Synology Diskstation runs very slow with OSX

I am having a similar issue with a sparsebundle image created by Carbon Copy Cloner. It is made up of FCPX libraries

that I have been backing up over the network to the 2414+ from a Pegasus2 R4.

Recently i had to restore the PegR2 from the 2414+ over the network.

Some things I ran into:

-Could not copy 5.5tb sparsebundle image NO MATTER what I did. It would not copy

-Speeds with a direct ethernet were terrible since I would try smaller files to see data rate read/write

-USB3 connection on back of Synology 2414+ was useless, it capped out at 20MB/s. Copying data to floppy drives would have been faster.

Some things that helped at different steps along the way in the order I did them:

-Turned off .DS Store on local user computer

http://kstcmedia.tumblr.com/post/155630745828/synology

-Rebonded ethernet cables on NIC on 2414+ (My IT checked setting and found that after the update it was not bonded

even though I was using the 3rd NIC on the back of the appliance, this helped)

-Opening the backup SparseBundle from the 2414 as s disk image on the Mac using Carbon Copy Cloner helped

to see the individual files instead of restoring the 5.5tb disk image back to the Pegasus2 R4.

(I also read somewhere, maybe this post, that the dumber RAID controllers will cause i/o speeds to slow due to spindle position etc.)

NOTE: If turning off AFP, you will not be able to use CCC to mount image using the SMB method without first making a copy (seems like SMB wants to modify the sparsebundle and prompts you in CCC). So I left AFP on to be able to browse the sparsebundle.

Hope this helps someone since I have spent the last 3 days on trying to figure out a method to copy my FCPX libraries from the CCC sparsebundle without issue. I am still not sure how I am the only one to run into this situation though.

Regards

I've been grappling with a related issue, that is, on Ethernet I was getting appalling speed. I got it up to 60MB/s using a few tricks detailed here: https://www.tech-knowhow.com/2017/01/mac-os-network-transfer-speed-still-broken- sierra/ however it still pales in comparison to Windows' stunning 100MB/s. Note that the windows I used, was installed on the same Mac with Bootcamp.

I'm starting to think that either Mac OS has an apalling network stack, or that their drivers are just not designed optimally. It all just seems like a problem. I also outlined my testing process and results at the link above, which ultimately showed the NFS was the winner for network transfer speed. Looking through these forums, dozens, possibly hundreds of people are complaining about network transfer speed, no-one though has installed Windows on the same machine which seems to rule out the hardware and lay the blame firmly on Mac OS.

I'd be interested in any thoughts you may have. Thanks.

Is there a particular question or goal or issue that you're interested in here? It's clear you're looking for performance, and for some comparisons, but it's not clear (to me) where you're headed with this. Might also want to check with the Synology folks, too.

Some generic comments follow...

In general... Wi-Fi is slow, and Wi-Fi with interference makes connections even slower. Downhill and with a tailwind, I'd expect a little over 200 Mbps (megabits per second, not megabytes) with semi-recent-grade Wi-Fi 5 GHz dual-slot, assuming a wired gigabit backhaul out to the NAS, and assuming no Wi-Fi interference nor contention.

Rotating rust storage is slow, and subject to the configuration.

That WD Red is listed without RPM — "Intellipower", with some postings showing a ~5400 RPM drive, which is pretty slow — and with no access time in the spec sheets. If a vendor does not post access times and transfer speeds for a disk device, then the device is not intended to be a particularly fast device. WD indicates as much in the footnote in the spec sheet, too.

For most RAID controllers, RAID-1 mirroring mean that both writes — writes to each of the disks in the mirror set — have to complete before the host I/O is completed. This slows down write speeds. If the RAID controller is smart — and not all RAID controllers are very smart — then it'll give you the first available read from the mirror set, based on the rotational position. Many will just pick a disk and give you the I/O when the sector rotates around, so you will be waiting on average half a revolution.

If you want faster access to storage, stay off of Wi-Fi, and use either SSD storage, or upgrade those disks to 15K RPM drives configured as RAID-0 striped. High-end and Enterprise storage — the older, hard-disk-based gear — gets its performance from having zillions of small 15 K RPM disks, configured with big disk and big controller caches, smart (rotationally-aware) controllers, and with RAID-10 or analogous storage configurations.

For comparing the performance of the device, the configuration from those benchmarks and what you're testing does matter. The benchmark hardware, as well as the measured speeds from the Windows configuration testing.

On El Capitan my synology NAS has become very slow at opening file dialog boxes, and transferring local files.

No disk health problems, no other changes to the Mac or NAS...

Hoping for ideas

thanks!

Check the Console.app logs, check for network errors (Wi-Fi interference, bad cable, mis-negotiated duplex, etc), try a wired connection if you're on Wi-Fi, try accessing the NAS from another box, etc. Then contact Synology and see if there's newer firmware, or if they've seen something similar, or have some diagnostics, etc.

Goals and expectations are interesting and laudable, but it's the configuration and the performance data that's key to learning where the bottleneck lurks.

Consumer-grade Wi-Fi connections are an either-or mechanism — either the Wi-Fi router is broadcasting from router to client, or the Wi-Fi client is broadcasting to the router. Slinging big files around means that subsequent Wi-Fi requests are delayed by the transmission time, and can be delayed by local client activity or the activity of other clients on the same Wi-Fi. Interference or older networking gear can slow this to a crawl.

Best case with a 200 Mb Wi-Fi link — and you'll want to see what speeds you are getting in your configuration by option-clicking on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar — is around a tenth of a second for the one-way trip of 2 MB image traffic, plus the overhead of the request — and which will delay all subsequent traffic — plus the time through the rotating rust storage and related. In short, 0.1 seconds is already gone via Wi-Fi, and you have to get the read requests up to the Synology via whatever disk server storage protocol you're using here, and read the data back off the rotating rust, and with the backhaul probably via a wired connection of unknown speed.

If you want to investigate this further, then test with gigabit Ethernet wired connections in particular, and also test the device performance outside of the applications you are using — see what the FTP or SFTP transfer speeds might be, for instance. Look for 100 MbE links or other problems, too. See what the bandwidth and the responsiveness is. Also check with the Synology specs or directly with the Synology support folks, and what performance-related information they might have available.

Performance problem solved after two changes:
1 - stopped using AFP and started using SMB for file sharing on the synology NAS

https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=194&t=103169&start=15&hilit=Slow+ capitan

2 - Turned off .DS files from spotlight for mounted drives

https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=102452&p=390291&hilit=slow+m ac#p390291

And then rebooted mac and synology NAS