10 Tips to get Faster Speeds from Synology NAS

all right how's it going you so today we're going to be going over a really beginner's guide to getting the very most speed out of a syy Nas and this is going to be for people who do not have a super in-depth understanding and are really just kind of starting out and wondering why it's kind of slow at sometimes to access files and things like that and I'll be honest with you it can get a little bit complicated because there's a lot of different factors that come into play with this kind of stuff because there's a lot of different ways you can connect to this and some of them can be much more efficient than others and so today we're going to be going over just some very basic tips and just overall understanding stuff on how to make your Nas faster and this is going to be both for remote connections as well as local connections because there are two entirely different workflows to getting the very most amount of speed out of your Nas also if you like these videos go ahead like And subscribe and all that great stuff we're trying to hit 100,000 subscribers and the very first place we're going to start when it comes to a Nas is we are going to really be focusing on the local connection for these first five tips and then we're going to move on to the remote connections as in when you're not physically located in the same office house or network as your Nas and start out the number one tip for people who are connecting locally as in you're in the same house or office as the Nas is be on wired ethernet with your device this cannot be overstressed how much of your speed really comes down to how fast of a network connection you have have between your computer and the nas so before you do any upgrades if you've got the ability to get yourself a dongle that allows you to plug your laptop or if you've got a desktop it probably comes with wired ethernet and try to plug into a network switch that is hooked up to the nas now for people whose Nas is right next to them like this it's not too big of a deal you probably have your router or switch somewhere around here and essentially you're going to plug both your n and your computer into the same network switch and then they're going to be able to talk locally this is the number one thing that you can do because it is going to allow them to talk so much faster and no matter how good your Wi-Fi is wired ethernet is always going to be better because wired ethernet is stable Wi-Fi even if you can get fast speeds is unstable packets have to be resent and things like that which causes a lot of latency which causes it to feel slow and in pretty much any reasonable environment you're always going to get a faster better connection with wired ethernet than you would talking over Wi-Fi now while that works great for some people a lot of people do not have a house that's wired for ethernet and their office is not in the same room as the Wi-Fi router where the Nas is located and wiring a house for ethernet in some cases is very easy but in a lot of cases is an expensive process and complicated depending on how how the walls are and all that great stuff but I want to throw out a couple of other things you can do to get a much better connection and I'll leave a link to these down in the description below but there is a thing called a coax mocha adapter and what this does is it allows you to essentially send ethernet over your existing coax lines those TV receiver lines that you've gotten a lot of walls if your house is not wired for ethernet it may be worth checking out one of these things right here essentially you have a little coax cable on each of them and the way coax works is all coax Connections in a house should be terminated in the same location if that's done properly so basically every coax is just wired together in one big old circuit and so if you have a coax Connection in both your office and wherever you've got the nas you can actually use this to get almost ethernet wired ethernet speeds especially just for one or two people these actually work great they are far better than Wi-Fi and they're really easy to add on because they don't require you rewiring anything it can just use the existing wiring some of them also do have adapters that allow you to still use the network for other things so saying the same room that the NASA is you also are using that coax cable for a TV receiver well you can actually get a splitter here that'll operate over a different frequencies and so they actually can both operate at the same time without interference for each each other it's definitely something you want to test out and make sure but this can be a huge Savor and 120 bucks pales in comparison of the cost to wire house if you're going to get it professionally done the other option that is not as good and a lot more air prone is what's called a powerline adapter so a power line adapter is a similar concept except instead of using coax it uses the electrical wiring in your house and this can work and it sometimes also cannot so I would use this as a last resort if you don't have great Wi-Fi in the room you are and things like that but this is one of those things that can work and is something to at least have on your radar but it also can be fairly shaky depending on how the wiring in your house is and what breaker everything's on and some things like that but it's just another thing to have in your Arsenal like if you really have to you can maybe test that out but those are two things that can make it so much EAS easier to connect to your Nas with wired ethernet without having to spend a fortune wiring your house or running cables just down the hallways all right so now that was a longwinded number one number two is actually pretty simple how full your Nas is and this really focuses much more on people who have hard drives in their Nas rather than ssds if you have ssds in your Nas it's probably fast enough and it's very rare that it's the ssd's case unless you got very cheap ssds but hard drives really really really slow down the Fuller they get so where you first start to notice it and it's a very small amount is about 50% full there they really you can notice that they are not as fast as they were when they were empty and then stuff really starts to get a lot slower at about 80% I normally tell clients 70 to 80% should be the maximum you ever really stay at if you're looking for fast speeds so especially for video production people that is a speed killer because when you're that full the hard drives don't have the ability to really just get these large continuous parts of data that make it fast access and so you really want to make sure you try to keep your Nas below about 80% full if you're trying to get your most amount of speed