The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/scoliadubia on 2024-12-22 14:29:17.

I currently have tens of terabytes of spinning metal in a Thunderbay 4 DAS attached to a Mac Studio via Thunderbolt, no RAID. This serves my needs for writing data from the network and for streaming data to the network *unless* I try to do both at the same time. When that happens, streaming HD video begins to stutter and pause unacceptably. I’ve tested the network and it seems more than fast enough. Given that everything is fast unless I’m writing to the server at the same time, it does seem like that’s where the bottleneck is. (I suppose there’s a small chance the server’s network connection is congested instead of the disk, but that wouldn’t be my first guess.)

Any suggestions for speeding this up? It’s an Apple shop so I have a reasonably hard requirement to use AFP (not NFS or SMB) as the file sharing protocol and an only slightly softer requirement to use APFS (or just maybe HFS+) as the disk format. That isn’t written in stone, but I’ve had very poor experiences in the past trying to use SMB, other disk formats, and Linux file servers to share files to Macs and iOS devices on this network.

I’ve tried a Synology NAS and trashed it for multiple reasons. It was unacceptably bad in so many ways.

So any suggestions (other than what I’ve already tried) for speeding things up? Are there better performing DAS boxes, fast NAS boxes that do support Mac disks and files (unlike the Synology), settings I can use to prioritize read speed over write speed on my disks, or anything that would improve perceived or actual performance?

The one thing that seems most certain to help is switching to SSDs instead of HDDs but that’s too rich for my wallet.