NAS & Shared Storage

~15 min · nas, nfs, smb, synology

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Centralized storage for the fleet

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) gives every machine on your LAN access to the same files. Synology and QNAP dominate the small-business / home-office space; for serious throughput, a small Ubuntu server with ZFS does the same job for less. Use it for: backups (rsync targets), shared projects, media libraries, Time Machine.

NFS vs SMB — pick by ecosystem

Property	NFS	SMB/CIFS
Best on	Unix / macOS	Mixed / Windows-heavy
Throughput	Faster on Unix	More overhead
macOS	Good but quirky	Native Finder integration
Permissions	POSIX UID/GID	Mapped via SMB user
Setup	Simple on Unix	Easier cross-platform

Code

Mount from terminal (macOS)·bash

# NFS mount
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/nas
sudo mount -t nfs nas.local:/volume1/shared /mnt/nas

# SMB mount
mkdir -p /Volumes/nas
mount -t smbfs //you_username@nas.local/shared /Volumes/nas

# Auto-mount via /etc/auto_master (NFS)
# 1. Edit /etc/auto_master, add:  /mnt    auto_nfs
# 2. Create /etc/auto_nfs:
#    nas    -fstype=nfs,resvport nas.local:/volume1/shared
# 3. Restart automount:
sudo automount -vc

# Verify mounts
mount
df -h

External links

Apple: SMB and NFS

Exercise

If you have a NAS, mount its shared volume from the terminal using both NFS and SMB (one at a time). Time a transfer of a ~100MB file: time cp big.bin /mnt/nas/. Compare. On 10GbE, NFS should win. Check with mount to see what's mounted, df -h to see free space.