Slow USB copy on Synology- how to fix?

I know you’re not the support people for Synology NAS but I thought I’d run a problem I have by you, just in case you’ve seen it before.

I bought the DS1618+ and it’s great, apart from one big problem; backing up to an external USB HDD is extremely slow (like a lot slower than USB2 speeds).

I have less than a TB of data and I gave up after 2 days of backing up (using the USB backup app). The HDD is a nice new Seagate and is formatted with NTFS.

I’ve looked line and it seems like this is a common issue but I’ve not found any concrete solutions.

The only thing people say speeds things up if I format my HDD with EXT4 but I’d rather not do that as I want to easily access my backup from any Windows PC.

Do you have any ideas please?

I would try to change external drives files system to EXT3 just for sake of comparison. And i would also try some other USB drives just in case this drive controller is faulty.
I would also open a support ticket with Synology, so they would work on a bug fix if there is one.

I hope this helps.

 

I just thought I’d send you an update, in case it helps others.

I can confirm there seems to be an issue with USB copy speeds when the external drive is formatted to NTFS.

Here’s a test I did. I’ve submitted a ticket with Synology but I’m not sure how much help they’ll be.

Anyway, here are the tests;

I used the USB Copy app to backup my NAS (set to Mirror) to an external drive (with USB3).

1. If I format the USB drive to EXT4 and run a new backup (which will copy around 900GB of data), it takes 8 hours to complete.

2. If I then format that same USB drive to NTFS and run a new backup again (so same drive, same data), it now takes 20 hours to complete.

The only difference between the 2 tests was the EXT4 vs NTFS.

One thing I did notice is, once the initial 20 hour copy is done, the next time I ran a backup, it didn’t need to re-copy the whole data again, it must compare the differences between NAS and external drive and only copy the files that have changed. So in real world usage, I think I can still use it like it is.

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