SMB alternatives?

redleader · 2025-08-13T17:10:44+00:00

I've been experimenting with workstation network attached storage for a while now and never really found something I was entirely happy with. I have a synology system networked to a few workstation and development PCs over QSFP DACs, but SMB overhead makes that quite slow for large datasets and horribly bottlenecks anything NVMe. iSCSI would be faster, but I'd really like to have many to many networking since I've got a few workstations and development PCs. SMB Direct (rDMA) is really fast, but it forces Windows Server on the NAS, which I'm not really excited about for management/hosting reasons and of course it doesn't support regular Windows 11 Home/Pro at all. Anything else I should be looking at?