and a really easy way to tell what's going on and why it might be slow is if you come into resource monitor right here on your Nas and click on your volume hit the custom View and this right here will tell you how busy your volume is if while you're transferring files this is 80% or more it's probably the drive to blame and you can also look at your discs over here to see what's going on this is a bit of a special case because I am currently doing a data scrub and rebuilding a pool as you can see so take it with a bit of a grain of salt in this case where right now my Nas is going to be fairly slow because the discs are just hammered as it's rebuilding the volume that's just because I pulled it out to use it for a demo and now it's got to rebuild but for most people checking out the volume tab will tell you hey is it my drives being slow or is there something else at play here all right so now moving on to number three for our local connections that's where you're in the house with an Nas this is where we start to talk about 10 gbit and 2.5 GB ethernet so for those of you who don't know there are really a few different speeds of ethernet ones you'll actually see in use most of the time is 1 gbit which is probably what your network is right now it has been around and pretty common place for the last 15 years is just anything you buy is probably built in 1 gabit then there is 2.5 GB which is actually something I really enjoy and I really like I think it's a great balance and then there is 10 gbit which is expensive and power hungry and a lot more complicated and so this is the speed at which the Nas and everything else can talk and I want to make something really clear here this has nothing to do with your internet speed right now we're only talking about local connections so that's where you're in the same house as the Nas and so in this case your internet speed does not matter you could have a 100 gigabit Network and have your internet speed be off of a Wi-Fi hotspot off of your phone the two do not rely on each other because whenever your computer is talking to the nas it's essentially going to find the fastest path to talk to it and that is going to be the limiting factor so if they're both plugged into a 10 GB switch the computer and Nas can talk to each other over 10 gbit speeds meaning that when you're transferring files you're going to be able to transfer them at 10 gabit speeds assuming all else is fast enough when we talk about a 1 gbit connection that came stock on your Nas that caps out to about 120 megabytes per second this is something that's really confusing because you hear one gigabit and then when you look at a transfer speed it's in megabytes per second that's because whenever we're talking about networking speed it is measured in a unit called bits per second and we're talking about data and data transfers it is in bytes per second there are eight bits in one bite and so that is why they are a completely different unit to get a easy ballpark figure for all of these whenever you hear something in gigabits just divide it by 10 and that's about the maximum speed you'll get when you're transferring files with that so A 1 gigabit connection is going to give you about 120 megabytes per second which is about the speed of a camera's SD card a 2.5 GB connection can give you about 275 megabytes per second pretty reliably and that tends to be a pretty good place to be then a 10 GB connection can do about 1 gab of data per second assuming all else is fine and that is about twice the speed of a SATA SSD so that can be very quick so those are your basic figures and to do these faster speeds other than one gabit you need three things you need your computer to support it and I really like looking at Amazon and getting these cheap 2.5 GB adapters they are almost as cheap as 1 gbit ones they're USB C or usba they just plug right in and they just work then you need a switch and then you need the nas to support 10 gbit cards So currently all techologies as annoying as it is they come with built-in one gigabit and then some of them have the ability to add in a 10 gbit or faster adding card this one has a little adapter on the back you just plug in and you can slot it on in you need to check your specific Nas model and if you're routinely getting transfer speeds that are capped out at 125 megabytes per second you probably want to look at upgrading that or you can look into a thing called SNB multi- Channel I'm not going to go over super in- depth here I'll leave a link down description below to how that works but that can actually use multiple 1 gbit connections to get faster speeds but that is the next upgrade to have is if you are really transferring large files and this is only something for people who are actually transferring large files if you're only uploading photos from your phone or working on Word documents this is not going to be a difference to you at all you're never really going to feel it most photographers the only time they ever feel it is when they're actually dumping data from their SD card editing in Lightroom doesn't have a huge effect but for people who want to do video editing straight from the nas you definitely want to get at least a 2 and half gbit connection all right so that is the summary of the network stuff there is a whole lot of stuff there and I'll probably going to go ahead and do an entirely dedicated video just on networking because it is crucial and then the next thing is having enough hard drive to support it so hard drives are not as fast as ssds and if you have a 10 gbit connection but only a single hard drive you're not going to be able to saturate that really fast connection because the hard drive is just going to get full and it is going to get over utilized and it's just not going to be able to do anything else but that's where a thing called raid comes in and can make it way faster so while one hard drive is slow if you're combining the speed of four or five hard drives well now it's a lot faster so if you're using shr1 or Raid 5 adding more drives will make it faster in general to get about 700 megabytes per second it's a good idea to have roughly five hard drives in a raid five or shr1 connect configuration that's a ballpark figure and you can sometimes get more speed out of that but that's a good consistent figure that tends to work out pretty well and so when you're using raid you're actually not reading and writing from one hard drive at a time instead when you're reading a file or writing a file it actually is reading it from all the drives except for one of them if you're using raid five two of them if you're using raid six because of that extra parody and that way it's actually faster because now it's reading a part of each of the files from each