A variety of value-added services is often why people choose NAS as their file server. However, when you ask someone about NAS, you always get different feedback about the quality and performance of these services – and it’s a mystery that’s worth exploring. Today we’re going to dig little more into the different ways people use their NAS, as well as the performance differences.
Let’s take a NAS we use at home as an example. Digital photos and HD films are transferred to a NAS server via our computer, which will take some time during the transfer. So it’s safe to say the speed at which the files are being transferred will determine the quality of the service, which raises another question– how fast can I get my files to my NAS? Today we are going to unfold the things that Synology has done to improve file transfer performance.
How we conduct the tests
To make the test results to be as useful, we try to make the way we test close to real-life experience. We used Windows 7, with the Robocopy command to transfer files to NAS server just like the Windows Explorer with SMB protocol.
In the performance test, we put together 10,000 x 1MB photo files. As for HD video, the file is at about 5GB each. These two testing environments and parameters are going to let us look at the performance results for small and large file transfer.
Using Robocopy command, we calculated the time it took for the above two types of file to transfer to a testing NAS server. In order to create a comparative environment, we placed Synology DS212 with other NAS servers of the same specifications on the market. In the chart below, you can see that in the first row we have DS212 and three other NAS servers; and hardware specifications of client PC’s .
| Synology DS212 | NAS 2 | NAS 3 | NAS 4 | |
| CPU | Marvell 6282 1.6G | Marvell 6282 1.6G | Marvell 6282 1.6G | Marvell 6282 1.6G |
| Memory | DDR3 256MB | DDR3 256MB | DDR3 256MB | DDR3 512MB |
| Raid type | RAID 1 | RAID 1 | RAID 1 | RAID 1 |
| File system | ext4 | XFS | ext4 | ext4 |
- Network Environment: 1Gbps LAN; MTU 1500; directly connected to the client PC
- NAS: HE103UJ HDD x 2
- Client PC: Intel Core i5 750 2.67GHz; 4GB DDR3; WD3000HLFS (10K RPM, 300GB) HDD x 2, RAID 0; Intel Gigabit CT; Windows 7
Writing Large Files to NAS
Let us first look at the transfer performance for large files. As you can see in the diagram below, Synology’s NAS server offers the best write-in performance for large files among the competitors. Our users will be able to copy a large quantity of multimedia content in a very short time, which we believe is what matters to most people. Just recently, we released a software patch aiming to optimize write-in performance for ARM-based platform models [1] – hoping to provide a complete user experience for our customers.
In addition to large video file transfer (5GB), transferring massive quantity of small files is also a common practice seen for everyday use on a NAS. So let us look at how this turns out from our testing.
Writing Small Files to NAS
The chart above reflects the ability that Synology products have in terms of performance. We are able to allow our users, when transferring photos or office documents, to get the best out of the service we provide. Until now, I am sure you are wondering about the same thing – why is there such a huge difference in terms of performance between large file and small file?
The answer is that each type of write-in is confronted with different challenges. Before going into getting the write-in performance up for small file transfer, we have to address the issue of how to search files that have the same name tag under the same level of directory effectively. The searching and the files are keys to affecting our performance tests. Well, we overcame the search issue with specifically designed optimization techniques. Together with the ARM-based optimization technology we mentioned earlier, the overall quality and performance for small file is proved to be greatly enhanced. So let’s now look at how and what we did to achieve this improvement.
Generally speaking, if we were to use the same testing methodology and parameters on Linux-based servers, the write-in performance will be inversely proportional to the number of files in the directory – the more files there are in the same level of directory, the slower the speed at which they are being transferred. This is mainly because the host server has to search for any file with the same name to decide whether a file can be written in or not. We see a particular curve (see below) in terms of network utilization during a performance test we did on small file transfer using Linux-based Ubuntu or Fedora.
Small file transfer on Ubuntu 10.10 [2]
The decreasing trend can be explained by the description we discussed earlier about file search. So if you want to transfer a large quantity of photos to Fedora or Ubuntu-based server, you will certainly see the overall transfer performance being affected by the number of photos. For this we also have our own solution: the file transfer performance on Synology products will not be hindered regardless of the number of files. Here is a display of the Internet usage during a performance test we did on an optimized DS712+ using the same batch of files.
Small file transfer on DS712+ [3]
Compared to Linux-based servers in general, we optimize our search technology so that the writing speed will stay constant regardless of the number of photos or office documents that are being transferred. This enhancement applies to all our Synology products.
Conclusion
Today we went deeper about the performance of file transfer on NAS by showing testing results we did. We would like you to understand the mystery behind the services on Synology NAS in terms of performance, especially file transfer. Our Synology® ARM® Performance Acceleration Technology optimizes the write-in performance on Synology products. The results were shown in our small file transfer testing as well. Furthermore, we will continue to set speed and performance as our foremost goal to improve on, and everyone can enjoy Synology products.
