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 configure your disks in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) or simply install one HDD.


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 be subpar.


As per usual 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, which took some time. However, only several clicks were required for the procedure to be initiated.

Package Center

Use Package Center to easily install and update many applications to dramatically boost your NAS server's usability. You only have to browse through Synology's available applications to pick those you want to install. You can also manually upload and install an application. Synology offers a rich variety of applications it grouped into the following categories: Backup, Multimedia, Business, Security, and Utilities.


Here are Package Center's settings. The most basic is Trust Level, which controls the installation of packages. You can by default only install Synology apps. If you want to try apps from other publishers, you will have to pick the setting to do so here. You should be very careful with apps that are from non-trusted or unknown publishers, especially if you store sensitive data on your Synology NAS.

Info Center

Info Center lists the NAS server's hardware specifications and comes with an overview of its services, the network, and its storage devices. A green icon under Thermal Status in its first tab denotes a normal state, while orange is indicative of high internal temperatures that will cause the NAS to shut down at any moment to prevent components from overheating. Hover over these icons with your cursor and the CPU's temperature will be displayed.

Resource Center

Resource Monitor allows you to monitor the system's resources—these include CPU and memory usage, disk utilization, and network transfer speeds. You can monitor resources in real time or view bygone data.

Using the resource monitor, you can check on all connected users and kill a connection if it bother you. There is also a process-monitoring option, and the settings menu allows you to set the real-time duration and enable the usage history option.