Revive Your Slow Synology DS411J NAS

Synology DS411J

I’ve been using a Synology DS411J for a little over 5 and a half years and overall am quite pleased with the performance for a low-power device.  I didn’t need a NAS with a lot of bells and whistles, I just wanted something that was reliable and could stream one video at a time to my TV.

Over time, Synology updates their device software and as the updates grew further away from the DS411J’s manufacturing date the more the device slowed down.  The recent DSM 6.X firmware has forced a new “feature” to the Synology ecosystem called “Universal Search.”  Well, it turns out that older devices, like the DS411J absolutely cannot handle the CPU resources needed for the Universal Search to index the box and slows the box to an unusable state..

In all of their wisdom, Synology has made this new “feature” that basically kills the older NAS boxes a part of the operating system that you cannot remove through their web interface.  Thanks, Synology!

The good news is, if you’re willing to get your nerd on and do some command line work by using telnet or ssh to access your DS411J you can bring it back from the dead and speed it up to very usable levels..

Once you log in, and it might take a while due to the CPU being pegged, the command that you need is:

synopkg uninstall SynoFinder

If you are told you don’t have the authority to run the command try:

sudo synopkg uninstall SynoFinder

And then enter the password when prompted.  Either way, once this is run your NAS will actually run pretty decently again.  Here is a current screenshot of my DS411J’s resource monitor running the latest DSM 6.1.3-15152 with all unnecessary services uninstalled, including SynoFinder.

Resource Monitor

Remember that the next time you update the Synology DSM software you’ll need to do the same thing again.  Hopefully they leave this loophole open to get rid of the useless software that turns their old device into a paperweight.

If you’re a Windows user unfamiliar with how to telnet or ssh into a device I highly recommend the program Putty.  It makes things pretty easy, even for a beginner.  You can download it here:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

I hope this helps you get your old Synology NAS back up and running smoothly!

 

47 Replies to “Revive Your Slow Synology DS411J NAS”

  1. This was really helpful, thank you. My DS411j was running so slowly even logging in was a chore. For anyone else who stumbles on this page with a similar problem, make sure you enable Telnet/SSH on the DiskStation in the Control Panel.

  2. Glad it helped. Synology totally dropped the ball by pushing updates to this box that it simply can’t handle. This one little fix takes a paperweight and makes a usable NAS again!

  3. Good idea. I wanted to get rid of this, but thought I had to downgrade the DSM version.
    Thanks a lot!

  4. This worked like a charm. My little DS411j (and its data) was in danger of becoming a door stop, but this has given it a fresh breath of life!

  5. thanks for the tip it really helps. i was also starting to browse new models.
    BTW has anyone tried putting in an SSD and use it as a system partition would that improve anything?

    1. The problem with this unit is the CPU can’t handle the indexing, at least as far as I can tell. I don’t believe different drives would do much.

      1. a late comment , but for others that stumble into this blog and reads comments
        Mine has 4SSD from a Dell server , intel drives
        not much improvement on performance. Its quit and run colder.

  6. do i get a confirmation message after running the comand or it just goes to a next line?

    1. There will not be any confirmation, it will just take a bit of time before the prompt returns. Running TOP or looking at the CPU usage in the web interface will show you that it’s gone.

  7. ive run both commands several times:
    when monitoring the processes in the resource monitor i get:
    SYNO.Finder.Fil
    and
    synoscgi_SYNO.Finder.FileIndexing.Status_1_get
    pop up frequently and use 30% and 19% respectively.
    Running: DSM 6.2.2-24922

    when i run synopkg list
    SynoFinder-1-3-1-0265 shows up in the list
    ive tried: synopkg uninstall SynoFinder-1-3-1-0265
    same result

  8. “..Synology totally dropped the ball by pushing updates to this box that it simply can’t handle…”

    As you say, I’ve also been running this for years and it has served me well. That’s not good for Synology’s bottom line. The cynic in me wonders if they took a similar approach to Apple and added something that would force us to upgrade.

    I’ve had iPads that became crippled as the iOS upgrades required more CPU etc.

    I’m not sure I’ve ever applied a Synology upgrade, but since I now want to add more disk capacity, I will look at both that and your fix above – thanks for posting this Darren

    1. Glad the tip helped. My box is still chugging along, even with the latest updates, as long as the same process is repeated after each one.

