Mac file transfer painfully slow

[albird]

I have a DS207+ and run a Mac OSX 10.6.6. If I copy a file in Parallels running Win XP on the same machine a 400MB file transfers in under 3 mins. If I transfer the same file using just the MacOS it takes 35-40mins. There is clearly something wrong in the MacOS setup - it's not a hardware problem (wifi etc) as Parallels is run in a window on the same MacOS operating system.

I have tried accessing the server via Appletalk, SMB and NFS in the MacOS but have not got any significant difference in performance - 35-40mins. There should at least be some difference right! Anyone got any idea what is likely to be going on here?

[albird]

It cannot be wifi or network issues as the same machine gets the 3min result. It must be a Mac + Synology related problem?

[bbdoc]

same issue on my DS508... file transfer are really slow using Mac OSX Leopard...

[albird]

Would be great if the guys at Synology would comment on the likely source of difficulty.

[NickPalmer]

I experience a similar problem. The wireless router being used was an Airport Extreme 802.11n. I have tried the router in several modes and none of them helped. I can stream between two Macs on the WiFi at 1.5MB/s. I can stream through this router in both directions relative to the NAS using a wire at 25MB/s. I can stream to the Synology DS 1510+ at 4MB/s. I stream from the NAS at 50-80KB/s which just doesn't cut it. I switched to a Zyxel 802.11n router just to take the router out of the equation and I can now stream to and from the NAS at 4.3MB/s. So in my case my conclusion is that the Airport Extreme is lousy at routing traffic from the wired LAN to the WLAN but has no problem the other direction. The trouble with the Zyxel is that it does not seem to pass Bonjour traffic from the LAN to the WLAN so I don't see the Synology in "Shared" or in "Network" in the Finder since the Bonjour traffic is being filtered. So it looks like I will be getting a new router but I am not sure it will be an Aiport Extreme again since it seems to have such a big problem operating as a router.

[msmedts]

I face the same problem. I just made some screenshot of the synology assistant measuring the diskstation's performance:


I am using a 207 with 2 500gb drive disks. Just to test, I have been transferring a folder containing a large avi (1.45 gb) and several small preview files. After running a couple of minutes, I canceled the transfer to make use of another protocol to make this comparrison

This transfer rate has been achieved by using wlan N connection.

As you can see, SMB and AFP are very unstable and really really slow. I am not able to stream video's to my mac via wireless. When I use windows 7 within mac OSX ( using VMWare), I am already able to cut down the expected time from 35 minutes to 8. If I use FTP however, I have achieved the highest transfer rate, the download was finished after 5-6 min.

I was about to buy new harddisks, as these are already 4 years old and getting a bit noisy, however, I don't believe they are the main cause of the slow connection (as the ftp and windows connections are reasonable). Does someone else have any idea how to speed up file transfers directly in Mac?

[MacHound]

msmedts, thanks for posting your detailed report. That helps other people tremendously.

Which Synology software version are you running on your DS207? How do you have your NAS RAID set up? Any partitions?

Which router and hub (if any)? Which wireless transmitter (if different than the router)? Which Mac and Mac OS X are you using?

I am curious, what throughput does Synology Assistant measure for AFP (Mac), SMB (Mac), Win7 and FTP/FileZilla if you connect via Gigabit?

Thanks again for the excellent post.

[vincenthouck]

Not sure I'm having the same difficulty as everyone below. I am truly new to this, so let me know if this is normal, it just seems painfully slow. I'm transferring 200gb from mac to DS1511+ at about 10,000 Kb/s. I'm connect through ethernet to router. Is there not a way to connect the Mac directly to the NAS and transfer through usb? I have another 1 TB I'm about to transfer from an external hard drive to the NAS and don't even want to think about how long that's going to take. Looks like the current transfer of 200GB is going to take well over six hours. I'm uploading to a 2.5 TB, iSCSI in HFS+ format.

Is Thunderbolt an answer to this? Should I keep the DS1511+ as my backup source and simply upgrade to a Promise Pegasus when it arrives or would that be the same? How do I connect my Mac directly to the DS1511? I seem to be missing something quite elementary....

[MacHound]

10,000 kbps (10 Mbps) over gigabit??? That's terrible. Even Synology's lowly DS411slim gets 35-45 Mbps according to user reports at Amazon.com

Are you sure your router / switch / cables aren't causing the problem? Did you try direct wiring your DS1511+ to Mac via a simple Cat 6 cable?

[mozthefox]

Hey

I'd just like to add myself to the list too.

I have just finished setting up my DS411j with 2 500gb Samsung F3 drives (HD502HJ). I'm very new to folder shares on a Mac (having come from Windows) so I'm not sure if I am missing something. My NAS is connected via ethernet to my D-Link DIR-615 router which I got from my cable company (Virgin Media in the UK). I also have an ethernet connection from the router to my iMac and have successfully connected it to the NAS and started creating folders on the drive.

I have just tried to copy my Apature library (5.55Gb) from the MediaDrive partition on my iMac's harddrive to the NAS but the transfer started off painfully slow. I was initially getting about 30 KB/s which lasted around 4 minutes. Transfer speeds then jumped up to around 4000 KB/s for about a minute and then dropped back to 30 KB/s again.

Have I missed something in the setup of the NAS or folder share on the Mac?

Just a few more stats for you:

I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.7

I'm running DSM 3.1-1613

I created the share on the mac using afp:// and smb:// but the problem remains

I have tried transferring over ethernet and WiFi but the problem remains

If you need to know anything else then please let me know. I would appreciate any advice as I may have missed something

Many thanks,
moz

[mozthefox]

I have also noticed that if I cancel a file transfer and all network activity stops, the hard drive activity lights continue to flash. It's been 5 minutes since I cancelled the transfer and the lights are still flashing...

Not sure if that's normal or not. I would have thought not.

moz

[et01267]

I'm also quite surprised and disappointed by the performance of my new DS411+.

Here's my configuration:

DS411+ with DSM 3.1-1613

8TB (4 x Samsung HD204UI with fixed firmware)

1 Disk Group using all 4 disks

1 Volume using part of the disk group

Shared folder for Time Machine backups

Gigabit Ethernet

Using this config, I'm only able to write to this shared folder at a max of around 12MB/sec, more like 10MB/sec sustained. This is whether I'm using AFP (under Time Machine or just copying files in the Finder), or FTP. All tests done from my MacBook Pro on GB Ethernet.

By contrast, I can write files to my old Time Capsule at over 50MB/sec.

This is just pitiful.

Can someone see something in my config that might be responsible for this abysmal performance? If not, I still have a couple of weeks to send this junk back.

[albird]

This post is really quite long and seemingly going nowhere. Isn't it about time Synology addressed this? Looks like no one has a solution.

[Jeeosch]

Hi there!

Add me to the list!

I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.7 and a Synology DiskStation DS210j with AFP (DSM 3.1-1613).
It even happens, that the disk station is disconnected suddenly for no obvious reasons ...

Plus, the hard disk activity lights are going nuts even when there is no PC and no other client connected and - BTW - it is like that since several weeks!!!.

So, what is the problem here???!
Synology should address this issue or at least let us know, what's causing this extreme disk activity and the - connected to that - the extreme lame response!

@Synology: hope, you read this, guys!

[MacHound]

Question: Are the people who are reporting such dreadful transfer speeds certain their router or switch hasn't dropped down to 10/100 mbps "fast ethernet" speeds instead of true gigabit? Maybe what you're reporting is not Synology's fault, but is instead a problem with your router / switch / cabling?