There are three Synology DiskStation devices in the office: DS1512+, DS411, and DS412+. In terms of performance, we found them suitable for our daily operations until about a month ago. The DS1512+ became problematic. The staff would often complain that the server has gotten significantly slow. Sometimes, it would fluctuate from normal to painfully slow. There were a few instances when browsing shared folders was impossible.

Monitoring the server, we found that there were no obvious signs that there’s something wrong. The CPU is not maxing out. There seemed to be no memory shortage as the usage ranged from 29% to 75%. The only strange thing was that it’s getting a higher than normal disk utilization percentage at over 50%.

Diagnosing the problem proved to be very difficult. A search for disk utilization monitoring tools turned up empty. Built-in tools were nonexistent in this BusyBox embedded OS.

After weeks of frustration, we decided to do a memory upgrade since this is the only upgrade that can be done to the device. The DS1512+ supports only up to 3 GB of memory including its built-in 1 GB. The 2 GB PC 1333 SODIMM card was inserted, and we turned on the device.

It’s been one week since we did the upgrade. Everything seems to be faster. In the end, a simple memory upgrade solved the problem. I regret not having to do it sooner just because of saving on cost.