I love my Synology DS423+. I’ve got it outfitted with four 12TB Seagate IronWolf drives. It’s been reliable and works great.

I initially used it locally without worry about accessing it outside of my home network. However, a scenario arose where I wanted to access it from work. So I installed Tailscale on my work computer and Synology NAS. It’s dead simple and works wonderfully! I was able to setup a mapped drive on my work computer. It was slow (given both ends of the connection are on cable internet) but worked.

Fast forward about a year and I decided that it would make more sense to have the NAS with me at work. I move it over and start using it on the local network. However, now I’m getting slow read and write speeds. Each time I try and copy over a large file, the connection drops, hangs and then eventually dies.

Solution

I assumed that Tailscale would be smart enough to default to a local connection when it saw the NAS on the same network. That may be possible with some work, however, I wanted the fastest speeds possible. I uninstalled Tailscale from the NAS and my computer and everything was back to normal.

Note: Don’t forget to check your hosts.etc file after uninstalling Tailscale. It edits the file and it may retain some of the directives which will mess up SMB connections.