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 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 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, which would endanger the data on them.


Use Storage Manager to check on the health of all installed HDDs or enable write cache, which increases their 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 from afar possible. 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 assign a hot spare disk, a feature you will probably only exploit in combination with a Synology expansion unit that has been connected to the NAS.


You have the option to use an SSD drive as cache, for faster transfer speeds. However, given the DS715 can only take two disks, you would only be left with another storage drive, which leaves you without any data protection. This feature will only be useful if you use Synology's expansion unit with the NAS.