As a bonus, this will also enable searching on Samba too.

Problem

I have a external HDD plugged into a Raspi which acts as a seed box of some kind. The files are served with Samba. The problem was:

Solution

After much searching, the fix is quite simple actually.

First, SSH into the server with $ ssh serverIp

Then edit the Samba config by typing $ vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

Once it is open add these lines to your particularly slow Samba shares:

vfs objects = fruit
fruit:aapl = yes
fruit:encoding = native
fruit:locking = none
fruit:metadata = stream
fruit:resource = file

Lastly restart the server with $sudo service smbd restart

Result

Now the listing large directory should be pretty fast, search should work as normal and transfer speed should be around 10x faster.

References