Yesterday, a previous client contacted us for a bit of advice. Before the lockdown, they needed data recovered from their aging Synology NAS DS411J as some of its WD Red S-ATA disks, configured using Synology Hybrid RAID, unexpectedly went into a “degraded” status. Luckily for them, we were able to recover all their important data.
Recently, they procured a new Synology DS218. In order to avoid the need for data recovery again, they followed our advice and tried to back up the NAS to an external LaCie Rugged disk. So, they connected the external disk to the USB 3.0 port of the Synology and using HyperBackup (part of DSM Explorer), proceeded to copy their files.
Returning an hour later however, the copy process from their new NAS to external disk was running at a miserable 1.2MB/s. It would take days before it would be completed!
Fixing Slow Data Transfer Speeds of Synology
This is a common problem with Synology NAS devices. Unfortunately, DSM Explorer does not play well with NTFS formatted disks. We recommended that they format the LaCie Rugged external disk to EXT4 format first. (This can be performed easily with Ubuntu or any other Linux-based OS.) After changing the formatting from NTFS to EXT4, they retried the copy process. This time round, the data transferred at nearly 90 MB/s. A much better improvement. For disk-to-disk data transfer operations, having both disks use a homogeneous file system can drastically help with file transfer speeds. It’s always the little things, isn’t it…