Discussion Synology DS220j early thoughts.

[CuriousMike]

Recently picked up the DS220j and a WD Red 4tb drive during Amazons recent sale. The DS220j was the cheapest i'd ever seen it at $135.
I paired it with another deal - a WD Red SMR 4TB for < $80 to go along with an older WD Green 4TB drive I already had.

Installation was trivial - I was able to use Synologys "www.find.synology.com" to immediately find the device and setup was simple.

I use a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, where I have a Sandisk 2TB portable SSD connected over USB-C.

The Synology was hard wired into my router.

The laptop is connected over Wi-Fi.

I mounted a shared folder on Windows to the NAS... so, Z:\ is the NAS drive.

The performance (backing up 1.5TB of photos) was ... disappointing. The copy averaged ... 35MB/sec? Less than I'd expected.
It was at this point I researched the hard drive I purchased and discovered the SMR fiasco.
But i don't have the drives in RAID - I have them setup plain as 8TB of space.

Today, I got my normal box computer (Ryzen 1700) hardwired into the network to do tests.
Much, much better. Copies to the NAS was ~80MB/sec, copies from the NAS was ~100MB/sec.

My laptop is in the same room as the router.

The router is gigabit (Asus RT-AC3200) so I think it's fast enough.

The router, which I did nothing but basic setup on, creates a couple of "access points" (not sure I'm using the right term.)
Essentially, "ROUTER_NAME", "ROUTER_NAME_5G" and "ROUTER_NAME_5G_2".
I had been connecting to the 5G_2 access point.

When I switched to the plain "ROUTER_NAME", I got about 8-10 MB/sec. That was bad.

When I switched to "ROUTER_NAME_5G" (note the lack of the _2 ), performance eeked up to ~50MB/sec ( up from the prior 35MB/sec.)

The performance tends to bounce all over the place on wi-fi - anywhere from 15-50 MB/sec.

Hardwired, it is pretty consistent at 80MB W 100MB R.

Not sure if this is a limitation of my laptops wifi or my router.

Regardless, I've managed to squeek a little more performance via switching access points.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, NAS access over wifi, while doable, is not really recommended.

 

[damian101]

The SMB protocol performs very poorly over high-latency connections. Over a normal home Wi-Fi connection you normally have a ping of at least a couple of milliseconds, often much more when multiple devices use the same connection, while over Ethernet LAN you normally have a ping of less than 1 millisecond.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The SMB protocol performs very poorly over high-latency connections. Over a normal home Wi-Fi connection you normally have a ping of at least a couple of milliseconds, often much more when multiple devices use the same connection, while over Ethernet LAN you normally have a ping of less than 1 millisecond.

I did a series of tests over WiFi in my home, and found that between AppleShare, SMB, and NFS, NFS was the fastest by a pretty solid margin. For big sequential transfers it wasn't too much faster, but things like getting directory listing or random-ish access were way better.