Do Macs and NASes not work well together?

[turnstyle]

Hi all,

Right now I use an old Windows 7 laptop with external 2TB USB2 drives as a file server on my LAN.

I'm now at about 65% capacity on the drives (and they've been running for 3+ years) -- so I'm looking into getting new gear. I had been assuming I would get a NAS, but...

1) I just discovered a bunch of relatively recent posts about poor (sometime VERY poor) NAS performance with Macs, and here's a recent article from the folks who make the backup software I use (ChronoSync):
http://www.econtechnologies.com/chronosync/TN-CS-why-your-nas-is-slow.html

Is it actually a bad idea to get a NAS for use with a Mac?

2) Or I could just add new & bigger USB drives to my Windows 7 laptop -- but then I'd be stuck at USB2 performance.

3) Or I could add a USB3 ExpressCard to the Windows 7 laptop -- but I believe those are flakey, and I'm reluctant to do so -- I don't think it'll be like a "normal" USB3 port.

4) Some people seem to say "Get a Mac Mini" -- but that seems a bit overkill -- plus, I don't have a monitor to use with it, and it's not clear to me whether it works 100% headless.

5) The priciest option is to replace the Windows 7 laptop with a MacBook Pro -- but this seems nutty. The advantage is I'd have fast ports and a built-in display for the rare times I need it.

So: a NAS seems the "sensible" solution -- but I'm a bit concerned that NAS and Mac don't work well together?

Anybody have an opinion? Grateful to hear it! -Scott

 

[stevech]

A small (2 bay) NAS from Synology or QNAP is good IF you have several computers on your home LAN and the NAS can provide safe storage. Otherwise, just use USB3 external drives. If your laptop has no USB3, then USB2 will probably do fine. The speed of USB3 shows up mainly when rarely you are moving files that are 100's of MB in size. Any NAS MUST have a USB3 drive for backups of the NAS. It will happen. And the Macs and PCs MUST have good auto-backups to the NAS. And users should get into the habit of storing files on the NAS, not the PC/Mac, with rare exception.

Macs and NASes integrate well. There are several here on the forum that do so.

 

[KenZ71]

What variety of NAS are you thinking about?

True you can stay with USB drives but that makes backups more of a challenge. Also, a NAS gives options to run other apps / utilities.

I am a big fan of NAS4Free, on their forums there are many MAC fans as well

 

[turnstyle]

Leaning toward a Synology or QNAP -- and I'd still hang a USB drive off the NAS to back it up.

My concern is that I've seen a lot of references to poor NAS performance when accessed by Macs, including the article I linked to above:
http://www.econtechnologies.com/chronosync/TN-CS-why-your-nas-is-slow.html

Or see examples here:
https://www.google.com/webhp?source...=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=synology+mac+performance

Thanks for any thoughts...

 

[stevech]

Doesn't Apple use a common (standard) *nix file system in OSX? They started with BSD rather than Linux, but that was an unfortunate decision way back when they were desperate to get out of Apple OS.

The same topic exists for PCs: NASes are mostly Linux based; most but not all, use the ext4 file system. So a PC with NTFS has an SMB driver between the LAN/NAS and the NTFS files.
A Mac has the same SNB layer, or it could use NFS instead. The NASes support both, I think.

Could such slowness with OSX, if true, be due to Apple not "trying hard" to have an efficient SMB implementation? Or maybe this is all just FUD.
I can't speak authoritatively as I don't own a Mac (Apple here is only my wife's iPhone/iPad).

 

[sfx2000]

I'm cross platform in my little home office, and I run a QNAP TS-453Pro, and NAS performance is fine...

It's probably overkill for what I do with it, but plenty of space, very good performance, and QTS 4.1 is feature rich enough to meet most needs. QTS supports both AFP (native and pretty fast with Macs) and CIFS/SMB (nice if cross platform) and the model I have also does iSCSI, but that's another story...

a 2014 Mac Mini with OSx Server app - actually, not a bad approach, they will run headless without issue (I used to with a 2010 Mac Mini), and a plethora of USB 3 ports and a couple of Thunderbolt ports to boot... having a monitor/keyboard/mouse initially to set it up is useful, but once you've got it sorted, you can use desktop sharing to control the mini from there...

But before going down the path of throwing down 500-1500 dollars on a NAS solution, look at what you have presently and work out the bottlenecks - you didn't mention if the Win7 laptop had GigE or not, and that would make a big difference...

 

[sfx2000]

Doesn't Apple use a common (standard) *nix file system in OSX? They started with BSD.

They're still using HFS+ rather than UFS or other - not a big issue...

The same topic exists for PCs: NASes are mostly Linux based; most but not all, use the ext4 file system. So a PC with NTFS has an SMB driver between the LAN/NAS and the NTFS files.

Samba abstracts the underlying filesystem - so it could be NTFS, EXT 3/4, UFS, ZFS, HFS+, whatever - as long as the OS supports the file system, Samba is fine with it...

