Storage Manager

Storage Manager is an essential application with which you will have to get familiar since it is used to configure installed disks and check on their health. Volumes are, briefly, a NAS server's storage units, so you have to create a volume before anything else.


The creation of a volume is easy because of Synology's Storage Manager. Synology offers two options here, one for an SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) volume and a custom option that supports different RAID levels. You have to pick the disks you want to use for your new volume before picking the RAID level. Be aware of the fact that all data on these will be erased. If you don't want to create a RAID array, you can also configure your disks in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) or simply install a single HDD. Synology thankfully gives you the valuable option to skip checking the disks during RAID initialization, which dramatically reduces the time it takes to set disks up in such an array. However, make sure your disks have no bad sectors or your RAID will fail, which would endanger the data on them.


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 from 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.


You can create iSCSI targets in the above menu.

Backup & Replication

These options allow you to easily 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.


You can back data on 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 at a different location. We tried to rsync data from a QNAP server and it worked like a charm, although transfer speeds were very low.