I have a Synology NAS that I am planning to connect to an Apple TV 3 (as soon as the new software comes out!). What is the preferred connection type with the NAS? UPnP? SMB? AFP?
I have mine as SMB i think.
AFP and SMB are currently supported, but support for NFS is not far off.
UPnP, DLNA and WebDAV are planned for future versions, but there’s no ETA just yet.
Is there any benefits of SMB or AFP with aTV Flash? Will there be any additional benefits with NFS?
For the most part the performance will be very similar, however NFS may provide a slight performance advantage due to a bit less overhead. It mainly depends on what your source device supports, and a general rule of thumb would be: PC use SMB, Mac use AFP, and Linux use NFS.
Additionally, most NAS devices will usually support more than one, so in that case you would have a choice of what to use.
Yes, my NAS does support more than one… that is why i was curious as to whether there was any advantage of one over the other with the aTV Flash. Sounds like there isn’t though. Thanks!
And no one says you have to use one and stick with it. If you’re seeing issues with one, you could always try another, or setup multiple shares using different share types and see which you like best.
Recently, since NAS vendors have been switching to the newest version of AppleTalk http://www.netafp.com/status-of-netatalk-and-afp-support-by-nas-vendor-update-625/ AFP seems to be twice as fast as SMB on a Synology DS412+
See also http://miniliew.blogspot.com/2011/09/afp-or-smb-synology-dsm-32-for-ds411ii.htmland the comments