Is Synology Supposed to be this Slow?

Synology
1

My setup: Synology DS418 with five Seagate 4TB Iron Wolf drives. Updated to latest today.

My computer is a MacBook Pro, 2021 model, attached to the LAN via gig Ethernet. Attached to an 11TB Western Digital USB drive which runs a HyperDrive backup daily. That’s it. Just my Mac. I store about 8TB of digital photos on my Synology, but they are excluded from Time Machine. The TM just backs up my 512GB SSD. My photos are stored in a 4TB external SSD. Not part of Time Machine; I just drag and drop them to Synology when needed.

Problem: Everything is just so slow. I wanted to browse my Time Machine backup, mostly to make sure it’s working. It took a few minutes for TM to show past backups, and when I tried to zip through them it crashed back to the Mac Finder.

I realize that copying files over 1 GB Ethernet isn’t going to be fast, but the system just seems very sluggish, given that it’s usually doing absolutely nothing. The system does what it needs to do, so it’s not that big a problem, I just wonder if there’s something wrong with it or if it’s supposed to be this way. I’m not going to upgrade the hardware for more speed.

2

Slow is of course relative. You could make it more explicit by measuring the transfer speed. We can get into details if necessary.
Some simple measures for Macs in general:

  • shut down the system every night
  • prevent running to much apps in memory
  • disable WiFi
    The last point is the most important. Despite connecting an Ethernet cable, Macs may still use WiFi.
3

Thanks for your response, Paul.

I ran Blackmagic Speed Test and it reported write times of 105 MB/s and read times of 75 MB/s.

4

The write time of 105MB/s is on the mark. The 75MB/s read is a bit slow but not extreme.

5

The write speed is on spec for 1GbE.

Are you sure your entire system is 1 GB Ethernet (nominally 10 GbE)?