I've used Samba fro years and inexplicably its insanely unreliable. I don't know if my VPNs cause issues (that doesn't seem to make sense because it shouldn't be using that if pinging local) but it would often show up on my Mac, I'd click to explore and it would begin loading and give me the "connected as" and then it would spin wheel if i ever clicked on a file and then suddenly disconnect. refresh often wouldn't find it again. Trust me I've tried so many different options and I just cannot get one to do the job consistently without endless pains and inexplicable frustrations. I would never have invested what I have into Peardrive if I hadn't felt that I had properly investigated this problem and concluded that there is simply no *good* solution out there. Plenty of half solutions and clunky or annoying options, but nothing that I genuinely like to use and feel is easy and intuitive. So I decided I was going to fix that problem. Lets see how I do, lol