[1] Synology® ARM® Performance Acceleration Technology. Click here for more detailed information.
[2] CPU: Intel i3 2100 3.1GHz; RAM: 4G DDRIII 1333; MB: MSI H61; HDD: WD 500GB; NIC: Built-in.
[3] Click here to see product spec of Synology DiskStation DS712+
Thank you for the article. Synology is my favorite NAS and I already have several of them.
Anyway the optimization of the small file transfer presented here (graph comparison of the Ubuntu versus optimized DS712+) does not look good. Average speed is equal to the lowest speed at Ubuntu. Probably there should be mentined that we can not compare the absolute speed because the both test servers have different hardware = speed. We only check the trend (decreasing at Ubuntu, stable at Syno DS).
I’m I right?
Well, the hardware spec of DS712+ and Server by Ubuntu is different, and the latter is more power hungry since it uses high performance Core i3 desktop CPU. The point I’d like to mention is the curve of the network traffic.
Hmm. All very well that one can rapidly transfer files onto the Synology DiskStation. But that’s just the start – as soon as the files are there, the DiskStation starts to make thumbnails of them. Lots of thumbnails. And it does so exceptionally slowly – perhaps 3 minutes per image on my DS212J. I uploaded about 10,000 images three days ago. The box has still got 6,000 in the its queue. This is quite an issue. See for example the thread Thumbnails : slow slow slow on the Synology forums.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your reply. I would really suggest you to upload photos using Synology Asssistant to upload photos if you’ve got many many photos to share with Photo Station or DLNA media server.
We make the quality of thumbnails to better, so it takes some time to create these thumbnails.
Hi Darren, it makes no sense to have high-quality thumbnails if it renders the product useless. I have disabled the Photo Station just for this problem. Low quality thumbnails are fine to spot the picture to see, and a high quality image can be requested when needed.
The biggest problem is (what also shows from the forum) that most people don’t know about this issue. It’s only the tech-savvy users who complain, because they understand it could be the CPU that is too slow.
I love all other DSM features, but unfortunately this single (easy to fix!) issue is crippling the experience. Like many others, I hope to see the thumbnail generation to be significantly shortened in DSM4, be it with a lower quality of the thumbnails.
Hi Bart,
Photo Station is somewhere photos are displayed, so it takes time to make the quality of photos being better =). You can upload photos to using Synology Assistant to upload bulk of photos in a quicker way.
In addition, despite the CPU usage is high, when you transfer files over SMB other protocols, the speed isn’t affected since the priority of file transfer process is higher.
You can change the quality of thumbnails in Photo Station in DSM 3.2 or Media Indexing in DSM 4.0.
For me, I would recommend you to upload photos with Synology Assistant.
Darren,
I have a DS 410 with 4 2 tb disks.
I want to downpoad a 7 gb file over the internet to a pc somewhere else. I am testing now with file station and than the comment download file(i am now at the other place to get the file from my DS). But this is very slow only 600 kb/s.
FTP takes to much time to setup(unless you have a step by step guide including the right ftp software).
My download link from my ISP is 100 mbit. So enough of power.
How to increase the speed???
Regards,
Gerhard
Hi, do you enable encryption which makes the transferring slower? File Station should be very fast of transferring files, and you could contact our support team for help.
Hello team of Synology
Up to me missing some features on my old Synology NAS, I am fully satisfied.
These features are on the new models.
I would be happy but if they are also ported to the old ones.
I would like to use the directory server on a DS107 +.
Is it possible to port the directory server for this DiskStation?
I hope there is a possibility to use the LDAP server.
Thanks!
Hi Frank,
We would really hope you to get a faster Synology DiskStation which will fulfill your needs
What does the y-axis represent in the ‘Writing Large Files to NAS’ and the ‘Writing Small Files to NAS’ graphs? I sure hope it isn’t time… It doesn’t make the syno look great….
Es bedeutet wie viele Dateien kopiert werden können in der gleichen Zeit.
Excuse me, I answered in my native language.
It means how many files can be copied at the same time.
Hi, Y-axis means the transfer speed (MB/s)
Is there any way I could check the size of each folder on my DS210j? I tried using du -s but that shows me every file in every folder. I just want to know the size of each folder. Thanks!
Hi, we don’t have the feature yet, but at the moment you can calculate the sum of size of files and folders using File Station in DSM.
Actually, on my DS112j, I can use the following command to accomplish what you are asking for:
find . -type d -maxdepth 2 -exec du -s {} \;You just need to adjust the “
-maxdepth 2” part to control how many levels deep you want this information for. I’m showing an example for just 2 levels deep, but you can change it (or remove it) according to your needs for sub directories.I am transferring files from my PC to Synolgy server DS. I have seen much faster download speeds but for the last two days file transfer speeds are SLOOOOOW!! – KB/S – any ideas on why this could be happening?
I am on a LAN