Our ReadyNas 312 unit is becoming very slow, sometimes it takes minutes to load a folder and/ or the folder is not found.
The unit is linked into a switch so that it communicate with the network but aside from that I cannot think of any other reason why it would be slow. There is also a router on the network but the device is not directly plugged into this.
The dashboard on the device says the drives are healthy.
Antivirus on the device is enabled (I see there was an issue with this on performance years ago)
The dashboard on the device says the drives are healthy.
Any thoughts on what it could be/ what I can do?
Don't put too much faith in the dashboard.
First step is to make sure you have a solid backup plan in place for the data.
Also download the full log zip file, and look at the stats in disk_info.log Look for disk and btrfs errors in system.log, kernel.log, and systemd-journal.log.
How full is the volume? Normally you want 20% or more free space with btrfs.
Do you know if there is a maintenance schedule set up for the NAS (disk test, balance, scrub, defrag)?
No maintenance is scheduled as you reference, how do I turn this on?
The volume settings wheel includes the ability to schedule the various tests. I run one per month (cycling through the set of four 3x a year).
But I wouldn't schedule anything now, instead I'd run some manually.
Start with the disk test, just to make sure it passes.
After that run the balance. Since it's likely never been run before, the balance could take a long time, and might further slow down system performance. When run regularly, it completes pretty quickly.
People have different views on defrag. I do run them myself as part the cycle, but I actually don't think they have a lot of value. Still, if some often used files are fragmented, then performance will be affected. So I would run defrag in this case.
Last, run the scrub.
Then set up a schedule for them (and while you are at it, make sure the email alerts are working).
While these tasks can improve performance, they might not solve your performance problem. Still, they are worth a try.
Do you have disk spindown enabled? That of course will slow down access when the disks need to spin up. So that is also worth a look. You can choose to schedule spindown only outside of normal working hours.
The first thing to check is that you have a good 1G connection. One way to check that is the indicator LEDs on the router. A bad cable or damage to the switch or NAS transceiver could be causing a slower connection.
