6 settings I tweaked on my NAS that instantly made it faster

When it comes to your NAS’s speed, adding new or upgrading existing hardware is a solid option. But sometimes, you don’t have to go that far. You can easily get by making some tweaks on the software side and make a much bigger difference on your system. The idea is to iron out any minor inefficiencies — when you identify and fix a lot of them, it all adds up, and your NAS starts feeling as fast as the day you first set it up.

These are the changes that gave me a noticeable speed boost almost instantly, and you should try them too before dropping cash on new hardware.

Enable SSD cache

Want to see your NAS fly?

The single most noticeable change came from adding a small SSD as a cache drive — and no, I didn’t buy myself a new one. I had a spare NVMe drive lying around from my desktop, and I repurposed it to make my NAS faster. How it helped me was by loading the transfers onto the faster SSD first, before placing them in the correct location on the slower HDDs.

This way, you can make your file transfers much snappier, especially for frequently accessed things, in real time. And the good thing is that the cache size doesn’t need to be massive. If you even have a 120GB drive lying around, it would be good enough to begin with and feel the difference.

Switch to a different file system

Find what’s suitable

Not all file systems are made equally, and they are perhaps the most ignored part of the NAS as well. I was previously running the default EXT4 file system, which worked fine, but it’s outdated by modern standards and should be considered obsolete now. I compared some alternatives and switched to Btrfs, which was quite a step up.

While the difference wasn’t day and night, transfers were completed noticeably faster, and the system started to handle multitasking better. Of course, what worked for me won’t necessarily work for you, too, but it’s fair to assume that the default isn’t always right. Try out what works best for you and jump ship if you need to.

Schedule your backups

Off-hours are meant for that

An avoidable bottleneck happens when you’ve got too many tasks running during your peak hours. When you’re trying to access that important work file, the system decides to run a backup at that very moment, ruining the speed of your main task. While the NAS itself isn’t technically slow, it does give the perception that it is.

A good measure that doesn’t require buying new hardware is to schedule your backups for later on, when you aren’t using the system actively. That’s when the resources would be free to handle the heavy lifting without bringing your NAS to a standstill.

Turn off indexing

And thumbnail generation

System logs showed that the NAS was using too many resources in the background. The reason I came across this issue was that the NAS was busy indexing my thousands of media files and generating thumbnails, instead of freeing up the CPU and RAM resources for tasks that actually mattered.

Indexing and thumbnailing are neat features, but I don’t want them eating up precious resources. If you don’t need them at all, you would be much better off disabling these options (if your NAS OS lets you) for a general speed boost. What I often do now is dump my media onto the NAS only on the weekends, giving it ample time to properly index everything.

Change RAID configuration

Smart safety

RAID is perhaps the most important data safety feature that you must enable the moment you set up your NAS for the first time. But what’s more important is that you get the configuration right. You have to find a balance between speed and redundancy. One of my systems has RAID 1, which mirrors the data, but leaves only half the storage for my use.

My other system had RAID 6 from the beginning, but it turned out to be seriously slow on writes. Thankfully, that NAS was something I could experiment with, so I switched to RAID 10, which turned out to be better for speed while still giving me peace of mind. Make sure to take the call well in advance, as switching RAID configurations later on can become a task.

Enable link aggregation

Your network determines speed

You can install the fastest NAS drives available on the market, but you will still feel they are slow if your local network is slow. Often, it’s the network that’s proving to be a bottleneck, limiting speeds for all your client devices. While there are several much more expensive fixes, you should start by enabling link aggregation on your system.

It is important that your router (and network switch) and your NAS support link aggregation for it to work. Using it, you can connect two LAN cables between your NAS and the router for double the bandwidth. It won’t double the speed for each client device, but it will allow multiple client devices to move files without stepping on each other’s toes.

The drives don’t matter as much

When we speak of NAS speed, it often comes down to the drives themselves, but that’s rarely the case. A lot of factors can make or break the experience — sure, the drives are one of them, but there are far more critical aspects about a NAS that can affect its speed, from the network to the stress you’re putting it under. So, before you take up the tremulous task of upgrading all your drives, you should give these a try first. I’m sure this is going to save you tons of cash.

9/10

CPU Intel Core i5-1235U

Memory 8GB DDR5 non-ECC SODIMM (up to 64GB)

Drive Bays 4 HDD bays + 2 NVMe SSD slots

Ports 2x USB Type-A (10Gbps), 1x USB Type-C (10Gbps), 1x HDMI 2.0, 2x 10GbE RJ45

The TerraMaster F4-424 Max is a premium hybrid NAS enclosure that combines a solid Intel Core i5-1235U processor with ultra-fast 10GbE ports and ample storage capacity. It also supports up to 64GB RAM and is as amazing for home lab workloads as it is for storing your precious data,