Storage Manager

Storage Manager is an essential application with which you will have to familiarize yourself since it is used to configure installed disks and check on their health. Volumes are a NAS server's storage units. As such, you will 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 any 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 one HDD.


This is probably the most important option in the volume-creation process, right after the RAID level's selection. The DS916+ supports two file systems, ext4 and Btrfs, with the second offerings advanced features and increased data protection, which makes it Synology's suggestion.


Synology gives you the valuable option to skip checking the disks for bad sectors during RAID initialization, regardless of which filesystem or whether Raid 0, Raid 1, Raid 10 or JBOD is picked. This option 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. Unfortunately the disk-checking procedure cannot be skipped in RAID 5 and RAID 6, those RAID array that are most likely to be used in business environments. Their initialization will take several hours, hours during which the server's performance will subpar.


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


Enable Write Cache to improve the system's performance; however, do keep in mind that a power outage while it is active may lead to data loss.


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 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 for such storage operations as read and write.

Creating an iSCSI LUN and designating its target is pretty straightforward with a Synology NAS.


This menu allows you to pick hot spare targets. You can set hot spare targets from other network devices as well.


You can enable the SSD Cache function if you installed an SSD, which improves the system's performance. According to Synology, SSD cache drives can be mounted in RAID 0 (read-only) or RAID 1 (read-write).


For our RAID rebuild measurements, we deliberately broke a RAID configuration by simply removing an HDD. Once we installed it again, we had to repair the degraded volume, an operation that took some time; however, only several clicks were required for the procedure to be initiated.