Should I use NFS in lieu of Samba on all Linux network?

[Rizlaw]

unRAID 6.0.0 runs Linux as do all my other computers. I do have Win7 as a VMware virtual machine, but I don't use it to access my unRAID 6 server. Beyond my all Linux system, another reason for considering NFS is that many of the large files I have use special characters that are forbidden in Windows (for example, the colon : ).  When I try to copy files from my Ubuntu workstation to unRAID 6 with the SAMBA protocol, I always get a file copy error regarding any filename with a colon. I don't feel like finding and renaming hundreds of files; although on all new files I am using "-" in lieu of ":".

 

I've done a search on the unRAID Version 6 support forum and the online manual for version 6 and I don't seem to find an anwer to these questions:

 

1. Is the NFS filesystem under unRAID 6 stable enough to use (any other downsides to NFS)?

 

2. Would using the NFS filesystem result in faster transfers than using SAMBA? Currently, I'm seeing about 45-50 MB/s file transfer speeds via SAMBA directly to unRAID6 disk shares. I also see the same speeds when copying to unRAID 6 cache drives ( I thought copying to cache would be faster because of the lack of parity writing, but it's not the case).

 

3. Can NFS and SAMBA co-exist? If so, are the shares displayed differently to me on my local Linux workstation; in other words, how would I know the difference between doing a SAMBA transfer and an NFS transfer?

 

4. Besides enabling NTF in "Network Services" are there any other settings I need to enable in unRAID 6 or on my Ubuntu 14.04LTS workstations to make this all work properly? What are they?

 

Thanks for any help.