Dear Lazyweb: Network Storage options

[da]

Anybody happen to know the relative speeds of NFS, AppleTalk file-sharing, or Windows file-sharing (samba)? All are choices open to me for a file-server (to be used by mac clients, either wifi or ethernet). If all are equally efficient/speedy compared with 802.11b/g, that's fine too. :)

Google seems to mostly get me product pages for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices.

Comments

[ckd]

Mmm, a bit of layer and terminology confusion here.

802.11b/g are link layer. Your link layer (Wi-Fi, or various speeds of wired Ethernet) is just the baseline over which you're running whatever protocol on top. Pick the fastest thing that works for you (802.11g for Wi-Fi, whatever Ethernet speed you feel like buying gear for for wired).

AppleTalk qua AppleTalk is a networking protocol, roughly at the same layer as TCP/IP. Very little uses it these days. Its primary advantage was ease of configuration back when BOOTP was a really kool nifty idea. We still run it at home only because of the ancient LaserWriter we have, which doesn't do LPR. AppleTalk over various physical and/or link layers was called LocalTalk, or PhoneNET, or EtherTalk.

AFP, or Apple Filing Protocol, is the equivalent to NFS or SMB/CIFS. It runs quite nicely over TCP/IP and has for many years. It shares with SMB/CIFS the advantage of being a per-mount authenticated protocol instead of a "hey, your IP looks okay, here you go" protocol like most NFS implementations.

I'd probably go with samba for compatibility/future-proofing.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

AFP, or Apple Filing Protocol, is the equivalent to NFS or SMB/CIFS. It runs quite nicely over TCP/IP and has for many years. It shares with SMB/CIFS the advantage of being a per-mount authenticated protocol instead of a "hey, your IP looks okay, here you go" protocol like most NFS implementations.

Heh. OK then, I meant AFP not AppleTalk. ;)

The page I saw that suggested I might want AFP did correctly refer to it as AFP, but a different page I looked at made me think it was also AppleTalk. Which turns out was wrong.

I wasn't confusing wifi with the higher-layer stuff; I was assuming that if I connected via wifi, the difference in speed versus wired would be far greater than the difference between the three choices of file-sharing protocol. Making any speed advantages of smb vs nfs, moot.

Thanks for the suggestions, anyhoo. Looks like smb it is.