  9. I came across your thread when updating my 411j. It has been running slowly so thought I’d try your fix.

    I get an error “Failed to uninstall package: SynoFinder, 272”

    Just wondering if Synology may have changed their approach on this? Are there any other items I should uninstall to help my 411j come back to life?

  10. Hi,
    I have lost track of the DSM version installed on my DS411j and I have lost passwords to access the device too
    How do I go about resetting the admin password .
    I have used many versions of Synology Window assistants and web assistant to try to gain access to the device to no avail.
    Any help is much appreciated
    Thanks

    jay

  11. If anyone is having the problem of not even being able to SSH into their ds411j due to this garbage problem try this:

    unplug or power down the NAS (I couldn’t power down due to it being unresponsive)
    remove all drives except for drive #1
    start the nas and wait for it to finish booting
    proceed with above instruction as you should now be able to SSH or get to the web interface at least
    power down the NAS and reinstall drives, restart nas and all should be well

    This drove me nuts for hours.

  12. Thank you so much. I dont get why this simple advice isn’t in the syno suport forums. You made my day sir!

    1. Glad it helped you out! I don’t think Synology wants people to know, would rather sell new hardware!

  13. Good afternoon
    First thanks a lot for this tip. I did scratch my head for months before I found this information. Even Synology support could not give me a solution.

    I had to sudo the command and it works. Universal Search disappeared from Installed Packages.

    Yet, DS411J is far to be a Rocket! I have mine since 2005 (about) and always been disappointed with its performances.
    It does the job for Cloud Station but if you try to do more (Video, Music, iSCSI, …) the processor and the memory reach very very quickly their limits.

    When the limit is reached, my unit becomes inaccessible, the drives LEDs are flashing, action on the front power botton is not giving results. I can leave it alone for a solid week, the situation does not improve. The only thing to do is to is to pull the plug praying for things to go well.

    My unit has 4 x 3To drive RAID5. Before, it was (2 x 1To drive RAID1) + (2 x 1To drive RAID1). I must admit it was functioning better even if I was not happy with performances.

    I just purchased a DS918+ and transferred all data to it. It has 4 x 3To drive SHR + 2 x 256Go SSD Cache. The difference is amazing and I’m very happy performance now. The unit is reactive, never in default, available at all time, able to carry several packages in parall. In short, everything I could not do with my good old DS411J

    Thanks again for the tip to deactivate Universal Search. Time shall confirm if this the improvement will be determinant.

  14. There’s a quick way that doesn’t require ssh access to the box if you just want to sort this via your browser. Login, go to Control Panel and select Task Scheduler. Create a user defined script with root privileges that runs the following script on bootup – this means that regardless of any patch reboots, it will still be applied:

    synoservice –disable pkgctl-SynoFinder

    My DS412+ is now usable again, and Plex no longer lagging.

  15. Pretty much what everyone else said. I powered up my old 411j for the first time in over a year and performed a system update. Device became basically non-functional after that. This trick unbroke it and I am good again 🙂

  16. One note: The process didn’t work for me at first because the uninstall command is just “uninstall” (all lower case). Typing “unInstall” failed. Linux is case-sensitive so I guess that makes sense. Maybe Synology changed the name of the executable.

  17. Thank you very much man !! This works perfectly for my DS115J, which was slow as hell before uninstalling this “feature”.

  18. Darren,
    Thanks for your great POST!! It allowed me to kick my DS411J back to life!! So let me challenge you a stip further if you will. In Windows I can take a USB2.0 Thumbdrive and use it as virtual ram. I was wondering Darren, can we put a USB2.0 Thumbdrive on our 411J and make the system see it as ‘virtual ram’??. I suppose the bigger the USB size the better. Anyway, thats my ‘random thought’.

    1. That would all depend on the NAS software, I am not aware of any such capability in the Synology system.

  19. Hi there,

    Thanks to you my synology is once more fully operational!!

    Best thing thanks to your help guys, I was quite frustrated with it.

    Cheers

  20. Almost 2023: still EXTREMELY useful info
    MANY thanks for the post, got recovered my 6tb DS411J with this helpful information. Millions of thanks to the author 🙂

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