it requires some changes in some directories I do not have access permission to. NFS does seem to be available, and I did manage to get an NFS server to work on Windows 7 and I verified as accessible using a friend's laptop, but despite using the exact same command with the exact same version of Debian to access this clugy Windows 7 NFS server, I get access denied when trying to do it from my Debian on Android. I tried packet sniffing to see what the difference was, the RPC calls are very similar and I can't understand enough to tell the difference. Can you give me more insight into NFS, so I can figure out why it works with the one system and not the other? Can you recommend a user mode Linux client that doesn't rely on fuse and Windows 7 server combination for a network a file system that I can mount on the proot based Debian machine ? I haven't tried iscsi yet , does iscsi have a user mode Linux client where I can mount the network directory and a Windows iscsi server that will work on Windows 7 or earlier? I've been told of various SSH and FTP packages, but none of the ones that have been recommended that I have tried meet my requirement to be able to be transparently mounted. I want to be able to use the free space on that old Windows machine so I don't fill up my phone. That includes installing some packages directly on it using it for live working temp files and more Any recommendations (short of buy a new system) will be highly appreciated!

What are you talking about?? I am able to store my entire steam game library on Synology NAS and play games through my 10Gbe network using Windows SMB shares. It works great and I have had no issues with it. Not sure what you are talking about.

I had some issues with SMB on Android: 1. Only one phone in my house had an SMB client / file manager built-in, and there is no good and free option on the play store either. And that phone that had one built-in, as it turned out, it used only SMB1. So I ended up using Xiaomi file manager, which I don't like. It's chinese and it serves adds. 2. I couldn't find any good plain text editor app to edit my text files straight out of my NAS. Now I'm using an app based on SFTP, but I haven't managed to make a proper chroot jail for my users, so I'm stuck with navigating through the whole file system and sharing it to other users would be too insecure for me. And the app is not great either. 3. I think there is no file sync app that satisfies my needs on android.

yes.... now i know. good explanation.

With mac. How do we use smb if we are not using local network?

Can my friend in another location connect to my server with smb?

Looks like AFP is required if you want to do time machine backups to Synology’s.

So NFS probably would be better as I am running a full Linux environment?

Is it me or is there a delay between video and audio?

Just forgot to tell everybody that for to use iSCSI on a Mac you have to buy a special client software for each machine, spite, in windows is free.

I use NFS for Kodi because of perceived lower latency. Indeed I found that accessing files is slightly faster than SMB. The latter would in no way be a deal breaker though.

why didn't you include FTP to the comparison? it's more suitable than iscsi

Your video editor need rest, see 4:43

Apple could do the same with their lightning cables… thing is the worst. Slow speed transfers…

no love for gluster fs and some of the other less know network file systems...

Whats the difference and ftp and webdev?

Some thoughts from a Mac perspective… SMB on a Mac is NOT working just fine. If you have a workload involving a lot of random I/O instead of just copying individual large files around, it's barely usable at all. Connections will drop left and right, corrupting files in the process. It's okay for keeping media files, but don't use it for anything remotely database-like. Warning: MacOS's own Photos app gets abysmally slow when put on SMB and will quickly shred its Photos Library. AFP on a Mac is defunct, just don't use it. It's been deprecated for a reason and nobody at Apple has been working on it for many years. NFS on a Mac is solid in terms of stability and speed, but NAS vendor's implementations - each differently - struggle with keeping Apple's special file attributes. If you use file tags, individual file settings (like "hide .pdf extension" or "open this file with that app") or even custom named attributes (like "recursively exclude this directory from being backed up by QRecall"), you can pick the NAS vendor that does some of the features you need most, but you can't have all of them and even the supported ones don't work reliably. iSCSI on a Mac is NOT fast. Depending on the driver software you use (which can cost you an arm and a leg) you can expect to get less than half of what SMB can do through the same network connection. Especially on Apple Silicon Macs where you can't use kernel extensions for that anymore the situation is currently … dire. That said, t is absolutely rock solid in terms of stability, so having an APFS-via-iSCSI volume on your NAS may be your only (sensible) option for database/VM applications besides using direct attached storage. Seeing that Drobo is defunct despite claiming otherwise - they haven't sold a unit in years, don't react to contact requests and aren't likely to ever start again - the market for DASes for Macs is rather slim. Don't fall for QNAPs ads for Thunderbolt 3 attached NASes - they use that connection to emulate a very fast network card, it's still a NAS with all of the gotchas above. So, what to do if you have an M1/M2 Mac and want to put your Photos library, VMs and database projects outside the tiny/expensive internal storage, and/or use a more sophisticated backup solution than Time Machine? Either fit everything on a TB-attached SSD, or use iSCSI with Daemon Tools. It's certainly very slow but also super cheap and may bridge the time until other affordable solutions have made the jump to Apple Silicon. In my case it was actually cheaper to buy 2.5G NICs for NAS and Mac than to buy a license that would fully saturate the built-in 1G NICs. Also: always remember that "NAS" != "backup". You only have a backup when you have two separate copies of your data in different locations. Snapshots, RAID etc. are not a backup strategy, go get a proper backup drive for when your NAS just dies and takes everything with it.

0.75 speed is needed here

I love your first minute, so I'll stay for the unnecessary (to me) rest of the video.

i wouldn't use smb outside a vpn.

“NFS is significantly harder to setup”. According only to you??

Here are two ideas for future videos of this kind: 1. A table of contents with time stamps is always welcome. 2. A summary could be added at the end, for instance in the form of a simple comparison table (pros and cons).

Did he say Mac server? 😂😂😂😂