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 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 the data on these disks 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 for bad sectors during RAID initialization, which dramatically reduces the time it takes to set disks up in RAID. However, make sure your disks have no bad sectors or your RAID will fail.


Use Storage Manager to check on the health of all installed HDDs.


You can increase the performance of your HDDs by enabling the Write Cache option, but enabling Write Cache might also lead to data loss in the event of a power failure, so you had better only enable this option if the NAS is connected to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).