Storage Manager allows you to organize the storage units on your Synology NAS, monitor overall storage use, and inspect the health of all your drives.

Key Terms

Before using Storage Manager, it can help to familiarize yourself with the following terms:

• Storage Pool:
  • A storage pool is a single storage unit made up of a one or more drives. A storage pool can be configured to be protected by a data storage technology known as Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID).
• RAID:
  • RAID is a data storage technology that aggregates multiple physical drives into one or more logical units for improved fault tolerance, performance, and storage capacity.
  • Supported RAID types vary according to your Synology NAS model. For details, refer to RAID type overview and the product specs of your Synology NAS.
• Volume:
  • Volumes are created on top of storage pools and provide the basic storage space on your Synology NAS. All of your shared folders, documents, and package data will be stored here.

Storage Pools and Volumes

Create at least one storage pool and volume to start storing data on your Synology NAS. For more information, refer to the instructions in the Configure storage space section.

You can go to Storage Manager > Overview to find key information about your storage system, such as overall system status, volume usage, drive information, and scheduled tasks.

View and manage all your storage pools and volumes at Storage Manager > Storage. The actions you can perform here depend on your Synology NAS model and configurations:

• Change the RAID type of a storage pool without losing existing data.
• Add or replace drives to expand the capacity of a storage pool and volume.
• Enable volume encryption to safeguard your data.
• Enable SSD TRIM to optimize the performance of an SSD-only storage pool.
• Perform or schedule data scrubbing on a storage pool to maintain data consistency.
• Perform file system defragmentation to improve a volume's file access performance.

Learn more about storage pools and volumes.

Hot Spare

Hot spare drives are standby drives that allow your Synology NAS to automatically repair degraded storage pools. You can assign hot spare drives to protect storage pools with a drive fault tolerance of one or more drives at Storage Manager > Storage > Hot Spare.

When a drive crashes and causes a storage pool to degrade, the hot spare drive replaces the crashed drive, allowing the storage pool to recover.

Learn more about hot spare drives.

SSD Cache

SSD cache is a cost-effective way to improve the performance of HDD arrays. It improves random access by storing frequently accessed data on the SSDs of an SSD cache mounted on a volume or LUN. Note that this feature is only available on specific models. Find out if your Synology NAS supports SSD cache.

There are two types of SSD cache:

• A read-only cache uses one or more SSDs to store frequently read data and accelerate random read performance. No data loss will occur in the event of SSD failure because this cache mode only stores copies of data from the volume.
• A read-write cache uses at least two SSDs to create a fault-tolerant cache. The read-write cache first writes data to the SSDs to improve the random read/write performance and accelerate data access speed.

Both types or modes of SSD cache can consist of up to 6 SSDs and must be comprised of drives of the same type.

Learn more about SSD cache and its requirements.

If you are unsure what is the best SSD cache size for your use case, we strongly recommend running an analysis in Storage Manager > Storage > SSD Cache Advisor beforehand.

SSD Cache Advisor analyzes your current data use patterns and recommends a suitable SSD cache size for your selected volume. Allow the initial analysis to run for at least seven days for more accurate results.

Learn more about SSD Cache Advisor.

HDD/SSD

Inspect the health of your drives and take follow-up actions at Storage Manager > HDD/SSD. Depending on your storage setup and Synology NAS model you can:

• Examine your drives' health information, including location, drive status, allocation role, temperature, serial number, and firmware version.
• Schedule and run S.M.A.R.T. tests to examine the status of your drives.
• Assign drives to create, manage, or repair a storage pool or SSD cache.
• Enable SSD estimated endurance notifications and request a warning whenever an SSD's estimated life expectancy reaches a specified value.
• Enable write cache support to boost the system performance of your Synology NAS.

Learn more about HDDs and SSDs in DSM.

You can pair your Synology NAS with additional expansion units or external devices to scale up your storage.

Expansion units

Scale up your Synology NAS with an expansion unit to increase your overall storage or use the expansion unit server as a backup location. Expansion units are designed to work automatically once connected to a Synology NAS and let you seamlessly upgrade your storage space.

You can create and manage storage spaces that span across your main Synology NAS and connected expansion units. However, we recommend keeping each storage space on one device for better performance.

External devices

Manage the external devices (e.g., SD cards or USB devices) connected to your Synology NAS device at Control Panel > External Devices. Connected external devices will appear as system-created shared folders that allow you to access their drive capacity.

You can install the USB Copy package to copy files between your Synology NAS and external storage devices in multiple ways. Synology NAS only recognizes certain file systems over USB: Btrfs, ext3, ext4, FAT32, exFAT, HFS Plus, and NTFS. External drives with other file systems must be formatted before use.

Learn more about external devices.

If you need to access data stored on exFAT file systems, you can install the exFAT Access package.

Learn how to install exFAT on your Synology NAS.

Storage Analyzer allows you to monitor the overall use trends of your Synology NAS. You can create reporting tasks to obtain detailed reports on volume usage that help you manage your system and optimize your settings.

Learn more about Storage Analyzer.

Make your Synology NAS a storage extension for your devices with SAN Manager. You can divide a part of a volume to create LUNs and connect to them using storage area networking (SAN) services.

Synology NAS provides certified storage for VMware®, Microsoft®, and other virtualization platforms. For better management efficiency, install Synology Storage Console for VMware or Windows to manage your storage systems right in the hypervisor.

With SAN Manager and Storage Console, you can:

• Choose between iSCSI and Fibre Channel as the protocol to deploy your own SAN storage. Deploying Fibre Channel requires an adequate switch and adapter.
• Create Thick-provisioned or Thin-provisioned LUNs as block-level data storage.
• Protect block-level storage with snapshot and replication features.

Learn more about configuring iSCSI or Fibre Channel services.

Learn more about Synology Storage Console for VMware and Windows.

Virtual Machine Manager is a full-fledged hypervisor for Synology NAS. You can run virtualized Windows or Linux services on your Synology NAS and create virtual instances of DSM.

The clustering architecture of Virtual Machine Manager allows you to manage virtual machines and operations across multiple Synology NAS from a single portal. You can allocate available hardware resources and migrate virtual machines between different Synology NAS whenever needed.

For data protection, secure your virtual machines with snapshot and replication protection plans. There's also the built-in high-availability feature to minimize system downtime.

Learn more about Virtual Machine Manager.

Container Manager is a lightweight virtualization environment that allows you to build and run applications inside an isolated software container. The hugely popular built-in image repository, Docker Hub, allows you to find shared applications from other talented developers. Synology has developed an optimized Docker container management GUI for users to create and manage containers in DSM.

Learn more about Container Manager.