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Are there any significant difference in performance?

I have Linux boxes and Windows Server boxes and I plan to centralize file storage. Should I use Samba (Linux) or Windows file server as the file server?

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I know this could be a religious war and I hadn't seen any benchmarks or done any tests myself, but my anecdotal opinion is samba was faster. However, when I look for a central file store I look for ease of administration and backup/restore. That for me usually determines the OS I use, which for me means Windows. – Scott McClenning Jan 21 '10 at 5:43
I know this could be a religious war and I hadn't seen any benchmarks or done any tests myself, but my anecdotal opinion is samba was faster. However, when I look for a central file store I look for ease of administration and backup/restore. That for me usually determines the OS I use, which for me means Windows. – Scott McClenning Jan 21 '10 at 5:43
will you use the same user/login on all boxes or are there a variety? do you have any need to connect to the server as multiple different users from any one box? – quack quixote Jan 21 '10 at 7:34
will you use the same user/login on all boxes or are there a variety? do you have any need to connect to the server as multiple different users from any one box? – quack quixote Jan 21 '10 at 7:34
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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Last time I checked (around 2006), I managed to run samba vs win2003, and samba was about 7 times faster. This took a lot of configuration, network sniffing and exact send/receive buffer calculations to match my network. Out of the box samba was slower than windows 2003.

just my $0.02

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up vote 1 down vote

I would vote for Samba on grounds of Compatibility of interface.

If you have in your network Vista/Win7 computers together with XP and Samba, a Windows server might not see all the computers on the network. However, Samba sees all.

While Microsoft's purpose is to encourage you to abandon XP, Samba's purpose is to interface with every OS.

I recommend using a recent enough version of Samba. If all the machines can't discover the file server, you might, in order to access the file-shares, need to allocate it a fixed IP address and add it to the hosts files of the other computers.

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up vote 1 down vote

Since SMB2 which shipped with server 2008 (perhaps only R2) and Windows 7 (Vista maybe aswell) is supposed to have multiple optimizations in the overhead on filetransfers, I would assume that a windows-based would outperform a linux SAMBA-installation as of now. I'm not really sure how far the samba-project has come in this area.

I do however think that the difference in performance is negligible in most cases, and the choice should depend more on your other criterias for your setup (user authentication for instance)

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up vote 1 down vote

If you want to set detailed access-rights and perhaps use Active-Directory, you shuld you Windows.

If you just need plain Shares, use Samba.

Why? Setting up Samba to work with Active-Directory is possible, but you spend some time. If you just need a share with no rights-management, samba is your choice.

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