Fixing Performance Issues with Synology NAS w/ macOS
Synology is one of the most popular manufacturers of Network-attached Storage systems. I bought my Synology DS416play over three years ago and it never performed how I wanted it to be until recently. Here are the steps and resources I used to get it decently performant.
May 26th, 2020 Update: I upgraded to 8TB WD Red HDs and the performance increased drastically since these higher-capacity drives do not use SMR.
Do not use AFP (Apple Filing Protocol)
In the beginning, I used AFP because it’s written by Apple and I only use Apple devices, but of course, this is one of Apple’s proprietary formats that is being deprecated. Instead, use SMB. Synology lists the file-sharing protocols that are supported by each OS.
Set advanced SMB settings
Bob’s post describes advanced SMB settings for better performance.
- Use at least SMB2
- Disable transport encryption
- Enable opportunistic locking
Disable Media & File Indexing
Media indexing indexes your files for Video/Audio/Photo Station while file indexing indexes your files for Universal Search. Both index your files whenever they change (e.g. create a file, delete a file, etc.) and could slow down your server for a minute or so. These indexing services quickly become a bottleneck.
A few downsides of removing indexing are:
- Media indexing: no more thumbnails for your media
- File indexing: universal search is slower
Both of these downsides were acceptable to me since I do not use Video/Audio/Photo Station.
To disable Media indexing, go to Control Panel > Indexing Service and remove indexed folders. You probably also want to disable “Enable video conversion for mobile devices” as well.
To disable File indexing, go to Universal Search, click settings (the gear icon), and remove indexed folders.
Your router probably doesn’t support Dynamic Link Aggregation
While figuring out why my NAS was so slow, I enabled Dynamic Link Aggregation. Then my NAS got even slower. After reading Synology forums, I learned that most routers don’t support Dynamic Link Aggregation (even Synology’s own router!) and enabling without proper support makes your NAS slower. Transferring data between my NAS and my computers would thrash the whole network, slowing everything down. Don’t enable this feature unless your NAS is connected to a router or a switch that supports it.
Cannot find resource errors
After maybe a day, I’m unable to connect to my NAS even though the drive is still mounted. An error pops up saying, “the original item cannot be found”. The fix is to restart your Finder, but someone in the Synology forums created a script to remount your NAS drive automatically.
Avoid huge share folders
I had a single share folder of about 8TB, which Plex could not even index. So I decided to split the folder into two shared folders and Plex starting indexing both folders and both folders became faster to search through via Finder. Who would’ve thought this would’ve solved anything!
Finally usable
After applying the above fixes, my NAS was finally bearable. Browsing my content via Finder didn’t include multiple seconds of lag. Videos played almost instantly. I finally felt like I got the NAS I paid for.