A Mac has the same SNB layer, or it could use NFS instead. The NASes support both, I think.

Used to - until Samba went GPLv3, which Apple had issues with - so they wrote their own implementation of smbclient and smbserver.. that happened some time back - it does support SMB2, but I don't believe it supports the latest/greatest SMB3 spec features...

Could such slowness with OSX, if true, be due to Apple not "trying hard" to have an efficient SMB implementation? Or maybe this is all just FUD.

SMB/CIFS has never been super efficient or fast on a Mac - it's supported, but there's been performance issues, and issues with large files...

From personal experience, I've had better luck with AFP going into a NAS box if the NAS supports it..

 

[sfx2000]

2) Or I could just add new & bigger USB drives to my Windows 7 laptop -- but then I'd be stuck at USB2 performance.

Larger drives might help - bit density on the platters, but ultimately, USB2 is going to be the bottleneck

3) Or I could add a USB3 ExpressCard to the Windows 7 laptop -- but I believe those are flakey, and I'm reluctant to do so -- I don't think it'll be like a "normal" USB3 port.

It's absolutely a USB3 port - might not be bootable if the PC doesn't support booting from expressCard, but performance across the ExpressCard slot should be fine..

4) Some people seem to say "Get a Mac Mini" -- but that seems a bit overkill -- plus, I don't have a monitor to use with it, and it's not clear to me whether it works 100% headless.

Depending on your needs, that might be a good approach - see my other post for comments there - Mini with OSX server is comparable to a NAS in many ways, and they'll run fine headless...

5) The priciest option is to replace the Windows 7 laptop with a MacBook Pro -- but this seems nutty. The advantage is I'd have fast ports and a built-in display for the rare times I need it.

No, not a good reason to get a Macbook Pro to do this kind of work - consider the Mini to be a Macbook Pro without the screen, battery, keyboard, and trackpad - so if you are considering a Mac to be your fileserver, go with the Mini..

 

[stevech]

MS windows cannot be booted from USB. Even in windows 10.
One CAN boot USB to install, but not run Windows.

 

[stevech]

Using a Mac Mini headless after setup...
I have two PCs here that run headless; one is in my HTPC setup. I used to use VNC for access as there's no new user login on the target PC (whereas MS Remote Desktop is disruptive in this manner). And as pixels per screen has grown, VNC is just too slow.
I used free Team Viewer for a while. But is too naggy and finnicky about login.

Now I'm using free SplashTop.... it's by far better than all the above.
http://www.splashtop.com/personal

says it can target Windows and Mac. I wonder how well it works on the Mac Mini?
I'm considering buying an eBay circa 2012 Mac Mini as my first ever Mac.

 

[L&LD]

MS windows cannot be booted from USB. Even in windows 10.
One CAN boot USB to install, but not run Windows.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html

 

[stevech]

cute.

comment on mini-Mac .. just so I can cheaply screw around with OSX? Headless with splashtop or ?
( my big monitor has a spare HDMI input, but switching the monitor among sources is absurdly slow and awkward in button pushing).

 

[sfx2000]

cute.

comment on mini-Mac .. just so I can cheaply screw around with OSX? Headless with splashtop or ?
( my big monitor has a spare HDMI input, but switching the monitor among sources is absurdly slow and awkward in button pushing).

Haven't tried Splashtop - heard good things about it for Windows platforms..

Team Viewer works well enough - faster than VNC (and yes, one can VNC into a Mac, because *nix, lol..

Mac to Mac - I just use the screen sharing there, works well enough..

I'll warn you up front - don't install BootCamp on your new Mini - as you might find it to be a better PC than most PC's on Windows

BootCamp runs Windows on metal - the only downside I've seen is that it does Legacy BIOS emulation vs. UEFI, and that is a problem for AHCI (think SSD's and Samsung's utility for example)

 

[stevech]

I like the one-click use of Splashtop - much like VNC is (but VNC is too slow). Team VIewer is for me a PITA. As is Remote Desktop. It's because I want to fiddle with the PCs that are always on and viewed on the TV set/HTPC. So Splashtop lets me KVM-connect and that PCs screen doesn't change. Give Splashtop on OSX; setup to not require a password (at least temporarily) - I don't worry about intruders on the LAN side of my router.

The 2012 Mac Mini is $500 and has a rather lame CPU speed. Reminds me of my pokey dual core Atom motherboard running Linux. I don't want to spend $1000 on a mini-Mac. What's your suggestion?

But, I think PCs eat all the MIPS that AMD/Intel can produce due to the virtual machine within Windows (.net). If you run native apps on today's PCs, ones written in C++ not C#, they are incredibly fast. As are most (non Microsoft-written) compilers that don't do screen output. But .Net seemingly exists fore security reasons - too many buffer overrun problems with C/C++ code written poorly way back.

