Application

Manage general settings related to Synology-designed applications here.


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 DS414slim can handle the workload of a light webpage. You can configure various PHP setting once you enable Web Station.


These options give you the ability to view and edit user privileges by services and applications.


Application Portal allows you to configure an application's connectivity settings, giving you the ability to run the application in an independent browser window without logging into DSM. These connection settings allow you to customize 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 a NAS's storage units, soo you have to create a volume before doing anything with the NAS. This can easily be done via the Storage Manager, and you may also create more than one volume through the Volume Setup wizard. It also offers a quick option for an SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) volume and a custom option that supports different RAID levels.


You pick the disks you want to use for your new volume. Be aware that all data on them will be erased.


The DS414slim supports all popular RAID levels: SHR and RAID 0/1/5/6/10. You can also configure your disks in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) or simply install a single HDD. Synology even gives you the valuable option to skip checking the disks during RAID initialization, which dramatically reduces the time it takes to set drives up in RAID. However, make sure your disks work flawlessly, without any bad sectors, or your RAID will fail, which would endanger the data on those disks.

The Hybrid RAID level (SHR) in the Volume Creation Wizard 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. SHR is the best option if you plan on installing differently sized disks since it creates the necessary partitions to exploit the disks' fully; not a single byte of space will go to waste.


The Storage Manager also allows you to create a disk group. A disk group brings multiple hard disks together to allow for one or more volumes across a RAID configuration on those disks.


You can check on your disks' SMART status here, and may 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. This feature will extend their lifetime and enhance their read- and write performance.


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.


You can set a hot spare if you want. Hot spares are disks that can repair a degraded volume or disk group automatically by replacing the failed disk.

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 through these options.


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(s) (destination).