I recently bought a NAS so my data is safe & available, with the benefit of being low power / noise / heat. I've considered Netgear, QNAP, but decided to go for a Synology as it was affordable, still had a big community, decent reviews & Time Machine support.

I wanted 4 bays so that I could use RAID5 and only lose 25% space on fault tolerance instead of (RAID1) 50%. Synology has 2 offerings in the 4-bay home-user range this year: the DS411+ (fast) and the DS411j (slow).

I figured as long as it can blast a bandwidth adequate for 1080p over my network, I'd save myself some money (300$ vs 600$), heat and power consumption that come with the more powerful + version.

However now that it's here I want it do download from newsgroups and am running into performance issues with my junior edition.

No worries. With a little bit of hacking you can squeeze just enough performance out of this thing to make sense of it all.

Here's how I turned my budget NAS that's mediocre at 8 things into a more powerful one that's good at 3 things: downloading / file serving / backups.

Warning

This article assumes you're somewhat skilled in Linux. By applying these suggestions you could seriously mess up your Disk Station.

I'm doing this on a DS411j running DSM 3.0. Your mileage may vary.

Downloading

In an earlier article I described how to install SABnzbd. After testdriving it for a while I was never able to get it to download above 3MB/s (2 average). Where as nzbget (the program used by Synology's own Download Station), peaks at 8MB/s (6 average).

Although I really like that SABnzbd automatically unpacks your downloads, these speed differences made me decide to go back to nzbget. The j is just not powerful enough to do SABnzbd at these speeds, and I can write auto-unpackers myself.

Optimal Config

I found that optimal speeds can be reached by letting your Synology download with 8 connections on 1 single download. With these settings the load reaches 11, so don't expect your NAS to do anything else while it's busy. But at least you're saturating your connection.

If you want it to multitask, limit it to 1 connection on 1 single download at any time, but you won't see it peak beyond 2MB/s.

If you use it for torrents as well, you don't want 1 slow torrent blocking the rest of the queue. In that case, set it to 2 to 3 connections with 2 to 4 threads each for optimal downloading.

Turn off unused protocols

Decide on 1 file-sharing protocol (I chose Mac File service cause all my systems speak it and use Time Machine, but SMB/Windows is typically the right choice). Disable the rest in your configuration panel, saving a few precious MBs of RAM.

This is all just done from your web-interface.

SSH access

Before you can do any hacking on your Synology, turn on SSH access in the web-interface's control panel. You can now type: ssh root@<nas ip>. Followed by sh. The root password is the same as admin password.

AppStore :)

Get your hands on ipkg, which is like your Synology's secret AppStore. From here on, it's much easier to install cool additional software.

Turn off media indexers to free up CPU & Memory

When I logged in to see what was eating up my NAS' resources, I saw a lot of processes running that I don't need such as thumbnail generators and media indexers (ffmpeg & convert).
They were endlessly consuming 100% CPU, leaving nothing for my other tasks.

Any currently available NAS is a terrible media streamer. And that's ok, just get yourself an AC Ryan ($80) or Boxee Box ($250) to do that instead and dedicate your NAS to less tasks.

In my case that meant killing off all these wannabe media processes that are eating up your poor handheld CPU with 128MB RAM (every MB we'll save from this point forward counts to faster download speeds :)

So if you don't use the Photo/Media/iTunes station and would like more power for other tasks, consider turning off indexers:

1) Turn off all services in the bottom configuration panel (iTunes, everything except Download Station, unless you're going to use SABnzbd for this)

2) Login as root via SSH and stop all indexing:

/usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??synoindexd.sh stop
/usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??synomkflvd.sh stop
/usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??synomkthumbd.sh stop
killall -9 convert
killall -9 ffmpeg
# If you don't use Download Station (but e.g. SABnzbd instead):
# /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??pgsql.sh stop

3) Make sure they won't restart on your next reboot.

chmod -x /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??synoindexd.sh
chmod -x /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??synomkflvd.sh
chmod -x /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??synomkthumbd.sh
# If you don't use Download Station (but e.g. SABnzbd instead):
# chmod -x /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S??pgsql.sh 

Hint) After a DSM firmware upgrade, you need to repeat these steps.

