Control Panel - Application

Manage general settings related to Synology-designed applications.


You can enable Web Station via this menu, which, in short, allows you to create a website that is hosted entirely on your Synology NAS. Built-in PHP and MySQL support makes creating dynamic, database-driven websites for your business possible. The NAS only has minimal energy requirements, so you won't have to worry about inadvertently increasing the electricity bill by hooking it up to a steady, fast, and reliable Internet connection; the DS214se can handle the workload of a light webpage. You can configure various PHP setting once you enable Web Station.


This menu gives you the ability to view and edit user privileges by services and applications.


Application Portal allows you to configure an application's connectivity settings, which gives you the ability to run the application in an independent browser window without logging into DSM. These connection settings include customizing portal aliases and HTTP- or HTTPS ports.


Media Library automatically scans for multimedia files stored on it and indexes them. You can set the thumbnail quality and monitor its conversion progress.

Storage Manager

Volumes are the storage units for a Synology NAS (and not only). You must, before anything else, create a volume to do anything useful with a NAS. This can easily be done via the Storage Manager. Create more than one volume through the Volume Setup wizard if you want. It offers a quick option which creates an SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) volume, and a custom option, which supports different RAID levels. The DS214se supports three RAID levels: SHR, RAID 0, and RAID 1. You can also configure your disks in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) or simply install a single HDD. Synology also gives you the valuable option to skip checking the disks during RAID initialization, which dramatically accelerates the time it takes to set drives up in RAID. However, you have to be sure of your disks being in good condition and without any bad sectors or your RAID will fail, which would endanger the data on those disks.

The Hybrid RAID level (SHR) available through the Volume Creation Wizard's Quick option is an automated RAID management system exclusive to Synology. It is for users who do not care for and do not want to acquaint themselves with the finer aspects of various RAID levels. The DS214se's SHR level works with a single disk worth of redundancy, allowing the SHR volume to suffer the loss of one out of two disks, which it has in-common with RAID 1. SHR is also the best option if you plan on installing differently sized disks since it creates the necessary partitions to exploit the disks' full capacity; not a single byte of space is wasted.


You can check on the SMART status of your disks here, and also take a look at their details. You can even schedule a test and enable write cache, which boosts performance.

You should enable the SSD TRIM option if a volume consists entirely of SSDs (Solid State Drives). This feature will extend the lifetime and enhance the read- and write performance of those drives.


iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) is a storage area networking (SAN) service that provides access to consolidated block level data storage. iSCSI's main purpose is to facilitate data transfers over intranets, which makes managing storage space at a distance a possibility. You will, to put it simply, "see" a remote storage location as a local one through your workstation, which makes expanding any system's storage space a simple task. An iSCSI LUN (logical unit number) represents an individually addressable portion of an iSCSI target. An iSCSI LUN can be mapped to multiple iSCSI targets to perform storage operations like read or write.


The screenshots above depict the procedure for creating a Disk Group.


Creating a volume with the Volume Creation Wizard is a piece of cake.

Backup & Replication

Perform backup tasks, restore files, back up iSCSI LUNs, back data up to public cloud storage, and sync shared folders on one Synology NAS device with another via these options.


You can back data from other Synology NAS devices or rsync-compatible clients up to your Synology NAS. This option also allows you to sync shared folders on one Synology NAS (source) with those on another Synology NAS device(s) (destination).