jmagella

Gubbgnutten I think you might be happily surprised about the performance of store bought NAS. I have an old WD myCloud that I use to currently backup my photos. It's pokey slow, no doubt, but it works. Directories take a few seconds to load but nowhere near the 5 minute Mac load times of my unRAID server. I'm sure a Synology like the ones John_M recommended would work just fine. I was hoping to save a few bucks and have more control over the hardware though, so I investigated unRAID. Maybe even be able to work directly off of it instead of a local drive. I think we all agree tinkering with this stuff is fun, but at some point you have to actually get work done. In the end, a server has to be consistent and dependable. I would most certainly trade off a few MB's of read and write speeds for a consistent experience no matter what the client I use.

I want to thank everybody again for all the help and advice. After reading what everyone has said. I'm going to keep the UnRAID server box running Plex and Sync. It does that really well. But it can't be a true file server for me if it treats Macs as second class citizens. I'll check in with each new build to see if things change. To solve my current problem.....I am thinking of: 1. Buying some low cost hardware and building a Hackintosh from the infamous tonymacx86 site and installing OS X Server on it. If I'm going to tinker then I might as well get a good Mac server out of it. The hardware would cost another $300 or so. The software is like $20. 2: Trying out FreeNAS. You can't beat the price as they say. 3. Just bite the bullet and get a prebuilt NAS from Amazon. Performance might not be great, but it has to beat the 5 minute directory load times I'm seeing now with UnRAID. I'll post back here once I get a solution.

John_M, I agree. I'm sure you are right. I'm not afraid of tinkering it to make it work well. But I suspect that's not the case here. I'm certainly not downgrading my OS's to get things to work well. Ugh. In the meanwhile I'll look elsewhere I guess. FreeNAS maybe. I wrongly assumed a paid product would be superior. I know this stuff is complicated, but I'm not too excited about becoming an expert on SMB and AFP protocols. I'd gladly pay twice as much to know it will just work. FYI. All I'm doing is backing up phone photos. Sure I could divide and conquer, but it all works so well on my Windows 10 PC. It's just the Mac that doesn't work. And AFP is really needed if I want to use the drives to work off of. Otherwise the OS will not automatically mount them and I have to manually mount after each reboot. I want to thank everyone for their help. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I concur this would be a very cool option.

TheMantis, Thanks for the honest input. I think you just saved me weeks of tinkering and witch doctoring. Karma +1 sent your way

Spants, Interesting idea....I'm going to avoid installing something like that on my Mac for now. It seems to me that if I cant get AFP to work then using unRaid might not be my best option.

Thanks John_M Good questions, I should of included them in my original question... A few thousand files are in a folder typically. All Photos. I'm just trying to get a file list, not build a thumbnail icon view. Although I think the thumbnail view shows up just as quickly( aka slowly), but I gave up on that and I am not just trying to get file lists now. I'm running El Captian, latest updates. I did try NFS. At least I enabled it. No difference. I'd really like to use AFP of course as using that protocol allows the Mac to auto mount the share when needed. I would wait sometimes 5 to 10 minutes for the finder window to populate. The subsequent directory view was faster, maybe a minute or two. When I switched to thumbnails I could watch the thumbnails slowly populate. Something that is almost instant on the PC. I really want to use the server for photo storage and browsing. So thumbnails are really needed. So is a fast refresh. Id say it was network or server hardware related but it works awesome on the PC.

Any help is appreciated on this topic. After loading my photo collection to a share I noticed really long waits to load the directory on my Mac. I mean really long, like minutes. I figured it was because I was using SMB to access the drive on a Mac, so I added AFP. No change. Access from a PC is almost instant, it's really snappy. The problem seems to be only when accessing folders with a large numbers of files on a Mac, but since the primary use of this server is photo storage it makes it kinda unusable. Ugh. I hope someone might point me to a solution. Thanks in advance.