Published May 6, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar. Network shares are an essential part of any NAS server, as they’re responsible for providing centralized storage to your home lab paraphernalia. But when you’re a beginner, you’ll probably stick to SMB (Server Message Block) while ignoring the other protocols on your Network Attached Storage server. That’s pretty much what I did for the first couple of months after assembling a NAS from old hardware, as SMB was enough to meet my file-sharing needs. But as I went deeper into the tinkering rabbit hole, I began experimenting with NFS (Network File System) and iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) – two protocols that are vastly different from SMB.…