I work in a smallish company – about five people in the office, with another fifteen or so scattered around the country accessing network files via VPN. We don't worry too much about quotas or things like that, and everyone has access to everything on the share.
The current architecture is basically our "File Server" machine has a shared drive, and everyone dumps their files in there in the folders we've set up. Of course, we are perpetually running out of space and buying more hard drives to try and keep up.
When we first looked into setting up the file server, I suggested a NAS instead, but was told "NAS devices are too slow, and the VPN is slow as it is". This seemed surprising; I have a ReadyNAS NV+ at home that has treated me incredibly well, but admittedly I'm the only one accessing it. But since I didn't have the benefit of any numbers providing evidence one way or the other, I let it go.
But we're now once again into "Running out of available space" territory. We're reclaiming space by re-organising what's currently in the directory, but it would be nice to have the expandable drive features that some NAS devices offer and stuff like that. However, when I bring it up, I continue to be told that NAS devices are inherently slow.
Is this true? If anything, I'd think the Windows share would be slower because Windows is more likely to be trying to think about other things than churning out files, but I have no way of testing my theory.
Best Answer
The short answer is, there is no inherent difference in file transfer speeds when comparing a NAS device and a Windows server. They will both (probably) use the CIFS protocol to offer up the file shares and transfer the files. The only limiting factor is the speed of the network (be it Fast Ethernet or Gigabit) and the speed of the disks (depending on the disk setup, anywhere between 80MB/s to 200+MB/s and beyond).
The difference is that the Windows server will offer more granular permissions and sharing rules. Since you don't need these, the NAS is the cheap and effective file sharing capacity.