While Disk Station Manager has now been installed onto our Synology NAS, the hard drives in our NAS are still not ready to store data. So in this video we take a look at how we create a Storage Pool and a Volume, using the Storage Creation wizard.
Quick reference notes:
- After installing Disk Station Manager, you will be presented with the Storage Creation Wizard
- Select Create Now
Note: When you install Disk Station Manager, the disks in your NAS will have been partitioned so that a copy of the system software sits on each disk. That way if there is a problem with a drive, Disk Station Manager will still load. However, at this stage your drives will not have been configured or organised into Storage Pools and Volumes.
- Now choose Start
- Within Configure Storage Pool Property select the type of RAID you wish to use. For beginners we recommend that you use SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID)
- In Storage Pool Description you can give a storage pool a name. This is very useful if you intend to have more than one storage pool.
- Select Next
- We now need to select the drives we wish to include as part of our storage pool.
- When you select Next, you will be asked to perform a Drive check.
Note: We chose skip drive check because this speeds up the setup process. However it would be better to check your drives now, as this process will help to identify a faulty drive earlier. It’s easier to replace a faulty (in warranty) drive at this stage of the setup, rather than find you have a faulty drive when it’s out of warranty and full of data.
- Choose Next
- In Allocate Volume Capacity, set how large you want your Volume to be.
Note: You can create multiple volumes of varying sizes for your NAS. However, initially you will need to have created at least one volume. If you want to create multiple volumes do not use the Max button, or assign the total available capacity of your storage pool, to the full Modify allocated size.
- After choosing Next, you will be asked to Select a file system. Synology recommend that you use Btrfs, but ext4 is a viable alternative.
- When you select Next, you will be asked to confirm that you will be deleting any data stored on your drives. As the drives we installed into our NAS are new we will choose OK
- A Storage Pool and Volume is now created.
Note: How long it takes to create your Storage Pool and Volume will depend on the specifications of your NAS, the size of your hard drives and if you selected Drive check.
Additional resources:
- Spare network cables – Network Cables from Amazon
- Amazon – Recommended hard drives
Reference materials:
- Synology Support – Storage Pool
- Synology Support – Volume
- Wikipedia – Btrfs
- Wikipedia – ext4
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