SMB alternatives?

[gusgizmo]

Have you done any tuning to SMB or your network? Not sure the extent that is possible but I assume you have logging turned down or off, and the typical accelerators like sendfile and async setup? Jumbo frames? Again apologize if this stuff is obvious but it's good to get a baseline.

Synology sort of implies a lower end CPU. That can be limiting for SMB as it's 1 file = 1 thread.

If windows server is out of the question, is a custom linux build also a no-go?

How about windows server on your workstations and divorce yourself from bing and copilot? Then you can do starwind or csv on-top of iscsi?

 

[gusgizmo]

I have a Windows Server setup now for testing, and I can get >3GB/s real-world through it using RDMA which is awesome, but overall its an annoying solution since I'd have to upgrade every the OS on every client since no support on Home/Pro. Likewise while my impression is that storage spaces or whatever its called is basically fine, I'm a little hesitant about building out a big RAID on Windows, especially since I've never done data recovery after a dead disk on it before.

Whats the underlying storage? SATA/SAS, SSD or Spinning Rust? NVME?

Storage spaces is solid. I wouldn't be too worried about recovery. I've even been able to mount volumes from windows pro. Making it perform is a little harder. You can turn off synchronous writes but I'm not a fan of that. There is caching available but it's not quite like ZIL.

I know I'm somewhat of an outlier here, but LSI makes great adapters for cheap enough. Put a BBU on the card, flip the switch for write caching, you safely have 95% of the peak performance of that array and you can put any OS and filesystem on top.