Synology – choppy network performance

A few months back, my Synology NAS (DS2413+) started having some poor performance over the network - it wasnt horrendous - but it was noticeable. Speeds during transfer were generally fine, but simple cut/paste operations took longer than expected - and moving large files to the NAS seemed to swap between poor and decent transfer rates. It is connected to the networked via a 2 x 1GB bond, up to date firmware wise etc etc... Its been rock-solid and awesome for many year prior to this (overall, the synology experience has been generally awesome)

After a while of not really worrying about it too much, i got little annoyed with the performance and decided to look into further.... basic logging showed no issues, resource monitor showed no issue, the switch showed no issues...

On the NAS, I went into control panel | File Services | SMB | Advanced settings and noticed the "maximum SMB protocol" was set to "SMB2 and Large MTU".... given that everything on the network is now Server 2019 or Windows 10 - there was no reason not to use SMB3.... i was also a little perturbed that SMB3 was not the default setting for "maximum". I also changed the minimum to "SMB2 with large MTU" - even though i don't think i have any SMB2 devices left on the network.

Once this was changed, all was good again... not sure if there was a patch on the MS side which resulted in this or if its a synology thing... or some type of strange combo.... either way - the Synology is something i rarely check (outside of firmware updates) - and changing to SMB3 was always going to be a good thing.