SMB2 or AFP on time capsule?

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iaw4 Author

Level 1

9 points

SMB2 or AFP on time capsule?

dear TC users:

according to apple insider,

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/11/apple-shifts-from-afp-file-sharing-to- smb2-in-os-x-109-mavericks

apple is moving from AFP to SMB2. my time capsule is new, my iMac runs 10.9.5.

the time capsule share shows up by itself. this is quite nice. alas, I suspect it is talking AFP to the iMac. it is not just that it is slow, but when I try to get info on the Time-Capsule in the finder, with "More Info", the circle keeps running forever, claiming to be Fetching. when I look at the "df" output, it includes as mount location the string afpovertcp . /etc/mtab no longer seems to exist, and /usr/bin/df -T doesn't work, either. so, it's an educated guess from the df output.

can or should one switch the over the SMB2 for better performance and windows [linux] compatibility?

advice appreciated.

/iaw

Posted on Oct 1, 2014 10:40 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

LaPastenague

Level 9

67,226 points

Oct 1, 2014 11:04 PM in response to iaw4

Apple never really makes it clear but you can force it to what you want.

I always advise people to use AFP as frankly SMB2 is known to be broken.

Mavericks has no end of trouble keeping track of the TC partly I suspect for that reason.

when I try to get info on the Time-Capsule in the finder, with "More Info", the circle keeps running forever

It is a network drive.. and has always behaved this way. You can select a sub directory but the not the main share.

Here is a TC which will access by AFP because I have forced it to.

And the NAS-Server which is not apple and is only supported by SMB.. neither complete more info.. I suspect the Blue Screen is apple's little joke about SMB but then this is Mountain Lion.. so it is like all the horrible things they said about Intel processors until the day they changed to intel.

In Finder, use Go, Connect to Server.

Type in SMB://TCname.local (where TCname is your actual network name of the TC) Local is the default domain.

Note that Time Machine always uses AFP no matter what you set the connection to.

And honestly I don't think a TC is fast enough to bother. Reality is when measured by people running PC the internal hard disk is just not that fast.

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Answer 2

iaw4 Author

Level 1

9 points

Oct 2, 2014 9:12 PM in response to LaPastenague

thank you. I realize that a network hard disk cannot have very good performance relative to a local SSD. I was hoping ithat OSX would cache better in my RAM if my time capsule ran SMB2 (rather than AFP). I guessed that mixed deployment would be shaky. I had hoped that the all-Apple iMac+Time Capsule would be stable. perhaps under OSX 10.10, then.

The company also outlines that "SMB2 features Resource Compounding, allowing multiple requests to be sent in a single request. In addition, SMB2 can use large reads and writes to make better use of faster networks as well as large MTU support for blazing speeds on 10 Gigabit Ethernet. It aggressively caches file and folder properties and uses opportunistic locking to enable better caching of data. It’s even more reliable, thanks to the ability to transparently reconnect to servers in the event of a temporary disconnect."

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Answer 3

Oct 3, 2014 12:07 AM in response to iaw4

The problem is of course is that SMB is Microsoft network protocol and it is not open source..

The SMB used by every other OS is the Linux hack version. At least as I understand it.. whatever is promised in SMB2 is great on paper and perhaps on Microsoft computers.. but using Linux hacks Hmmm!! It more than amazes me that Apple would go this way.. since they tend not to like open source.

SMB2 flaws are well known. Just do a google search. .there is plenty out there.

Gigabit is pretty well loaded and since you cannot exceed gigabit on the network, using SMB2 is also not going to do anything. (It would have to be supported at both ends anyway).

I did a test of speed just recently. 631Mbps .. so the slow down caused by reading and writing the hard disk is most of the problem.. But I also did a test reading from my TC.. copying file to the computer with SSD.. and I got peak speed of near 80MB/s which I think is pretty good for a single disk solution.

Here is the tests.

1. copy a single very large file to the TC.

Here, I moved a 1GB video file from TC to the computer. Activity monitor shows it moved at peak of 79.8MB/s .. that is Bytes.. As you can see the single file hit a max speed and really sustained that speed throughout the transfer.

If I run iperf from one computer direct to the TC.. (I have terminal access . shhh!!) But you can do it computer to computer via gigabit.

Set one computer as server in terminal.

iperf -s

bind failed: Address already in use

------------------------------------------------------------

Server listening on TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 32.0 KByte (default)

------------------------------------------------------------

Start the test in the other computer. Put in the IP of the other computer.

iperf -c 192.168.2.201

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 192.168.2.201, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 129 KByte (default)

------------------------------------------------------------

[ 4] local 192.168.2.72 port 50587 connected with 192.168.2.201 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 753 MBytes 631 Mbits/sec

So a test over network achieved 631Mbps which is pretty much what you would expect from gigabit.

Looking then at the speed of copying from the TC to this computer 73MB/s x 8 = 584Mbps .. which considering overheads is pretty close to the max speed of this network..

SMB problems

Service Message Block, or SMB, is a commonly used network protocol in the Windows world. SMB is quite commonly used for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices and other devices, making it a must-have for many small businesses and home networks that rely on some kind of central file storage appliance that's not a full blown file server.

Mavericks, just as with other OS X versions before it, supports the protocol. But midway through Mavericks' development, Apple decided to switch out SMB for the later SMB2 protocol (which, despite what its name implies, is not necessarily an improved version of SMB). That's has caused a lot of users to lose connections to their servers. Yo

You can fix this a couple of different ways (using "cifs://server_name" when using the Connect to Server command from the Finder (command-K) is the easiest way), but you shouldn't have to. It's broken.

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