NASLite Network Attached Storage

hallo all.
After a lot of research I don't understend why I'm getting different performance result.
My setup is Naslite2 with adaptec 2400a and 4x 250MB in RAID5 on a 100Mbit network.
Now mounting the disk under OSX I get different performance result if I'm using SMB or NFS.
With SBF write to the disk I get this:

and is what i'm expecting.

With NFS write to the disk I get this:

(5 MByte average)

When I read from the NAS in NFS:

Which is not bad.

anyone have some clue?

ciao
Davide (ITA)

Because OSX's finder file IO is pitifully slow, If you benchmark via the command line you'll see the difference.

Hopefully Leopard will have better IO via the finder.

Which version of OSX?
I found from lots of tests the following
10.3.x is painfully slow to write, not bad to read for NFS
10.4.x slow to write, read same speed as 10.3.9 for NFS
both are fine with SMB but then there are a FEW problems associated with OSX and SMB.
I did a post in the NasLite+ forum somwhere here and you can see via the terminal you get great copy speed but through the finder its crap.
ATM I now have a NasLite2 server and a FreeNAS. NasLite for the PCs and FreeNAS for the Macs, as it supports AFP, and I get as good as SMB speeds with AFP (and none of the SMB problems), SMB is slower but that can be tweaked to be fixed (next version should have the tweaked SMB settings).
If you try FreeNAS don't try the software RAID, stick with true Hardware RAID like NasLite has done.
NFS on Macs atm is a pain, no amount of tweaking fixes this. Maybe 10.5??? or NasLite might add AFP?

I'm using OSX 10.4.7.
I did some testing too and I came up with the same of yours results.
For now I will use SMB with the only drawback that my mackbook doesn't go to sleep while with NFS did, other than that is OK.
With NFS I have problem with file permission:

as you can see I can't unlock the permission and with Photoshop CS2 I can't overwrite the file, with other software I'm able to overwrite though, it may a Photoshop issue. Is strange because I remeber that while using Dreamweaver I had the same problem so after locating the file I change the permission of all the files from the folder where they was store in.

Which other issue should I look for using SMB on OSX?
Lets wait for 10.5.


ciao
Davide

There are a few which I have hit, but there are more which are on http://www.macwindows.com.
File name limitation
Invalid characters (/, \, *, ?, ;, etc.) which mac users keep trying to use
Network browsing sometime won't show SMB shares
Login to a SMB can be a nightmare (authentication problems)
a lot of "._filename" all over the server, which is the resource fork of the file you sent, so it keeps it preview, file type, what program made it etc etc. Usually they will delete when the file is deleted from a Mac, but if a PC deletes it or moves it, it stays there. (I had around 20000 "._" on one of my WinNT smb servers that I deleted, you can get "BlueHarvest" which helps you a bit, but be carefull on which file you delete the "._" on. I only do it to PDF, TIF, PSD, EPS, JPG, MPG, and a couple of other types. DON'T DO IT TO FONT FILES or you can kiss them good bye. If you use extensions on your files its OK, if not, learn to use them.
Some setups in a mixed PC Mac place, you can some files that lock, and you can't delete them untill you reboot the NAS (did have this problem for 10.4.x only where 10.3.9 was fine, so I have only got a couple of macs running 10.4.x atm, this problem did go away for some reason, but other ppl out there still have the problem, apple forums has others if you do get a problem)
I hope 10.5 is better.