Whether you’re a home labber looking to connect self-hosted services with a storage server or a casual user trying to pair your NAS with a Windows machine, you’ve definitely heard of SMB. Besides NFS, it’s one of the most popular network protocols for transferring large amounts of data on a home network. But unlike its rival, SMB is easy to set up, works well on the big three OS families, and doesn’t require a lot of mental calculus when creating permissions.