NFS vs SMB vs iSCSI: Picking the Right Protocol to Share Your Data Hoard
Most people pick a sharing protocol by accident. Whatever the NAS web UI defaulted to, or whatever worked the first time they tried mapping a drive on Windows, becomes the permanent choice, usually without anyone asking whether it actually fits the workload. For a media library that mostly gets read by one Jellyfin box, that accident rarely bites. For a Proxmox cluster sharing storage across nodes, or a mixed household of Windows laptops and Linux boxes hitting the same array, the wrong protocol choice shows up later as corrupted files, mysterious permission errors, or a performance ceiling nobody can explain. The three real options, NFS, SMB, and iSCSI, solve different problems, and the right call depends on what’s connecting, not what’s easiest to click through first. ...