Port forwarding a NAS to get high speeds: what am I doing wrong?

[alemutasa]

Hello everybody!

First and foremost, please forgive me if I'm vague and I can't properly explain my problem: I'm new to the networking world and I'm still struggling to properly understand it all. Also I'm not a native English speaker, and that worsens all up. Sorry!

Now to business: I bought a Synology NAS for Christmas, a DS218j with two 2TB WD Red HDD, in order to store all my crap on it, listen to music on my hi-fi, accessing my music library when I'm not home and use a Linux machine without installing it in my machine (I installed Linux before on the very machine I'm writing on, I foolishly messed GRUB up and I had to format my drive, losing all the Windows files: don't want to risk again).

I already managed to SSH into the NAS by opening port 22 of my router (which model I don't know: thank you, non responding Italian ISP!), both via home network and other networks; I also managed to make the hi-fi play whatever music I wanted and to access the NAS via phone app to listen to my music when travelling.

The thing I didn't manage to do is to speed up the transfer rate and I really want to fix the puny 8MB/s transfer speed: my brother is a videomaker and his files tend to get very big (up to 10 GB per file) and my music is all FLAC, I don't want to clog up my entire network everytime my brother has to transfer a file or I buy a new CD. The only thing I tried to do is to create a new "rule" for my router as shown in the image below, but nothing else came to mind (note that 5000 and 5001 ports are dedicated to Synology):

https://imgur.com/a/CmkBl

(about image posting, how do I display an image directly without a link?)

Here's, hopefully, something to help with the diagnosis:
- my router is 1Gb capable (or at least that's what the box says);
- my laptop wi-fi is 135 Mb/s capable;
- my desktop motherboard interface is 1Gb capable;
- my internet connection is 20Mb/s;
- not sure about my LAN wiring, but probably CAT5;
- DSM 6.1.4-15217 Update 5 operating system on the NAS;
- Windows 7 on desktop, Windows 10 on every other machines I have at home;
- when using Synology's utility to setup the router, the "network environment" (not sure if that's the proper english translation) test fails, telling me that the NAS detects two routers and I need to set up a bridge, even though there's only one router in my network.

Could you please help me? I can't think of anything else
:/

 

[Deleted member 1771594]

Use the EZ-Internet Synology app.

 

[Solandri]

I already managed to SSH into the NAS by opening port 22 of my router (which model I don't know: thank you, non responding Italian ISP!), both via home network and other networks;

If you're going to regularly SSH into your router, I'd highly recommend changing the SSH server to use a port other than 22. SSH is pretty secure, but anyone trying to attack SSH will automatically attempt it on port 22. Not all routers will support this, but some do. Just pick a random port above 1024 that doesn't conflict with other applications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers#Registered_ports

The thing I didn't manage to do is to speed up the transfer rate and I really want to fix the puny 8MB/s transfer speed:
- my internet connection is 20Mb/s;

So your Internet's download speed is 20 Mbps. What's your upload speed?

Assuming you actually mean 8 Mbps, that is really good. A 20/8 Mbps Internet connection is giving you a lot more upload speed than most ISPs give. You have to keep in mind that music/movies streamed from your NAS to other networks when you're away from home are using your upload Internet bandwidth, not download. So 8 Mbps may actually be the max your Internet connection is capable of.

 

[Deleted member 1771594]

He can actually turn on/off Telnet/SSH access via Terminal & SNMP on control panel. Any case, he should change port 22 to 4321 (ex.).

 

[alemutasa]

Use the EZ-Internet Synology app.

Thank you for your answer, but sadly that utility doesn't work for me! It says that one of my routers should be set as a bridge (keep in mind that I don't have two routers, just one modem-router combo)

I already managed to SSH into the NAS by opening port 22 of my router (which model I don't know: thank you, non responding Italian ISP!), both via home network and other networks;

If you're going to regularly SSH into your router, I'd highly recommend changing the SSH server to use a port other than 22. SSH is pretty secure, but anyone trying to attack SSH will automatically attempt it on port 22. Not all routers will support this, but some do. Just pick a random port above 1024 that doesn't conflict with other applications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers#Registered_ports

The thing I didn't manage to do is to speed up the transfer rate and I really want to fix the puny 8MB/s transfer speed:
- my internet connection is 20Mb/s;

So your Internet's download speed is 20 Mbps. What's your upload speed?

Assuming you actually mean 8 Mbps, that is really good. A 20/8 Mbps Internet connection is giving you a lot more upload speed than most ISPs give. You have to keep in mind that music/movies streamed from your NAS to other networks when you're away from home are using your upload Internet bandwidth, not download. So 8 Mbps may actually be the max your Internet connection is capable of.