drive and then combining all that together so you're adding that speed it can make sequential transfers a lot faster once again if you're using ssds you only need about three ssds in raid five to saturate a 10 gbit connection and so that's only coming into play for people who are locally connected and also have already upgraded their networking to faster speeds if You' got one gigabit adding in more drives is not going to help you much at all finally number five for local connections before we move on to those remote connections is indexing so if you've enabled sonology drive on a folder and say it's something like a final cut Library where there are millions of files in there with a bunch of frames and they're constantly changing sonology Drive is going to have to index all those files and when you log into the nas you might see that occurring so you will see up here that drive icon constantly indexing and that's something that can take a ton of performance away if you are having a lower powered Nas and things like that so only ever enable sonology drive for folders you actually want to use sonology drive with especially things like time machine and video production servers you really want to avoid unless you need to and another thing that's important to do is look at versioning so right here we can see that indexing going on and it's taking up a blot of prod processing if you are somebody who has more than about 10,000 to 100,000 files versioning through sonology drive can really hurt your performance and be very slow I very rarely enable versioning through sonology Drive unless it's a very basic company server so I'm talking just a share where it's normal Word documents and that's pretty much it anything past that where you've got a bunch of media files and a bunch of stuff like that and thousands upon thousands well honestly millions of files that's where adding inv versioning through sonology drive can really start to take up a lot of space and a lot of performance so I will often disable the number of versions for that for high performance systems and instead use snapshots which in my opinion are much more useful for versioning and do not have any kind of performance overhead when using them because of the way they work so that's where you can go ahead and if you do have version enabled you can disable it here and then go into settings and hit clean up on your recycling bins and it will go through and clean out those versions note this process on a big file server that's got millions of files can take days to clean up all those versions so do it off hours outside of time just be wary of that but after it's done you'll notice a massive performance Improvement all right so that is it for our local connection I've got another video on that that kind of goes even more in depth for people who are really looking to get the most performance out of a 10 GB Network I'll leave a link down to in the description below but that is the basics of it now let's talk about how to get better performance when you're connecting to the nas remotely and there are a few different ways you can connect to the nas remotely and there are a lot of different reasons to use the different ones we're going to first talk about people who are using a VPN and standard SNB so if you followed my openvpn tutorial I showed you that you can just map your network drive in Mac OS finder or Windows File Explorer and connect to files just like you're in the local network this process is called SMB an SMB is a Windows protocol that has been around since the late '90s has been adapted but it was never really designed for a high latency connection a high latency connection is something like the internet where it has to go over over miles and miles of cable it's got to go to different data centers just to get from your Nas to your computer that's because whenever you're going over the Internet things take a lot longer than they do if you're only talking to things in your same local network hundreds or even thousands of times longer and SMB was never really designed for that use case and so when you're accessing files over SMB over a VPN connection it can be very slow now for people who are just using regular office documents word excel and things like that you'll hardly notice that's because it's fast enough for those documents entirely because we're talking about maybe a megabyte but for people who are trying to Video Edit or edit photos and things like that the performance can be unacceptably slow and Incredibly frustrating to work with and so that is the number one thing to know is that VPN connection specifically with mapping a network drive SMB can be very slow for specific use cases you're never going to have a good experience video editing over SMB over the Internet it is just not going to happen and if you're trying to transfer tons of data it can also be very slow in those cases and so that's why number two is to actually use sonology Drive instead of SMB over the Internet for people who need to have those faster access to those files especially when they are large media files and things like that so sonology drive is a lot like iCloud drive one drive for Windows Google Drive all of those things where essentially instead of actually using the nas as an external hard drive like SMB does sonology drive for Mac or Windows allows you to sync files to your local computer and so now when you open up a file on your computer instead of actually just opening up like an external hard drive on the nas it'll first download that file from the nas to your computer and save it on your computer's local hard drive while that first download will take a little while depending on the size of the file obviously every time you save and change a file and open up again it now is just going to be using that local copy on your computer's hard drive instead of having to go round trip to your Nas every single time and this can have huge performance benefits it does come with some other caveats and things like that but is definitely something to look for if you're always accessing files over the internet and especially if you find that Nas is too slow otherwise so I'll go ahead and leave a link down description below to that video that kind of goes over how to set that up because it can be very powerful onto number three this is a very key thing that can either make or break your performance if you are using sonology drive and if you're using Quick Connect there are two different ways you can be accessing files via Quick Connect either using what's called a relay server or a direct connection a relay server is basically a Synology server that sits in between your Nas and your computer and relays the data back and forth between them it's actually encrypted through