Custom cleanup & rename script cause SAB is too slow

Building your own cleanup scripts can be fun (and risky). If you want to get into it, you'll need some system tools at your disposal.

Here's what I cooked up to take care of my downloads. It runs every 15 minutes by cron, will remove broken downloads, unpack complete downloads, move lonely files 1 directory up, delete a bunch of unwanted extensions, etc. It makes a few assumptions (e.g. downloads must be in /volume1/downloads), so be sure to only use it for inspiration.

It's a work in progress, and improvements are more than welcome.

Downloadstation CLI

To have your Synology scan a directory for new download tasks, you can use Downloadstation CLI.

ipkg install python24 py-pgsql py24-mx-base
wget -O- http://downloadstation.jroene.de/downloadstation > /opt/bin/downloadstation
chmod 755 /opt/bin/downloadstation

With the command

downloadstation add <nzbfile>

The download will be added to the queue. If you use an adaptation of my unpacker script, it will already automatically scan /volume1/downloads/_queue for any new torrent or nzb task.

Tools

These programs may take up a little bit of space, but won't be active in memory until you call upon them (except for cron), so feel free to install without performance loss:

ipkg install vim bash bash-completion less rsync mtr \
  sudo tshark htop openssl mlocate perl ack hdparm sysstat dstat \
  bzip2 unrar unzip zlib p7zip

curl -k https://github.com/timkay/solo/raw/master/solo -o /usr/bin/solo
chmod a+x /usr/bin/solo

Optionally do ipkg install clamav so you can run clamscan on freshly downloaded files and check them for viruses (I decided not to).

Renaming files

There's a neat program called tvnamer that will rename all your TV series files.

Install:

ipkg install python25 py25-setuptools git
cd /volume1/@tmp
git clone https://github.com/dbr/tvnamer.git
cd tvnamer
python setup.py install
ln -s /opt/local/bin/tvnamer /usr/bin/tvnamer

Use:

tvrenamer -r /volume1/video/tv

FileBot is even better but requires a GUI.

Crontab

Crontab works slightly different than on more high-level Operating Systems.

Here's how to edit your crontab:

vim /etc/crontab

Every job needs a user prefix. e.g. root:

*/15 * * * * root /usr/bin/solo -port=1111 /volume1/video/unpacker.sh 1>&2 > /volume1/@tmp/unpacker.log

When you're done editing the new crontab, reload it by executing:

/usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S??crond.sh stop 
/usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S??crond.sh start

Tmux or Screen

If you start programs from within tmux, you can close your SSH session without killing it. You can check back later on it with tmux attach || tmux.

This makes it perfect to run cleanup/rename scripts in while you're still experimenting and need to check up on them regularly.

Tmux similar to screen, but I think it's a bit easier to deal with (just tmux attach || tmux is all).

However screen is a lot easier to install thanks to ipkg, so pick your poison.

Screen

ipkg install screen

Tmux

ipkg install libevent optware-devel ncurses-dev

# http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=30132
mkdir /opt/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/lib_disabled
mv /opt/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/lib/libpthread* /opt/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/lib_disabled
cp /lib/libpthread.so.0 /opt/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/lib/
cd /opt/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/lib/
ln -s libpthread.so.0 libpthread.so
ln -s libpthread.so.0 libpthread-2.5.so

cd /volume1/@tmp
wget http://sunet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.4/tmux-1.4.tar.gz
tar -zxvf tmux-1.4.tar.gz
cd tmux-1.4
export CC=gcc
export CFLAGS="-L /opt/lib -I  /opt/include/ncurses"
./configure --prefix=/opt # prefix is not supported. So we'll need some symlinks
make # This will take a while
make install
ln -s /opt/lib/libevent-1.4.so.2 /usr/lib/libevent-1.4.so.2
ln -s /opt/share/terminfo/* /usr/share/terminfo/

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