NASLite Network Attached Storage

I did some rough diskwriggler benchmarks today from my G4 to my NASLite box between AFP and Samba, surprising how much faster AFP was, especially in writes. I guess my AppleTV will be mounting via AFP in the future, instead of currently via NFS.




AFP :

Write Summary : 300.00 frames in 371.59 secs
: 0.07(min) 0.81(avg) 1.42(max) FPS
: 0.82(min) 9.81(avg) 17.29(max) MB/s


Read Summary : 300.00 frames in 233.44 secs
: 0.54(min) 1.29(avg) 1.44(max) FPS
: 6.54(min) 15.62(avg) 17.51(max) MB/s


Samba :

Write Summary : 300.00 frames in 498.73 secs
: 0.26(min) 0.60(avg) 1.52(max) FPS
: 3.16(min) 7.31(avg) 18.50(max) MB/s



Read Summary : 300.00 frames in 295.95 secs
: 0.55(min) 1.01(avg) 1.23(max) FPS
: 6.63(min) 12.32(avg) 14.97(max) MB/s

Over 12MB / frame? That's a pretty hefty resolution.....

Does this mean that the iTunes server implementation is progressing?

The iTunes server is indeed progressing and we hope to be able to provide more details soon. AFP, as most of you know is the OSX native protocol and is currently not supported by NASLite. We are trying to change that so after some intense work we have a working prototype that actually performs better than we originally predicted. Ralph has spent a lot of time tuning AFP for our purposes and as he noted above, it appears to be faster than SMB/CIFS.

Just bought a Macbook Pro and was about to ask how to set up AFP. I am new to mac and still learning. I guess I will have something to look forward to. I am also waiting for the music server.

jmiliz

Alright AFP support
No more SMB limits on OSX like naming problems, ._DStore and resource fork files.

I was talking to one of my friends who's SE at Apple, he was very surprised when I told him I tweeked AFP up and it was faster than Samba. Apparently native AFP has some latency issues.

I have a Thecus N5200 which has AFPv3 and its AFP performance is no where near as good as my old W2K server running AFP

Here are just some figures I'm getting from every mac I have tried so far.
File is 732Mb avi, software RAID5 with 4 disks and a hot spare, Gigabit connection to a Gigabit switch. I reboot mac between each copy. Coping was done through the finder. Not a true way of showing speed, but you can see the N5200 AFP is not that good.

Mount drive as SMB first

Copying to N5200 took around 35 seconds
Copying from N5200 took around 30 seconds

Mount drive as AFP

Copy to N5200 took around 3 minutes
Copy from N5200 took around 50 seconds.

Mount 5year old W2K server running AFP v2

Copy to W2K took around 30 seconds
Copy from W2K took around 30 seconds

Since v2.06 now supports AFP ...

I have Win and Mac machines on my network. Would it be a bad thing to use SMB from Win and AFP from a Mac? Is this kind of protocol mixing a big no-no? Should I just stick with SMB for both?

Thanks

You can most definitely use both but with the understanding the AFP and subsequently OS X will leave apple-specific artifacts on the NASLite drives when accessed via AFP. That's normal but can be a bit of a surprise to the untrained eye.

Ahh ok, cool. Thanks Tony