With 5 months under our belt using the half-terabyte array, we are re-thinking completing the project by adding 2 more 250 GB NAS drives. These SMB shares (aka CIFS as the Mac prefers to ID them) have a way of dropping off the network. Often, they can’t be remounted without restarting them (this takes me back to the early days of network servers).

Given the cost – cheap – I guess I can’t complain, but things like automated backups fail when the NAS won’t mount. You can imagine preventable disasters while on vacation etc. under these circumstances, especially given Murphy’s near-perfect batting average.

Macs have problems with SMB shares, IMHO. I see this at work frequently enough. But then, Windows has problems with SMB, though perhaps less often (also observed at work). I wish I could say that Mac OS X Server’s AFP was take-it-to-the-bank solid, but I’ve had some issues there, too (on Server 104.x anyway – I think Server 10.3.x is better). And, the last time I tried, NFS was not particularly mature on OS X (that was a while ago, though). I’ve had good luck with netatalk Appleshare-over-IP on Linux in the past, but that defeats my plan to move the whole gulker.com LAN to our 2 Minis. Sheesh… new plan in the works… upgrade the drives in our AMD Linux box?

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