A beginners guide to setting up a Synology NAS | Part 3 | Familiarising yourself with your NAS

It is important that before you start to configure a new NAS, you properly familiarise yourself with how it has been laid out. So in this video we take a tour of switches, lights, external ports, bays and sockets, that can be found on a typical Synology NAS.

The Power Switch

While the power switch is obviously used to power a NAS on, you can also use the power button to safely power down your NAS. So if you simply press and hold down the power button for 5 seconds or until you hear it beep your NAS will start to power down. As it can take sometime for a NAS to power down, before removing the power, wait until the status light goes out.

eSATA Ports

eSATA is a way to connect your NAS to an external storage device. This makes it very useful if the drive bays on your NAS are full, as it is an easy way to use an external hard drive to add additional storage or create a place for your backups.

Suggested eSATA Drives:

• Seagate 8TB External Hard Drive
• Synology DX517 Expansion Unit
• Synology DX1222 Expansion Unit

Link Aggregation

As long as your NAS has more than 2 Local Area Network (LAN) ports, you can combine them to provide redundancy should a network port fail. You can also use Link Aggregation to increase the bandwidth of your NAS. However, as there are different modes of Link Aggregation you may find that by trying to bond multiple LAN ports together you do not get the increased bandwidth you expect. So for now we recommend that you leave Link Aggregation until you have your NAS fully working.

Cache Acceleration using M.2 SSDs

While you can use standard 2.5 Inch SSDs in your NAS for storage, if you have M.2 slots on your NAS you can only use those for Cache Acceleration. As Cache Acceleration is best used when reading small blocks of data, anyone using their NAS predominantly as a media server, will find Cache Acceleration to be of only limited benefit.

Additional resources:

• Spare network cables – Network Cables from Amazon
• Synology Article – Link Aggregation
• Synology Article – SSD Cache

Reference materials:

• Synology Support – Getting Started with DSM
• Synology Support – RAID Calculator
• Wikipedia – Network Attached Storage