My NAS got simpler when I stopped overthinking whether to use SMB or NFS

Published Sep 26, 2026, 2:30 PM EDT João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he's always happy to talk about. Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/ Setting up a NAS can come with a few challenges, and one of the earliest ones is how to make my files accessible to my other devices. Using dedicated apps or a web UI isn't always ideal, so I had to find ways to make things accessible on any device without too much setup. There's plenty of debate to be had about whether SMB or NFS is the better file sharing protocol, with benefits and downsides to both. But rather than spend time mulling things over and setting them up, I simplified my setup by answering an easy question: does it work? And things got much easier from there. SMB just works everywhere I didn't bother with anything else As much as I've switched to Linux and macOS where possible over the past year, there are still a handful of Windows devices in my house, and even more so when I was first setting up my NAS. When I did look into whether NFS or SMB were better, all the guidance pointed to SMB being easier to use with Windows, so that's what I went with. But SMB also turned out to be incredibly easy to use on other platforms, too. In fact, I'd say even more so. On Windows 11, I generally have to manually add a network location in File Explorer, but my Linux and macOS machines detect network shares automatically, and all I needed to do was enter the username and password to access those shares. I never had significant challenges setting up an SMB share on any of my devices. And while I haven't needed to do this on a phone, looking around tells me SMB is also easier to use on Android or iOS compared to NFS. Speed is often an argument in favor of NFS, but truthfully, I also rarely move massive amounts of data on my NAS. Whatever slower speeds I have to deal with have never been a problem in the slightest. I can access my files just fine, and even the containers in my homelab, specifically Jellyfin, can load and stream my media from my NAS with no issues whatsoever, even at high resolutions. NFS can do some things SMB can't Use only when necessary SMB has been serving me perfectly fine for all the uses I needed. I was able to add files to my Jellyfin library, and more recently, I even added an SMB share as storage in my Nextcloud VM, so I can store my files on my NAS and make them available in the Nextcloud UI. However, when I made the transition from TrueNAS to a split homelab and NAS using Proxmox and Synology, I had some trouble with Immich. I tried setting up Immich mapping the data storage to an SMB share in Proxmox, but this didn't work, so that's when I finally had to use NFS. I only set up NFS for this specific purpose, and Immich has been working perfectly fine ever since. NFS's better performance on Linux systems is something my colleague Ayush Pande highlighted when he compared the different sharing protocols you can choose from, but it was interesting to see it have such a meaningful impact on my self-hosting projects. For everything else, SMB is still doing a fine job and I have no reason to make changes. Especially when you consider that NFS shares can be much more complicated to set up when it comes to permissions. I had a relatively easy time because I was following a clear guide, but there are many ways things can go wrong and you may end up not being able to access your shares the way you'd expect. For its part, SMB just works. As long as you have a user account with access to the shared folder and permissions to use SMB as a whole, you can use that user account to sign in on any device and access the share easily. NAS veterans may disagree It depends on your use case I'm not in any way trying to say that this is the ideal approach for everyone. If you've been using a NAS for a while and you're relying on it to move a lot of files around, or you have a lot of self-hosting projects, automated tasks involving file operations and so on, I'm sure the pros and cons of SMB and NFS matter a lot more. For me, though, I just need my NAS to be a backup for the files I truly need to keep, and those are things I back up semi-frequently and tend not to touch for a long time. Plus, I access my NAS over Wi-Fi most of the time, so it's not like I'd be getting incredible speeds either way. It's just not worth the hassle of considering the benefits and disadvantages of NFS or SMB when a simple SMB share works everywhere. Keeping things simple works Anyone getting into NAS solutions for the first time will probably be looking for something that just works, maybe just as a backup for personal data that doesn't rely on the cloud. And for those people, getting into the weeds of what makes one protocol better than another doesn't make a lot of sense. SMB is the easy solution, and unless you feel like you're being slowed down by something other than your hardware, there's no reason to spend time worrying about whether it's the right solution.