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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

Newer macOS prefers SMB3 over AFP, even for time machine backups. There’s no reason to use AFP anymore on a modern Mac.

Except that AFP is 3 to 5 times faster on 10GigE. SMB implementation on MacOS has always been a joke, and still is. As long as you're only networking with WiFi, it's probably OK. But when you do serious video editing, AFP still reigns supreme (but apparently almost nobody knows it).

Case in point : recently, tested using a Hackintosh and a hand-built high performance NAS (100 TB), 10GigE ethernet.

Running Windows 10 on the Hackintosh, SMB protocol : ~900 MB/s read/write

Running MacOS on the same machine , SMB protocol : ~200 MB/s read/write

Running MacOS, AFP protocol : ~1 GB/s read/write.

And you don't even need the AppleTalk module for AFP. (I don't think modern macOS even supports AppleTalk anymore.) AppleTalk only comes into play when you're dealing with really old Mac systems which didn't support AFP-over-TCP yet.

What hardware do you use to connect the two?

All the things described are running over ethernet, there isn't any special hardware.

The kernel module implements the stuff described in the sections on EtherTalk and AppleTalk phase II on this [1] wiki page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk

So just a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge?

No, the old Macintosh uses its ethernet controller to connect to the Linux server, LocalTalk isn't used.

I see.

When the article mentioned AppleTalk I envisioned a way to get files off of my old SE using something that hooked into the ADB networking ports.

You wouldn't use an ADB port, LocalTalk used the printer port.

For your SE you could get an ethernet adapter that plugged into the SCSI port or a PDS card to go inside the case.

That too is possible (serial ports though, not ADB). There are existing LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge products from long ago that are getting harder and harder to find. I was actually working on a new one for a while but ran out of the time/motivation to finish it up. https://mac68k.info/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=275&start=0&...

Great info, thanks

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