Constant Lag when accessing NAS within Windows 11

Ron30 · May 23, 2023

Hi. I've got a Synology NAS drive that I've been running for a few years. On Windows 10 I had no issue, but I've been on Windows 11 now for about a year, and have found that it constantly locks up Windows explorer for 2- 60 seconds whenever I try to click on a video file, copy data in/out, etc. If, for example, I'm copying data in, then highlight (not open, only highlight) another video file that I haven't recently opened, the transfer will slow to 0 bytes and the file explorer windows will be unresponsive. After the lag time, the transfer continues. I've found that trying to watch a video file that I've recently opened doesn't cause any lag; it's only when I try to highlight or open a file that I haven't viewed recently.

I've got the NAS mapped to a drive letter and access it via File Explorer. I run a plex server on my C: drive, which streams videos from the NAS. I haven't had any issues with streaming videos. I can also access the Synology Web UI without any issue or lag. It seems the issue only occurs within Windows / File Explorer.

I'm not really sure where to start with troubleshooting this. All my google results point to issues with slowness in Windows Explorer in Win11, but local files and files on my other NVME drive don't have any issues. It's specific to my NAS files. If I copy these files over to my local drives, there's no issues.

Thanks in advance.