Synology and External Drives

I was having trouble with my DS211J taking ages, in the order of 2 days, to backup ~1TB to the external drive (A Samsung Story Station 3). Occasionally it would also fail at some random point and require restarting further prolonging the pain.

Initially when I set-up the external drive I used NTFS thinking that I would want to be able to read it from my Windows PCs. After some digging around on the Synology Forums and finding plenty of posts like this one I decided it was time to reformat the drive to native format (i.e. EXT4).

All I can say is wow, the backups are 4 times as quick now.