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We have a Graphic Design team running iMacs in pretty standard Windows network environment (Windows Server/Domain).

They use up a heap of disk space and we need to hang onto the artwork files forever.

We have HP SAN Servers for all our data.

The problem is that OSX can only see network drives up to 5TB in size. This means we have to split data across multiple shares which creates issues for the designers.

We've tried using dedicated NAS devices before but there also seems to be issues with OSX and SMB that makes browsing folders crazy slow.

Does anybody have any suggestions for large Network Storage that will work with MacOS properly???

Thanks

Chris

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  • tested freenas os ?
    – yagmoth555
    Oct 20, 2017 at 1:57
  • You don't need to stick to SMB, consider NFS - there's loads of centralised and distributed storage systems that expose files via NFS and you'll almost certainly be able to deal with a much large volume size than 5TB - our NetApp filers expose 100TB volumes all the time and Infinidat and Scality can go into the multiple PB ranges.
    – Chopper3
    Oct 20, 2017 at 8:13

1 Answer 1

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There are few options when you are trying to use a network share on mac os:

  • Apple Filing Protocol (AFP)
  • Server Message Block (SMB)
  • Network File System (NFS)
  • File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
  • WebDAV

AFP currently supports Unicode file names, POSIX and access control list permissions, resource forks, named extended attributes, and advanced file locking.

The fastest access is achievable using AFP. I do not know where this 5TB limitation is coming from. There is no mention of it anywhere in the documentation.

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/AFP/Concepts/Concepts.html

If you use SMB there can be some improvement by modifying the network settings (not sure about the different mac os version):

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/NagleDelayedAck/

And /etc/nsmb.conf (client side):

[default]
signing_required=no

https://dpron.com/os-x-10-11-5-slow-smb/

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