Troubleshooting question

[ted_b]

I run Minimserver on my Synology NAS (DS1513+ DX513) and up until late November everything ran fine. Then, all of a sudden I couldn;'t play anything higher bitrate than redbook without significant buffering. This is into any renderer (Aries, Rendu, Playpoint, etc) I chose. Prior to this I could do multichannel DSD256 for gosh sakes.

So I tried non-Minimserver players (JRiver, HQplayer, both simply pointing to Nas as file server) and sure enough the same buffering was occurring! If I added a local USB drive as the temporary library of choice then all was well.

I continue to try and find out what the hell is going on; everything is either gigabit or fiber (with FMCs) and nothing I can remember has changed. I am even getting an occasional IP conflict message from my router (ATT UVerse gateway) so I suspect that. Hmmm

Question: as I continue to troubleshoot I have filled up this temporary USB drive and liked being able to use it. But it does me no good when wanting to listen via DLNA/Open Home (i.e renderer). So...my question is: can I install Minimserver on my Windows Server 2012 R1 music server pc, point it to the local USB drive attached, and then find it on the home LAN for my renderers? I want to see if the NAS is any part of my problem (Minimserver or not), or whether the buffering will continue even with the local USB'd Minimserver instance, thereby removing the NAS as a suspect.
Thx
Ted