SMB vs. AFP

Hello,

I am using Lightroom Classic on my MacBook Pro (14", 2021 with Apple M1 Pro chip) and a Synology NAS DS414 (using EXT4 file format) where all my photos are stored. I have connected my NAS drives via AFP. When I try to "Edit in" from a photo in LrC, LrC creats a TIF and hands over to the external editor. A few plugins (belonging to the external editor) do have an issue, while trying to load the image. It takes a few minutes until something happens. But instead of loading the photo my NAS drives get unmounted.

For testing I switched from AFP to SMB connection and did the above test again. This time I was not getting an issue. The images loaded perfectly and reasonable fast at the external editors. However, at the external editors, processing and saving takes sometimes longer sometimes very fast. Sometimes, when I get impatient I hit Option+Command+ESC to terminate the editor, this seem to help and saving gets done at the same moment I hit the key combo.

I have done, a bit of a research in regard to AFP vs. SMB. In the past AFP was the preferred protocol, that is why I used this. However, I went to the Apple Guide pages and found two sources (for macOS 12 - Monterey), indicating that even Apple is now preferring SMB over AFP. At the following article they say if you have the choice chose SMB:

Types of disks you can use with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

Even more restrictive they do not list AFP any longer at this help page when it comes to connecting to a NAS server:

Network address formats and protocols on Mac - Apple Support

So what is your experience, do you have similar issues using AFP over SMB or vice versa?

Cheers

Joerg

(Update wrong tags below - MacBook Pro 14" and macOS 12.5.1)