The thing about port 22 is very logical, it didn't occur to me. As I said, I'm new to the networking world. Thank you very much for you suggestion, I'll change it right away!

Ok maybe I messed up some measurings and my problem wasn't well stated, sorry! Let me start over. My problem is that I expected a higher transfer rate when NAS and my devices are on the same network, not when I'm away: correct me if I'm wrong, but listening to music located in the NAS when I'm not home is like using Spotify, except that the Spotify server is my own NAS, right?

Here's the measurings again, hopefully now the notation is correct:
- internet download speed: 20 Megabits per second (downloading a game from Steam);
- internet upload speed: 2 Megabits per second (uploading photos on Dropbox);
- home network upload from machine to NAS: 8 Megabytes per second;
- home network download from NAS to machine: 40 Mbytes per second.

Since I have theretically a 1 Gbits per second home network (the NAS is capable, and the router and some of my machines too) I was expecting 125 Mbytes per second transfer rate. Is that wrong?

 

[Solandri]

Since I have theretically a 1 Gbits per second home network (the NAS is capable, and the router and some of my machines too) I was expecting 125 Mbytes per second transfer rate. Is that wrong?

Theoretically you'll get 125 MB/sec transfer rates over Gigabit Ethernet. In reality, you've got two other bottlenecks.

First, most NASes use HDDs, and HDD speed varies depending on what type of data you're reading or writing. Sequential files like movies transfer faster and can usually max out Gigabit Ethernet. But small files will transfer slower because a larger portion of the transfer time is taken up by the HDD moving the read/write heads to the file location. For really small files like text files, it can be slower than 1 MB/s. For moderate sized files like PDFs or MP3s, it's usually around 10-50 MB/s (depends on file size). Fragmentation can cause large files to behave more like small files though. If the NAS is very full, you may be encountering fragmentation problems (which would match your symptoms of writes to the NAS being slower than reads).

Second is the speed of the hardware. A PC's processor has no problem reading data off the drive and piping it to the network card at Gigabit speed. NASes tend to use much weaker processors, which sometimes aren't able to repackage the data in the format the network protocol needs quickly enough to saturate Gigabit Ethernet. It's not uncommon for low-end NASes to top out at 20-40 MB/s due to a weak processor. The DS218j actually one of the better entry level NASes in this regard. You can see the DS218j's performance across a variety of different tasks in this review:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/33160-synology-ds218j-ds218play-diskstations-reviewed?start=1

Also, are you sure the Synology is wrong when it says you have two routers? Did someone by chance install a second router to use as an additional wireless access point? You have to disable the DHCP server on the second router if you do that, which most people fail to do.

 

[Deleted member 1771594]

Reset your modem/router equipment then turn it OFF for about a minute before turning ON. Download "Synology Assistant" then open it & click Search. This will search for your Synology NAS local IP address (if it doesn't show in your modem/router browser UI). Take note of the IP then go back to your modem/router browser UI & forward TCP port 5000,5001 with NAS local IP. This will allow you to open the DiskStation Manager using the NAS http://localIPaddressort (5000). If you have hard time opening the DiskStation Manager then just click the IP address on Synology Assistant. Run the EZ-Internet Syno app. Set up router manually if it can't locate a compatible device. Choose the router that's close to your router firmware (ex. Asus RT-AC56U almost the same the other ASUS RT-AC routers either stock or Merlin) or manually put the router admin login info. You should be able to sort what's next with this simple stuff.

 

[Deleted member 1771594]

Also, are you sure the Synology is wrong when it says you have two routers? Did someone by chance install a second router to use as an additional wireless access point? You have to disable the DHCP server on the second router if you do that, which most people fail to do.

Sometimes Syno DiskStation can trigger this two router kind of stuff. My case, I happened to temporarily set up an AP on a second router then got rid of the second router permanently. Still when I set up the router config on Syno control panel I get this two router message. The solution is to just reset the router + modem & run a search using Syno Assistant if the NAS IP doesn't show up in the router browser UI.

 

[alemutasa]

Since I have theretically a 1 Gbits per second home network (the NAS is capable, and the router and some of my machines too) I was expecting 125 Mbytes per second transfer rate. Is that wrong?

Theoretically you'll get 125 MB/sec transfer rates over Gigabit Ethernet. In reality, you've got two other bottlenecks.

