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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
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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3 Answers

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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

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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