Switching from AFP to SMB - experienced advice required please

[Gandalf123]

Hi,

We have designers on Macs running mainly OSX 10.4.11 and they connect to our Windows 2003 fileserver using the AFP protocol. The Windows server is running SFM which supports the older AFP client.

After much time researching, we found that when the designers browse the fileserver using OSX Finders column view if they click on a folder with lots of files within in, the designer experiences the beachball effect whilst the Finder builds the list of contents, presumably caching as clicking off the folder then back onto it, the folder contents display immediately.
When designers are using InDesign or PhotoShop and are browsing the server to open an image file or to 'place' an image, the beach balling /lagging effect really slows them up and is affecting their productivity.

For the purposes of testing, we connected to the same server and shares etc using SMB and the problem described above does not occur at all.
However, I'm nervous. I know that if we are to switch from AFP to SMB then all users must do it at the same time as you cannot have a mixture of the users connecting with both SMB and AFP.
But would it be enough to just make sure that ALL users are using SMB and not AFP or should I consider anything else, like will connecting via SMB affect existing data on the server that was accessed and saved omn there previously using AFP ?

If anybody has some hands-on first hand experience of this, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks in advance

[Natobasso]

You might try CIFS instead of SMB. It's much, much faster and seems to have fewer connection issues. CIFS is the faster, newer variant of SMB/Samba.