How to speed up network drives on OS X Mojave

Advanced!

Apparently there are a a few bugs in OSX when it comes to accessing a network drive. This was really slowing down my Synology NAS which I use to host my video and audio files. To fix it, create the following file in /etc/nsmb.conf

# /etc/nsmb.conf - macOS 10.13 - 2018-05-20
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# More information:
# https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208209
# https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/309016/smb-share-deadlocks-since-high-sierra
 jbfriedrich/nsmb.conf
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[default]
# Use NTFS streams if supported
streams=yes
# Soft mount by default
soft=yes
# Disable signing due to macOS bug
signing_required=no
# Disable directory caching
dir_cache_off=yes
# Lock negotiation to SMB3 only
# 7 == 0111  SMB 1/2/3 should be enabled
# 6 == 0110  SMB 2/3 should be enabled
# 4 == 0100  SMB 3 should be enabled
# 2 ==   SMB2 only
# protocol_vers_map= choose  2 or 4
protocol_vers_map=4
# Turn off notifications
notify_off=yes

Thats it!

If you want to research what all that does, here are the links:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT205926

https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/7/post/119623?page=2&sort=oldest

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204021

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8555715

Posted

October 27, 2019

network, SMB

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3 responses to “How to speed up network drives on OS X Mojave”

Wayne
November 13, 2019
Note:
I was experiencing some freezes/delays again this week so I changed
protocol_vers_map=4
to now be
protocol_vers_map=2
and it’s working more reliably.
Reply
Wayne
November 13, 2019
From Apple:
Speed up browsing on network shares
To speed up SMB file browsing, you can prevent macOS from reading .DS_Store files on SMB shares. This makes the Finder use only basic information to immediately display each folder’s contents in alphanumeric order.
Use this Terminal command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE
Then log out of your macOS account and log back in.
Reply
Jeff Hall
March 22, 2020
Ever since I upgraded a week ago to Catalina I can no longer connect to my Windows 10 NAS. Near as I can tell things get messed up with authentication as in I never get to authentication. I removed my Keychain entry for the NAS to hopefully force manual authentication but that did not do anything. I have reconfirmed that the NAS firewall is configured properly and it has port 445 open. I also have other Windows 10 systems that are connecting to it just fine. So the issue has to be with Catalina as Mojave was working just fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reply