 

[sfx2000]

The 2012 Mac Mini is $500 and has a rather lame CPU speed. Reminds me of my pokey dual core Atom motherboard running Linux. I don't want to spend $1000 on a mini-Mac. What's your suggestion?

Mini's are odd - so one has to find the right one... old school mini's from 2009 have their place, but generally around 200-250 depending on G4 (runs 10.4 so can run classic Apps from PPC land) or Intel Core Duo/Solo... there was a run of 2006 thru 2009 mini's with various Core2Duo options - they're all socketed, and I did take a Core Solo 2006 edition to a dual-core T7200 and it ran fine... until OSX 10.7 where it's 32-bit UEFI got in the way...

FWIW - No Mini's run ATOM, so don't worry about that - they're Core2Duo post 2010 or i5/i7's, fair enough, and they do tend to follow MacBook Pro's for CPU's...

Mini 2010 - the server edition is the one to find - OS Server 10.6 installs clean on it, and it's a Core2Duo@2.66GHz - trouble here is that the rust disks are getting old, and replacing them is a major PITA

Mini 2011 - Might be the sweet spot - Core i7 Quad (mobile/laptop), but the high end has a discrete GPU from AMD, and it's not bad - disk replacement issues, see above, but single disk refit for an SSD ain't a lot of work

Mini 2012 - Big change here... from Core i5 to a 2.6GHz Core i7 Quad - they're decent performers, but again the CPU's are mobile CPU's from the Macbook Pro 15' line, and no discrete CPU, but HD4000 graphics ain't bad on the Mac..

Special note on the 2012 Mini - includes both Thunderbolt, as well as FW800 and USB3, along with GigE on the motherboard - and HDMI for monitor with DVI adapter in the box - the 2012 mini is the ne-plus-ultra of Mini's with all the options - CTO and Server versions include a 2.6Ghz Intel Quad Core i7, and they're a mini-Mac Pro with the right stuff included - resale markets know this...

Mini 2014 - lot of folks were disappointed with these - max of a 2-core i7 Haswell, and the base model was pretty limited with a 1.4GHz dual-core turboing up to 2.3Ghz - mid-range isn't that bad, and the upper end with the dual-core i7 is perhaps something to avoid - but getting SSD, which is offered on CTO, is a big plus...

If one is looking at Mini's on the ebay/list from Craig - stick with the 2012's unless one finds an i7 2011 with AMD-GPU... and even then... the 2012's are the sweet spot for Mac Mini's...

sfx

 

[stevech]

thanks VERY much. I'm considering a "late 2012" Mac mini. I think there's a big difference in early/mid 2012.
I'm not sure that it allows me to replace the disk with an SSD but that's what I want. I saw a video of how to dismantle a mini to replace the drive.. really intricate, error prone, as I recall. Or maybe that video was for a 2014 or newer mini. Comments?

Maybe this should be email or a new thread.

 

[sfx2000]

thanks VERY much. I'm considering a "late 2012" Mac mini. I think there's a big difference in early/mid 2012.
I'm not sure that it allows me to replace the disk with an SSD but that's what I want. I saw a video of how to dismantle a mini to replace the drive.. really intricate, error prone, as I recall. Or maybe that video was for a 2014 or newer mini. Comments?

Have to be careful buying Mac Mini's on the used market - they all look very similar, but are widely different - I wouldn't recommend getting anything before the Mid-2010 unibody - I have two Mini's, a 2010 Server (ex-server, now HTPC) and a 2012 i7...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201894

Generally, the 2010's are nice for HTPC work, and the 2012's are the most flexible (and with the IvyBridge i7 Quads, the most powerful).

Mini's before 2014 could really be consider similar to MacBook Pro's of similar years...

The 2014 Mini is much more like the MacBook Air 13 in capabilities/features - many folks consider the 2014 to be a step backwards compared to the previous models. 2014 removed FW800, added 3 stream 11ac, but they're dual core only w/soldered RAM, and PCI-SSD in some models (proprietary). They did upgrade Thunderbolt to 2 TB2 ports.

The 2011's with the AMD GPU and the 2012's with the i7-Quads are hard to find, and folks think they are worth much more than the others.. (in other works, used prices are close to new prices).

RAM upgrade was easy enough, but all the Mini's going back to the original, were never intended for end-users to do much inside...

SSD and Drive Swaps - I did a drive swap in a 2010 Mini (same form factor) - probably the worst, most fiddly computer I've ever been inside of - the bottom bay isn't too bad, but since the Mini was a server edition, the upper bay drive required that the Mini be completely disassembled - taking my time, it was an hour and a half job - worst than most laptops...

iFixit has some great guides, as does Other World Computing (OWC)...

OWC does offer mail in services for Drive upgrades - and their SSD lines are high quality - the fact that they're a Mac focused company also helps...

www.macsales.com is OWC's Web Site..

 

[stevech]

thanks... reading