First, most NASes use HDDs, and HDD speed varies depending on what type of data you're reading or writing. Sequential files like movies transfer faster and can usually max out Gigabit Ethernet. But small files will transfer slower because a larger portion of the transfer time is taken up by the HDD moving the read/write heads to the file location. For really small files like text files, it can be slower than 1 MB/s. For moderate sized files like PDFs or MP3s, it's usually around 10-50 MB/s (depends on file size). Fragmentation can cause large files to behave more like small files though. If the NAS is very full, you may be encountering fragmentation problems (which would match your symptoms of writes to the NAS being slower than reads).

Second is the speed of the hardware. A PC's processor has no problem reading data off the drive and piping it to the network card at Gigabit speed. NASes tend to use much weaker processors, which sometimes aren't able to repackage the data in the format the network protocol needs quickly enough to saturate Gigabit Ethernet. It's not uncommon for low-end NASes to top out at 20-40 MB/s due to a weak processor. The DS218j actually one of the better entry level NASes in this regard. You can see the DS218j's performance across a variety of different tasks in this review:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/33160-synology-ds218j-ds218play-diskstations-reviewed?start=1

Also, are you sure the Synology is wrong when it says you have two routers? Did someone by chance install a second router to use as an additional wireless access point? You have to disable the DHCP server on the second router if you do that, which most people fail to do.

First off, I took account of that. I ran Windows defragment tool on my test machine before testing the transfer speed and I used large files (ISOs and videos) and there wasn't sign of fragmentation. The HDDs are two WD Red and they should reach 7200 RPM, so drives speed should not be an issue. Second, my three machines all have good processors (the desktop have an overclocked i5 2500k and my two laptops have, respectively, i7 6700hq and i7 7somethingU) and, as you say, my 218j should be able to get good in/out speeds. Also yeah, I'm very sure ,my network is very simple. Just a modem/router and some cabling for the desktop: the other devices are attached via Wi-Fi (please note, my tests were carried out via LAN). Theoretically I'm good to get Gigabit speeds, but in reality I'm stuck with 10 MB/s from machines to NAS and 40 MB/s from NAS to machines, that's why I'm asking you guys... What the hell, I can transfer files like a pro but I cannot set all up properly, it bothers me

 

[alemutasa]

Reset your modem/router equipment then turn it OFF for about a minute before turning ON. Download "Synology Assistant" then open it & click Search. This will search for your Synology NAS local IP address (if it doesn't show in your modem/router browser UI). Take note of the IP then go back to your modem/router browser UI & forward TCP port 5000,5001 with NAS local IP. This will allow you to open the DiskStation Manager using the NAS http://localIPaddressort (5000). If you have hard time opening the DiskStation Manager then just click the IP address on Synology Assistant. Run the EZ-Internet Syno app. Set up router manually if it can't locate a compatible device. Choose the router that's close to your router firmware (ex. Asus RT-AC56U almost the same the other ASUS RT-AC routers either stock or Merlin) or manually put the router admin login info. You should be able to sort what's next with this simple stuff.

I tried to do that but sadly the problem was still there: EZ Internet said my network had two routers... Also, I tried to continue the setup but sadly there's no way I can find my modem/router model... Hell, I couldn't even find what brand it is! No one on the internet is talking about it and, of course, my ISP won't respond back to my emails. I suspect they made their own modem/router and, even if I come up with a model number, the Synology utility hasn't that particular model in its database. What if I intall another one of my routers? I have a TP-Link router, it's Gigabit capable and I could set it up without the DDNS option like Solandri said. Will it make the problem go away or I would still refer to the main router that carries the signal?

 

[Deleted member 1771594]

Then just choose whatever router in the list but don't use the router admin login method 'cause it won't work. It will generate a list of ports to open & save. Then go to your router & manually port forward those those ports. Pick & choose only those ports that you need & delete those ports you don't need on Syno. Run the EZ-Internet again. It's really not that hard to do.

 

[alemutasa]

Then just choose whatever router in the list but don't use the router admin login method 'cause it won't work. It will generate a list of ports to open & save. Then go to your router & manually port forward those those ports. Pick & choose only those ports that you need & delete those ports you don't need on Syno. Run the EZ-Internet again. It's really not that hard to do.

Ok I did that. Ez Internet flagged to open port 80, I did that and the connection was more stable. Sadly though, it wasn't any faster

 

[nigelivey]

Then just choose whatever router in the list but don't use the router admin login method 'cause it won't work. It will generate a list of ports to open & save. Then go to your router & manually port forward those those ports. Pick & choose only those ports that you need & delete those ports you don't need on Syno. Run the EZ-Internet again. It's really not that hard to do.

You keep on about this but it has nothing to do with transfer speeds on his internal network!!

 

[nigelivey]

Are all your device 1000BaseT ?