NAS for Mac environment
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High speed and excellent mod!
@Minion-Queen -
@MattSpeller said:
We have 2x DS412+ and 2x large ones (12 bay?)
The heavily used 412 has given us some issues, most of which are firmware related. Just finished updating it again this morning which has (so far) cured our most recent ills.
Overall, I'd recommend them but they're not perfect by any means (and what is, really).
How does it work with MAC?
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Also, once the main drive is set, i need to back this up to a readynas which is also one of their existing system. I think this can be done with some tools installed to watch the folders and move it on daily basis
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@Ambarishrh I've not heard anything bad, other than standard MAC stuff (takes a sec to populate list of folders, magnified over VPN)
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Need to make sure that the device has afp support which I believe gives better performance while accessing it from MAC, plus the regular SMB for windows guys
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If you want an appliance, Synology and Netgear ReadyNAS would be my starting point. Those are my top two picks in this range.
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whoever wants to see the interface of Qnap and Synology
https://demo.synology.com:5001/webman/index.cgi
ACCOUNT: admin
PASSWORD: synologyhttp://demo.qnap.com:8080/
USER NAME: qnap
PASSWORD: qnap -
@Ambarishrh said:
Need to make sure that the device has afp support which I believe gives better performance while accessing it from MAC, plus the regular SMB for windows guys
Mac officially uses SMB, not AFP. They've dropped AFP officially. I don't believe that they were seeing any performance benefits from it. It's a deprecated technology, but will continue to work for a while. But hardcore Mac users are all on SMB and have been for a while.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Ambarishrh I've not heard anything bad, other than standard MAC stuff (takes a sec to populate list of folders, magnified over VPN)
That's not a Mac issue but a Finder issue. Replace Finder and the Mac has the same speed as elsewhere.
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finder replacement for solving the access speed issues on MAC?
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@Ambarishrh said:
How does it work with MAC?
Macs talk the same protocols as everyone else. SMB first, NFS second and AFP deprecated but included. There is no concept of "storage for Mac" anymore. That's an old idea.
The only thing to be aware of is the Finder issue and that plagues all non-Mac native storage equally.
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@scottalanmiller Any recommended finder alternative?
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@Ambarishrh said:
finder replacement for solving the access speed issues on MAC?
Yes, Finder causes issues with large directories when served out from any non-Mac platform on any protocol.
Options to fix it are:
- Use a Mac as your file server (because it creates the needed metadata to make Finder happy)
- Replace Finder with a tool that doesn't require the metadata
- Give up on file sharing and move to SAN + clustered filesystem like SAN-MP so that you are using a Mac-managed HFS+ system.
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@Ambarishrh said:
@scottalanmiller Any recommended finder alternative?
muCommander worked for us in testing but I doubt that people will want to use it if they do this full time. There are lots of commercial ones that are supposed to fix this problem too, but you'd have to trial some and see which ones fix the issue and which ones people like.
Before you do that, though.... are you seeing the Finder bug? Or is this just fixing a hypothetical performance issue?
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@scottalanmiller well they have asked me to look for an alternative for the current seagate black armor, plus as mentioned earlier, on MAC opening one particular folder which is around 1TB is painfully slow, it has loads of images and even listing folder takes time. On Windows it works fine though
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Need to check from this, try those 3 tools and see if it helps
http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/why-a-finder-replacement-is-still-a-good-idea--mac-60841 -
@Ambarishrh said:
@scottalanmiller well they have asked me to look for an alternative for the current seagate black armor, plus as mentioned earlier, on MAC opening one particular folder which is around 1TB is painfully slow, it has loads of images and even listing folder takes time. On Windows it works fine though
A 1TB folder would be expected to be painfully slow. That slowness is 100% on the Mac side and is not from the storage. What they are doing is fundamentally something a Mac can't handle correctly. It's a well known bug that Apple refuses to patch. As you can tell by doing it from Windows, the issue is the Mac itself, not the storage.
That's definitely the Finder bug. So unless they want to completely change how their Macs work, they need to stop using NAS storage completely.
A SAN with a Mac Mini file server in front of it is the popular solution.
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@Ambarishrh said:
Need to check from this, try those 3 tools and see if it helps
http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/why-a-finder-replacement-is-still-a-good-idea--mac-60841I feel like Path Finder is the one that people recommended the most back when we last dealt with this.
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There is also the other option of looking into why a Mac is accessing such a large amount of network storage. Obviously this is something that Apple does not intent Mac users to be doing. Maybe they are choosing the wrong tools for the job.
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I am not sure what an entry SAN pricing is.
We could find replacement for finders, but I believe there are companies who access file servers like this which has more than a TB of data from MAC.
In my company we use Netapp which handles the file sharing well for both MAC and Windows and also does well for heavy files as well. We work on PSD files which the user download via finder. The challenge would be to find a good but not super expensive SAN if thats the way to go