the server So in theory syy cannot read any of the files on it but if you're using Quick Connect instead of a VPN and you're using a relay server because you don't have any ports open downloading files first to go through sonology servers these Quick Connect relay servers that sonology has to pay and maintain now this costs them money and you're not paying a subscription fee for it so they throttle it very strongly now if you're just using sonology photos and office documents it's not a big deal you're not really going to notice the performance slowdown of this but if you're trying to download 10 gigs of files it's going to go from something that could take minutes to hours now the way to tell if you're using a relay server can actually sometimes be a little bit difficult one of the easier ways to tell for mobile apps and things like that other than sonology drive share sync on a computer is to go to your quick connect URL and see what it redirects to so if you see something like this your n. us2 quickconnect do2 that means you are using a real server and that means you're going to have a very slow remote connection but if you've got a DSM Port open and you can actually change this port to any arbitrary value and forward it on your router note this does come with some security risks that I've actually got a video on that I'll leave link down the description below to you'll actually see something like direct. quickconnect do2 just like this I'm on the local network so we actually see the local IP address right here but if I was remote and I saw thisd direct. Qui connect. two that would mean that I'm actually directly connected to my Nas over the internet now if you're just using sonology drive all you have to do is port forward Port 6690 TCP from your router to the nas which is actually very secure to do due to the fact that it is only used for that data Transit it's actually still going to use the Quick Connect for authentication with sonology so it's a great kind of middleman with security and that's probably what needs the most amount of performance but that is all those things I'll leave a link down to a port foring guide as well as just an overall security guide for that but if you see air. quick connect. two you know you've got the fastest possible remote connection another thing that is really critical I'll add on here is global latency is very important if you've got everything tuned properly and a very fast connection you are going to have a much better experience if you're connecting to your NAS from the coffee shop 5 miles away then you are from five countries away the further you are geographically from your Nas the slower it is going to be because data can only travel at the speed of light and especially if you're using something like a starlink that is going to be even slower because your data has to go all the way up to low earth orbit and back to be able to get to your Nas and so those are another case where it can be a lot slower and now moving on to number four this is where internet speed starts to matter again because your upload speed wherever the Nas is located is going to be everyone else's download speed when downloading files off the Nas and vice versa that's because whenever you are downloading a file from your Nas your Nas is uploading it to you and so if you've got cable internet and you've got one gigabit down lovely but maybe only 40 megabit up that means you're only going to be able to download files at about 5 megabytes per second because your Nas can only upload as fast as your internet speed allows and that's something that can really slow things down when you've got those really slow internet connections especially if you're trying to send a lot of data upgrading to something like fiber can make a massive difference because fiber tends to be symmetric that means me your upload speed and your download speed tend to be the same and so a 250 megabit symmetric Connection in my opinion is far superior than a 1 gbit connection with 40 megabit up for most people all right so that is number four realizing that your upload speed at your office or house may be the limiting factor it's something a lot of people tend to forget and finally number five is maybe you just have to take the remote connection out of the equation I work with a fair amount of accountants who have tax software that is just not designed to be accessed from people across a VPN connection and people who are in the office will access the files in seconds whereas people who are remote may take 10 20 seconds just to open a single file which is unacceptably slow a lot of software is just not written with this Global latency and things like that in mind when they're designing it so for those people it can make a lot of sense to take the remote part of it out of the equation and the same is true for video editors so for just regular companies you can actually just have an extra computer at the office where the nases and use Remote Desktop over a VPN to have your employees who are working remotely connect back to their desktops at the office and boom now they are opening the files from their desktop that's at the office office 5 ft from the server all your performance problems are gone because it's flipping the equation instead of having the data go all the way to their house and back every time they're doing any minute operation now it's a lot simpler because they are just getting the video signal from the computer at the office so the data only has to transfer to their local computer and it is a huge difference and no matter how much tuning and tweaking you do in some cases software is just not optimized for this remote connection and look at having a setup where they can just remotely Connect into a computer and then operate locally for people who are just doing regular office things just Windows remote desktop or Mac OS remote desktop both work phenomenally well and unless you're video editing you're not going to notice but for people who are video editing or using Lightroom and really need accurate color and low frames per second and a lot more customization my favorite software to use for this is parac and that can make all the world a difference and it's just something to check out all right well that was number five we've gone over a ton of different ways to optimize how fast your NASA is in a lot of different use cases if you'd like you can hire me there's a link for that down description below I do this professionally as you might have been able to tell and if you have any questions go ahead and put those down in the comments below all right we have a good one bye a [Music]

Channel: SpaceRex

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Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2024