Samba

SMB (Samba)

SMB - "Server Message Block" - is a file sharing protocol that was invented by IBM and has been around since the mid-eighties.

SMB is a protocol meaning an agreed upon way of communicating between systems.

The SMB protocol was designed to allow computers to read and write files to a remote host over a local area network (LAN).

CIFS

CIFS - “Common Internet File System.”- is a particular implementation of the Server Message Block protocol by Microsoft. someone said CIFS is a dialect of SMB.

Because CIFS is a form of SMB, a client speaking CIFS can talk to a server speaking SMB and vice versa. While they are the same top level protocol, there are still differences in implementation and performance tuning

Popularity

Most modern storage systems no longer use CIFS, they use SMB 2 or SMB 3 and NFS “Network File System”