NFS with Intel SS4200-E?

[dkazaz]

Hi,

I'm thinking about setting up NFS to access my SS4200-E NAS from my windows PC's. It works fine with SMB but I thought I would try NFS for any possible performance benefits.

The latest release of the SS4200-E OS (a custom linux flavor) supports NFS, however once activating it I cannot figure out how to access it from the PC's. Although I've installed NFS support in Vista and XP, I cannot figure out how to make them login to NFS without a domain server (all the windows guides are written with Domain server in mind - no surprise).

My question is - do I need to run an NFS server in one of the Windows PC's? My guess was that the NAS acts as an NFS server so having NFS clients in the PC's would be sufficient. If thaqt is really the case then I just need to figure out how to login to the NFS server from the PC's...

 

[thiggins]

I haven't tried mounting NFS volumes. But I know that in order to mount an NFS share, you need to know where it is (the exact path) on the NAS, and this isn't often documented.

You'll also need Windows Services for UNIX.

 

[dkazaz]

I will need to experiment a bit with it - the NAS had instructions on mounting the NFS shares but they didn't work for me, which is why I wondered if I needed to run an NFS server, in order to supply the login credentials with which windows will access the NFS shares.

Can anyone advise if this is likely to be worth the effort? I hear a lot about the performance of NFS vs SMB but nothing specific. Also Vista x64 implements SMB2 which is a major step forward in performance.

 

[Dennis Wood]

So far we're seeing a fairly consistent jump in performance between SMB and SMB2 (Vista). The increase varies from about 20 to 80% depending on hardware.

I'll admit that in our testing, I would not have assumed Vista would even be used, but we've tested now on three different hardware platforms and in each case the workstations talk to each other much faster, as well as to the NAS boxes.

 

[corndog]

Whether NFS is better than SMB depends a lot on your NAS device's implementation. While NFS is "supposed" to be faster because it is ligher, in kernel mode, blah blah, it isn't always the case.

I find consistently that SMB is 60% faster than NFS on my ReadyNAS 1100. On my DIY NAS I find them to be about the same.

 

[radit]

Intel SS4200-e join active directory Windows Server 2008?

Friends,
I can not connect Intel SS4200-e to join AD in Windows Server 2008, even I install AD in functional level 2000 or 2003. Anybody help me?