[PLUG] NFS or Samba for access to Network Attached Storage?

[Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com>]

I'm going to be setting up a linux box, the primary function of which 
will be the company FTP server.  That may sound like a very demanding 
application but for us it's not.  We have a lot of files, but the number 
of transfers is relatively small.

The current machine is running Windows with an external RAID box to hold 
the data.  For the new machine, we are thinking of holding the data on 
one of the NAS boxes (Network Attached Storage, like the WD MyCloud 
series for example) that have become popular in the past few years.

The downside would obviously be that instead of a dedicated drive 
connecting through a SATA cable we're now connecting over our LAN.  But, 
it allows the storage capacity of the NAS to be used for other purposes 
company-wide, not just on the FTP server box.

Question:  Is NFS likely to provide a significant performance 
improvement in this application over Samba, and will I have an easy time 
setting up the FTP server machine to mount the NAS device at boot with 
fstab? I don't know whether all NAS devices support NFS, and whether to 
make it a requirement or not.  If Samba works just as well I don't have 
to hunt for NFS-capable devices.

--
Greg Helledy
GRA, Incorporated
P:  +1 215-884-7500
F:  +1 215-884-1385
www.gra.aero
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