NSA325 v2 - What's the best way to access its share by linux?

Rosario

All,

I need to access the NAS shares using linux. What's the best way in your opinion?

Thanks,

  Rosario

Mijzelf

Depends on the CPU power of the Linux box. If that is 'enough' you can use samba. If it is some embedded system, NFS might be better, as samba takes a lot of extra CPU cycles.

The problem with NFS is that it's implementation in the 325 is a bit, well, strange. You can share a directory by NFS or by samba, but not both.

AleXSR

What about FTPS? Would that not be even more secure?

Mijzelf

All FTP flavors are file transfer protocols, which is something different as a sharing protocol, although there are similarities. For instance, using FTP you can't open a file, read the last n bytes, and close it again. You first have to download the whole file. A bit problematic if the files is multigigabyte.

AleXSR

Hmmm, but it definitely works to open and search files that are only shared via FTP with Kodi. Kodi it will play, seek in and do anything you want with that file.
And the device most definitely does not download the files (I have that setup on an old Fire TV stick, which has basically no local memory).

Plus, for pure downloads, FTP is far more stable and supports resuming. I switched to FTP because I found NFS and Samba to be less reliable when transferring large amounts of files or huge files.

oldnas

Mijzelf said:

Depends on the CPU power of the Linux box. If that is 'enough' you can use samba. If it is some embedded system, NFS might be better, as samba takes a lot of extra CPU cycles.

The problem with NFS is that it's implementation in the 325 is a bit, well, strange. You can share a directory by NFS or by samba, but not both.

First of all: THANK YOU, @Mijzelf for all of the work you do to keep our old NSA325s useful!!!!

May I suggest a small refinement on the above re: NFS vs. samba:

If you store the folders (and files) in your NFS share directories, you can log in to the NSA325 using SSH or Telnet and then "ln -s <nfs_subdirectory> <directory_in_samba_share>". The directory tree below the symlink will appear in both the Samba and NFS shares.

Edit: and NFS definitely provides faster/better data transfers when mounting on a Linux box. I've not had any problem with files >10 GB on NFS, FWIW.

JockeSve

Is there still a noticeable (or even measurable) difference between Samba and NFS with "modern" hardware?
I really can't see any real difference if copying a movie (5-8 GB) to or from NFS or SMB with my Raspi 4B's (Raspberry PI OS).
Yes, I know that was a difference earlier but as both HW (including network) and protocol stability and performance has increased dramatically so the difference shouldn't be any major issue... 

oldnas

JockeSve said:

Is there still a noticeable (or even measurable) difference between Samba and NFS with "modern" hardware?
I really can't see any real difference if copying a movie (5-8 GB) to or from NFS or SMB with my Raspi 4B's (Raspberry PI OS).
Yes, I know that was a difference earlier but as both HW (including network) and protocol stability and performance has increased dramatically so the difference shouldn't be any major issue... 

My comment was only with regard to the NSA325 v2 performance, and is based on a little over 6 years of using it with high-performance Linux PCs on a gigabit Ethernet switch at full duplex. No claims made about other configurations/combinations.

Mijzelf

A Raspi 4 is very powerful hardware, and probably the bottleneck is not in the filesharing protocol. I would expect it in the sd card, wifi, cabled network or usb storage. The network throughput is maxed out on 120MB/sec, and I don't think 120MB/sec samba will hit a serious dent in the RPi's CPU.

I had an old Atom based laptop. When using it for movie streaming it could handle 480p over NFS, but not over samba. Mind you, the movie decoding alone was 75% CPU, and the remaining CPU time was not enough for samba.