i work for a company with a 'Mac' department (they are creative/graphics).
At the moment they are using an old server mac with a shared Hard drive formatted in HFS+; i would like to buy a NAS with full compatibility with HFS+ partition. I know Synology and QNAP offers compatibility with Mac World (using AFP), but i'm sure they use EXT filesystem as main partition.
Is this correct to use Ext partition either for 'existing' Mac datas ?
Thank you!
Best Answer
You don't say how the server mac is sharing the HFS+ formatted drive. I would suspect it is AFP in which case the NAS drive format is largely irrelevant.
The NAS will store files on it's storage in whatever format is best for the OS of the NAS, and expose those files through network shares in a single or a variety of formats. The client machines mount the shares and should be unaware of the underlying storage (just as they will be unaware that it will likely be a RAID configuration of some sort)
Synology, QNAP, Netgear, Drobo and many many others all adopt this approach.
The major factor is getting a NAS supplier who fully supports AFP and does not just see it as an afterthought to be tagged on with a bog standard install of the AFP packages which may be out of date or have not been tested or tuned. The introduction of Lion saw a number of NAS devices with difficulties sharing AFP until they could be patched. Of course during this period the users could have switched to using CIFS shares and keep going.