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

[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.