How To Improve Your Synology NAS Performance and Speed?

Intro:

Synology NAS is a popular Network Storage Solution, it provides a wide range of services and applications.

You can use it as a network storage for file sharing and collaboration, or a media server for your streaming services (for example: plex server).

But every device is limited to its resources, network bandwidth and more. In order to utilize all the resources available, we need to optimize the performance of Synology NAS Devices.

What are the factors that affect Synology NAS performance?

Synology NAS is pretty much like every NAS device, therefore, the factors are pretty much the same.

I have talked about it in a previous article, check Qnap NAS Performance.

Hardware Optimization:

1) Change the Hardware Components when possible

If it’s possible to change your NAS hardware components like RAM memory, adding SSD Drive, or changing HDD drives, it can be helpful especially if your NAS is old or damaged.

2) Choose the RAID configurations:

Choose a RAID type that best fits your performance requirements, you can check this article for more info about RAID types.

Network Optimization:

1) Enable Link Aggregation On Synology:

If you have two or more Ethernet ports on your Synology NAS, the best thing to do in order to increase the network transfer speed on your NAS is to connect two Ethernet cables (CAT6 or CAT7) to your NAS, then enable Link Aggregation.

To enable Link Aggregation on your Synology NAS, open the web management portal, then open Control Panel.

On Synology control panel, head to Network Section:

Then, open “Network Interface” tab, and click on “Create Bond”:

Here, I will choose “Adaptive Load Balancing” to enable load balancing between the two links:

Next, select the Interfaces you want to include in the load balancing:

Then, you might need to reassign a static IP Address to your New Link Bond, if you are using DHCP, you can choose it instead:

Wait until applying network settings are done, then you will be able to see the new Bond created in the Network Interface tab:

2) Optimize SMB Settings:

If you are using windows machines to access and download file from your NAS, you are probably using SMB protocol, it will be beneficial to optimize this protocol for better performance.

– Choose the latest SMB version.

– Enable SMB Multichannel ( if you are already  using Link Aggregation you won’t be able to activate it )

To enable SMB Multichannel:

Head to control panel > file services, open the SMB tab then “Advanced Settings”:

Then, Open “Others” tab and enable the options “asynchronous read” and “SMB3 Multichannel”

Save the settings then click “Apply”:

System and Software Optimization:

1) Disable Unused Services:

Check if you have a service that is running on your NAS which you don’t need, these service can be Media Service, Additional Backup Jobs, etc…

2) Use Synology Resource Monitor:

Utilize the resource monitor provided by synology and check the tasks and processes that are running on your system:

3) Regular Maintenance and Automatic Updates:

Enable automatic updates for the latest  DiskStation Manager versions for better performance and bug fixes.

Also check the Disks health regularly and clean up storage if possible.

4) Reduce File System Overhead:

Avoid storing a large number of small files in a single directory, instead separate files in different directories.

Conclusion:

Small steps and updates can make large improvements in your NAS performance, these tips will be effective and will fully utilize all the potential performance of your Synology NAS or Qnap NAS.

However, all these steps will be more effective if you have a solid network which your NAS is connected to, this is why you need to test your Network performance with Iperf tool, check it out here.