In this video we look at how you can increase the storage capacity of your Synology NAS using an external USB Hard Drive. While we recommend that where possible, you fit an internal hard drive to one of the spare hard drive bays of your NAS. If that is not possible, you can use an External USB Hard Drive. For our example we used an 8Tb Western Digital Mybook.
After fitting an USB hard drive to a Synology NAS, the NAS will automatically turn the hard drive into a network access point. Please note that when using an external USB Hard Drive, DSM will not allow you to install packages to that Drive.
As the hard drive has to be formatted with either EXT4 or FAT32. As FAT32 has numerous limitations, for example in the size of files that can be saved, and how big a partition on a hard drive can be, we have used EXT4.
However the problem with EXT4 is that its not compatible with Windows or macOS. This means that the contents of the external USB hard drive will not be readable should try you and plug the hard drive into either a Windows or Apple Macintosh computer.
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