MS Word writes to NAS drive very, very slow.

My wife and I need to share documents for a project we have underway. We have a NAS from WD that works well, so we created a folder there to share the documents. Copying to and from the drive is quick, so we thought the process would be fine. However, we are using Word through Office365 and are finding that writes to the drive are very, very slow. As in several minutes to save a couple of hundred words slow. As in so slow that macOS reports Word is not responding slow.

Now I know we could copy the files to our local drives, open Word, edit away, save to the local drive and copy the files back to the shared drive, but that's a lot of steps when it SHOULD work to just open and save on the network share.

I've searched and found some suggestions for how to fix it in Windows, but nothing for Macs. I've seen articles about how "Macs are special" and "Mac network drives are slow" but a straight read/write to the NAS is NOT slow, just Word is slow.

Anybody seeing the same thing? Any solutions or suggestions?

Hello Jake. Does anything in this article help (How do I improve slow file transfer speeds between Mac OS 10.11.5 (and newer) and my NAS via SMB protocol?)?:

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/...10-11-5-and-newer-and-my-nas-via-smb-protocol

- Nick

Nick, I had see that before, but my normal file transfers are typically quick. Only Word is slow. I gave up with the NAS and started using One Drive. The OD came with the Office365 subscription, so it doesn't cost anything and the file saves are really fast. I think it saves to the local One Drive folder and then syncs, but it only seems to take seconds as opposed to 4-5 minutes to my NAS. I think MS is deliberately slowing it down to get folks to use One Drive.

EDIT: The reason I think that is that Activity Monitor shows almost no network activity during the time Word is "saving" the file, then one small burst of traffic and it's done. So for some reason MS is waiting and waiting to start the transfer, even with the drive attached, the directory opened to where the file should go, and having opened the file FROM that location. To me, that's deliberate.

What about if you have an alias on your Mac, and save to that? If you don't want to use OneDrive?

I'm not opposed to One Drive, and it doesn't cost anything (more), so I'll use it. It's just frustrating to have a NAS that works perfectly well except for this piece of Microsoft crapola. My wife is a long term Word user and I can't get her to migrate to Pages, so I'm sort-of stuck where I am. So, it's Word and OneDrive. Fortunately, I don't have to pay any more for OD than I already pay for Office365.