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

[@DaniLearnsIT]

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

[@pkennethv]

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 :)

[@SpaceRexWill]

Hey thanks! glad you like it!

[@pepeshopping]

If you must depend on a YT video instead of learning on your own…

[@EnFuego79]

​@@pepeshopping By what warped logic is watching a YT video about a topic your researching not "learning on your own" 🤦

[@blu3_enjoy]

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

[@EnFuego79]

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.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Great to hear!

[@TomTelfer-c7t]

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

[@yusufahmed2233]

Thanks for the simple but very informative video 😭

[@novelmartinez6154]

Thank you for the simple explanation!

[@pogiproblemsgaming]

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

[@Aesir5]

I was just looking for the simple answer, thanks!

[@siddheshwari6]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad you like the videos!

[@tyherty45]

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

[@chromerims]

► 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.

[@chromerims]

I did a little more rtfm this week, and I may give NFS another shake.

[@CousinBumbleF]

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!

[@SpaceRexWill]

Hey I am glad!

[@ContraTempusMusic]

thanx for the info! you have a very pleasant voice by the way.🙂

[@flognort]

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

[@PowerUsr1]

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

[@CharlesDeMar]

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

[@JoeMillion]

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?

[@justice5776]

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.

[@es5587]

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.

[@TeamTNTunicorn]

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

[@YannMetalhead]

Straight to the point, thank you!

[@user-vu9hs5zu9y]

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

[@dkf2711]

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

[@alejandrocotilla2899]

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

[@mslogicbee9964]

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.

[@shadowarez1337]

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.

[@BoraHorzaGobuchul]

How exactly was that problematic? I have a shield and watch movies over nfs without issues (well, almost, sometimes Kodi kinda freezes but that happens rarely and it could be for a whole number of reasons - will try to isolate the issue later on. What I don't like about the nfs is the permissions, in all guides on how to set up a shared folder to work with Android tv players it says map users to root, and while most of this Linux and network stuff goes over my head out doesn't seem a proper thing to do from the security standpoint

[@shadowarez1337]

@@BoraHorzaGobuchul yeah iv tried and it just doesn't work what iv ended up doing is setting powerline internet since WiFi 5ghz is not Strong enough 10ft from the ROG Rapture Router.

[@BoraHorzaGobuchul]

@@shadowarez1337 omg words fail me

[@shadowarez1337]

@@BoraHorzaGobuchul I am learning throwing nukes at a problem don't always work in my favour I have to learn a more elegant approach as Bandwidth needs increase instead of blowing $700+ I coulda did same with a powerline kit and a basic router.

[@riendlyf]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad I helped!

[@FF7824]

Thank you. Very well done.

[@droneforfun5384]

Thank you Will! Best NAS videos on the net!

[@SpaceRexWill]

Hey thanks!

[@GrandPapa16]

Thanks for answering my question in the first minute. Time is an asset. Like and subscribe.

[@marcello4258]

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

[@Psoewish]

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 :)

[@hhectorlector]

very great explanations

[@subway394]

Thanks for the nice video!

[@VeryTutos]

Great explanation broh!!

[@ckckck12]

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

[@mrcrackerist]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

Yes and no. For sequential transfers no. (Unless you spend days tuning) but for small file transfers yes. Just make sure to look into either having authentication or a VLAN

[@mrcrackerist]

@@SpaceRexWill Thanks was thinking of using smb but this sounds better for my use case :)

[@rudysal1429]

@@SpaceRexWill how big of sequential transfers are you referring to? I have an Ubuntu server and have both smb and nfs setup and transferring data, multi terabyte movies and TV shows. The permissions thing is something I'm trying to figure out to tune it better for multiple users. It's actually a little easier to setup for general use but definitely security is the more complicated thing trying to set it up right.

[@demandelz]

Yes. And contrary to the presenter's point of view, I think NFS is easier to set up at least in an all Linux/Unix environment. At least, that has been my personal experience.

[@nicoladellino8124]

Very nice video, TNX.

[@demandelz]

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.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Mostly the issue with NFS is 2 things in my experience: 1) getting sequential 1GB/s speeds. 2) authentication. Setting up a kerberos relm to do auth is a huge pain to do

[@incandescentwithrage]

​​@@SpaceRexWillKerberos Auth for NFSv4 can be involved yeah. I use a NFSv3 export as a mapped drive on a windows client to DL/seed torrents directly from a Linux based Plex library. Works really well once GID/UID is mapped

[@a_mouse6858]

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

[@xyx489]

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

[@jaimeortega8939]

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?

[@WallaceRoseVincent]

Thanks you so much!

[@ewenchan1239]

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.

[@SpaceRexWill]

So I actually learned something that steam no longer has this restriction! (according to comments, I have not been able to verify) so now you can just use SMB!

[@ewenchan1239]

​@@SpaceRexWill Okay....then hypothetically, if the restriction was still in place -- in order to further expand on the differences between each of these protocols, how would or might you try and accomplish something like this if that restriction was still in place? What I am trying to get at is "iSCSI sounds better, but you can't have concurrent access, which means that SMB (and/or NFS) sounds better." I'm trying to figure a way to leverage the advantages of both and layer them on top of each other, or if layering them on top of each other would actually make matters worse than say, if I were to use SMB natively, directly from the NAS. This was the intent behind my original question and I was trying to use the Steam library, as mentioned in the video, as the example to "jump off of" to discuss the underlying principle. Thank you.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Oh I got you now! So iSCSI works almost identically the same way that a hard drive works, just over ethernet instead of SATA. Because if this if you where to layer them you would really not get any advantages as you would still have the downsides of SMB while also having slower access by using iSCSI then if the disks were directly plugged into the computer (which is what the NAS has)

[@ewenchan1239]

@@SpaceRexWill Hmmm....interrresting.

