MacOS Sequoia and Synology NAS -- SMB protocol issues?

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Level 1

36 points

MacOS Sequoia and Synology NAS -- SMB protocol issues?

In early fall I started noticing strange behaviours with my Mac

- NAS mounted drives suddenly ejected when exporting, copying and deleting files

- could not copy or delete large numbers of files between NAS drives without errors stopping the processes or drives ejecting.

- lag in playback with Adobe PremierePro

- odd RAM previews and lag in Adobe After Effects

- DaVinci Resolve exports frequently failed and ejected the drives.

This was happening on MacPro Intel 2019 systems and our MacStudio M2 chip systems

We found many posts from other users wth NAS systems who reported the same issue

and either were frustrated like we were

or just copied media to their internal drives first and then back to the NAS.

(a whole lot more time and work)

I paid a Synology expert to go through all our Synology system settings and ensure everything was top-notch and try and identify where the issue could be.

He could find nothing.

I sent through rounds and rounds and rounds of discussions and trials and system logs and code with Synology, being escalated to the top developers.

Nothing could be found by their teams.

The only factor that we could not rule out was our office jumped to MacOS Sequoia sometime before the symptoms appeared.

Last night we tried updating to 15.2 to see if it would help.

It got SO much worse - causing a huge number of problems on our MacPro Intel 2019, OWC breakout boxes and external USB-C drives.

So our logic was, if we're going backward, let's go WAY back and restore from just before we upgraded.

So we backed up our internal drives for safety

created a Sonoma thumb drive installer

booted in Restore mode,

wiped the internal system drive,

reinstalled Sonoma and then restored our Time Machine backup from Sept 16th, 2024

After starting up and re-configuring and authorizing a bunch of system settings

We ran our usual tests.

And the copies and deletes we could not do? They got done. No errors at all.

First time in months this basic OS process did not fail.

More testing needs to be done but for now it appears we can't upgrade our systems to Sequoia until we're CERTAIN Apple has fixed this issue.

We hope it's soon.

Mac Pro, macOS 14.7

Posted on Dec 19, 2024 10:37 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

iSAWaUFO

Level 1

15 points

Mar 1, 2025 2:18 PM in response to Filet-o-Fish

I've been working on, I think, the same problem and having discussion on Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1iza2zq/synology_smb_has_problems_with_macos_sequoia_can/

Lots of similar reports: https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+smb+has+problems+with+macOS+Sequoia

Summing up what I've learned so far is, while I have not found a perfect solution, the best option that I have found (thanks to OK_Cheetah6307) is to enable the AFP file service, and connect the Synology shares using AFP instead of SMB. This gives comparable performance to forcing SMB_2.002 protocol, while still allowing other systems to connect with the newer SMB_3.1.1 protocol.

Control Panel > File Services > AFP > Enable AFP service > Apply

Reboot everything and when reconnecting your macOS Sequoia to the Synology shares, reference "afp://servername" instead of "smb://servername"

I'm not sure if you can pick and chose which shares are AFP mounted and which are SMB mounted. It may be all one protocol or the other?

The AFP connection can also drop out, if put under a heavy load. My test case works ok, but by happenstance I observed doing a bunch of MP4 remuxes concurrently, using Subler.org, I managed to crash the AFP connection and had to restart the AFP service.

If you're looking at this problem, some handy Terminal commands to check the what is mounted SMB or AFP are:

# filters SMB stat output for the most interesting information

# check for any AFP mounted shares

mount | grep afpfs

Synology does not recomand using AFP and warns you when you enable it with this pop-up message in the DMS Desktop:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Security Advice:

AFP server support was removed in macOS 11 Big Sur. For your security, we recommend disabling your AFP service and using SMB service instead.

You may need to reset your Mac Finder connection and Time Machine backup after replacing AFP service with SMB service.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Thanks to all for your comments. Perhaps this and some related posts will help Synology and Apple work better together to improve their SMB interoperability between DSM and Sequoia. It looks as though there are issues on both the Server and Client sides of the problem.

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Answer 2

Filet-o-Fish Author

Level 1

36 points

Mar 2, 2025 7:26 PM in response to Filet-o-Fish

Update for me:

We hired the great team at SpaceRex and they solved a lot of problems with the SMB.

But…I was still experiencing some speed issues.

And the drives would still get stressed and eject if too much was happening.

So…I did the crazy, radical thing.

I backed everything first for safety,

made a few notes about my apps,

and then wiped the internal SSD drive clean.

Yes, I preformed an entirely clean install of the OS

and a clean install of every single app.

Yes, I had to set up everything all over again.

(But I’m pretty organized).

Long story short?

So far…worth it!

My system is so much more snappy and I no long have the issues I had.

And the Synology drive is mounting faster, copying faster and so far (knocking wood) has not ejected at all.

In addition:

I no longer use my supplemental DS517 array for additional storage.

I offloaded that footage to external drives

Then reformatted the 517 for backup of the 1821+

That too was an immensely helpful action to improve the performance of the Synology.

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Answer 3

tom8toes

Level 1

8 points

Feb 12, 2025 1:12 PM in response to Filet-o-Fish

We were having the same issues in 15.3. We are testing… enabling AFP in NAS and using AFP instead is SMB as a temporary workaround. Hopefully we have a real fix before AFP goes away.

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