AFP vs SMB vs NFS - fiiiiight

b0redom

Dabbler
Joined
Sep 2, 2011
Messages
40
Hi Folks,
I've just bought a shiny new MacMini to replace my iMac which exploded. I've decided to move my large Photos library on to my FreeNAS box. I will set up a dedicated share for this purpose. My question is, what is the best sort of share to enable for this? AFP, SMB, NFS? The profile is obviously lots of smallish (1-2MB usually) files.

Mac OS version: Catalina (10.15.2)

FreeNAS version: FreeNAS-11.2-U7

FreeNAS hardware is:

LeNovo TS140
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 v3 @ 3.50GHz (8 cores)
32GB RAM
5x 10TB Drives in RAID-Z2

The only benchmarks/advice I can see are *way* out of date. I guess I'm leaning towards AFP, but only because that has Apple in the name.

Any recommendations?

TIA....

b0redom
 
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
926
I would say SMB as its universal across all clients and will still be around over the next few years unlike AFP potentially.
 

anodos

Sambassador
iXsystems
Joined
Mar 6, 2014
Messages
9,543
Color tags probably won't work properly over NFS. When you create the SMB dataset on 11.3, make sure to choose the "SMB" dataset preset. This is create-time only and includes optimizations for listdir. AFP has a limited amount of time left on it (probably measured in single-digit years, but no definitive information from Apple). It's generally better to look at the features available through a given protocol (and how long you'll be supporting it) and then make a decision accordingly. NFSv3 generally performs significantly better in metadata-heavy workloads (with the all the limitations of NFSv3, which are generally well-documented) and AFP is on its way out.
 
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
926
‘official’ iXsystems view
I don't think you are going to get an 'official iXsystems view' on this forum. But I would say SMB would be a sensible choice.
 

marcevan

Patron
Joined
Dec 15, 2013
Messages
432
I can tell you this (with Macbook Pro 2020):

Even if you have SMB share with the IP of your macbook in there, and create no AFP shares at all, the macbook will connect thru AFP to your freenas.

I'm on 11.3u3 and if I turn off AFP service my macbook does not connect. If it's on, it does. And there's not a single "share" in AFP, only in SMB.
 

seanm

Guru
Joined
Jun 11, 2018
Messages
570
There must be something weird with your setup, because that doesn't happen with any of the 30 odd Macs in my office.
 

marcevan

Patron
Joined
Dec 15, 2013
Messages
432
Just tried and thanks. Fixed.

I disabled AFP service, then used finder go to server as smb://IPoffreenas/Share

No trailing '/' after Share name.

Made an alias for the desktop and all's well.
 
Top