[@KonKhmer83228]

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

[@John-eq8cu]

great explanation

[@rakibhossen49]

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

[@kikouvolant9932]

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!!

[@TomTheAustrian]

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!

[@ericjorgensen4826]

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.

[@VolkerHett]

Or when you have Xiaomi security cameras, they use SMBv1, too. Luckily I do know some things about storage virtualization, which is exactly what the RasPi is doing there. Oh, another example, some backup programs need their files to be at the exact same URI for restore, that's where I used a RasPi so I could restore a PC from the off site backup. Luckily for testing purposes, not an emergency.

[@3333218]

Excellent video!!!!!

[@rackabone]

Thanks! SMB it is!

[@ianfrye8988]

Do you have a video like this on file systems?

[@SpaceRexWill]

No but that’s a good idea!

[@Cerim112]

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

[@MrFloRolf]

@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.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Oh really? Thats awesome! been a while since I had that setup so things must have changed. Either way you might look into trying a game or 2 with iscsi as you could get a ton better performance for load times

[@helghastisgood]

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

[@Djcrooks]

Great video

[@theboldmen76]

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

[@freedom3eagle]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

You would want to setup a VPN server

[@freedom3eagle]

@@SpaceRexWill that means every time if i want to get files i need to connect vpn first right..?

[@MarkRay84]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

Checkout this video: The Complete Guide to Remotely Access Synology NAS - All 5 Options Explained kzbin.info/www/bejne/pWPGnGSdaMSeadE

[@thisisalain]

thank you

[@TacoGrande007]

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.

[@benque7491]

Good video thx a lot

[@pbrigham]

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.

[@SpaceRexWill]

If you are on a Mac and need IOPS use NFS

[@seaofcuriosity]

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 .

[@SpaceRexWill]

You will want to use a VPN server to do this. Basically you connect back to your home network using a VPN server (I have a video on how to set it up) and then you will be able to securely access SMB

[@seaofcuriosity]

I wanted to know what protocol does NextCloud use . Can we do smb + nextcloud together on the same pool or they will create conflict ?

[@yw7014]

@@SpaceRexWill Hey! Thanks for the video. Can you have a tutorial for this VPN+SMB access set up? Been trying to use WebDAV to access files remotely but has not been successful...

[@MrFloRolf]

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.

[@B-a_s-H]

Solid Explorer is pretty.... solid for that.

[@fandibus]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

You do not have to! Smb works fine for this

[@fandibus]

@@SpaceRexWill is there a guide for this? The guides I found all said to use AFP. I had connected over SMB the other day and time machine wouldn’t backup as it couldn’t find AFP. It’s the only reason I currently have AFP on. I’d love to ditch it.

[@KangJangkrik]

Your video editor need rest, see 4:43

[@petevenuti7355]

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!

[@swistak0220]

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.

[@danielsamuels986]

Try FX File Browser (the Pro version) - it doesnt have any file syncing I think. but has great smb support and a built in text editor and open with function if you want to use another app to open the file.

[@swistak0220]

@@danielsamuels986 Thanks, I just downloaded the free version and it's way better than previous app I used. Text editor and video streaming works great for me. Do you know what's the difference between free and pro version?

[@danielsamuels986]

@@swistak0220 I think it adds cloud storage support(Google Drive, Ondrive, etc) and ftp support. Plus it has a android to android sharing, and a way to manage files on your android via a web browser on your pc

[@Hephasto]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

All of the ones I went over here are essentially file systems your computer can connect to. FTP is just a transfer protocol. You can’t edit a document on an FTP server (at least not by design) it’s only used as a drop box

[@blcjck8121]

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.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Yeah, when you are running linux NFS should be faster for something like a lsdir. Only reason I would use SMB in this case is if you wanted to load media from your windows machine onto the share directly

[@Olfan]

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.

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

[@freedom3eagle]

Whats the difference and ftp and webdev?

[@SpaceRexWill]

They are fairly similar, WebDAV is actually very similar to a website and uses the http(s) protocol. FTP is just a different protocol that focuses more on only file transfers

[@freedom3eagle]

@@SpaceRexWill do you recommend ftp over webdev ?

[@freedom3eagle]

@@SpaceRexWill i have sent email. Could you check please?

[@ronstewtsaw]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

Hey thanks!

[@TalpaDK]

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

[@TSSC]

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).

[@TSSC]

General recommendation 0:21 SMB 1:15 AFP 2:38 NFS 4:45 iSCSI 6:47 Summary 11:32

[@eaglesmallenterprises3050]

Very handsome, smart man.

[@frankbaron1608]

i wouldn't use smb outside a vpn.

[@SpaceRexWill]

All of these I would only use over a local connection (not over the internet) except for a VPN

[@Kimera_Alternate_Realities]

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

[@catsupchutney]

0.75 speed is needed here

[@pepeshopping]

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

[@SpaceRexWill]

not NFS, NFS with authentication. regular NFS is really easy but has to be deployed on a completely trusted network because it assumes that the client connecting is telling the truth about which user ID it is using. If you want to do authentication you need to use kerberos which is not easy for a general user to setup compared to the simple authentication by smb / iSCSI

[@marcello4258]

Did he say Mac server? 😂😂😂😂