Watch before Buying a Synology NAS - The 5 Most Common MISTAKES new users make! 

I love our Synology NAS! I never would have got it set up without your videos! Thanks for all the great content!

There are not many tech enthusiasts who can explain things plain and simple to masses. You can and it’s awesome. I watched several of your videos and understood everything. Thank you, you’re a lifesaver 👏

Another great video. You have the ability to explain this complex topic very easy. Congratulations !!!

NAS is a great upgrade if you own so many external HDDs lying around and want to consolidate your files. Also with SHR you can get some form of redundancy. Just don't expose to the internet, disable default admin profile and you're good to go. Also get a UPS that can communicate to your NAS because rebuilding drives can take hours or even days.

Love your straight forward, no nonsense video.

Hi Will, i have recently discovered your channel as i research the topic of purchasing my first nas proper. well some time back, i have owned a single drive buffalo linkstation, but i now want to step up to the big league. your content and your videos are proving to be a very valuable resource packed with great tips and advice. in a few of your videos (ones i have watched) you have made reference to having a mariadb instance available in your homelab. a couple of my docker containers make use of their own database instances and i would love to see you make a video on how your are leveraging mariadb in your own homelab setup (does it/will it run on a synology ?). cheers for the content, time now to watch the linked video on raid options

Thank you for this tutorial. I just purchased a NAS and I am preparing to set it up.

Really good points, especially the one about security and port-forwarding 👍

go for 4 bay NAS.... now you tell me.! I enjoy all your video. Thanks from Seoul.

Thank you, this was helpful. I'm new to NAS and considering a 4 bay Synology (DS920+). I already have two 4 bay DAS boxes for backup.

One thing I would add about the DAS: Do your research. I have a WD MyBook DAS and its functionality is limited by the firmware of the DAS not playing nice with the BIOS/UEFI. If you have a DAS expanding your memory locally, it likely will be via USB cable into your PC of choice. Boot from USB is a thing on most systems, and on some like mine (Lenovo) even if you de-prioritize and disable USB boot (moving it to the bottom of the boot order under SATA, DVD, etc., it will still try to boot via USB. Not sure why, but it results in me having to disconnect the DAS USB in the back of my pc every time it starts up. So every time I boot up, restart, or even restart during an update, I have to make sure my WD DAS is disconnected. What's more, if I saved a restorable image on my WD DAS and wanted to connect it, wipe my PC, and restore from that point in time snapshot USING THE SOFTWARE THAT COMES WITH THE WD DAS TO DO SO, I cannot. Because wiping and restoring involves cycling the power with a connected DAS, it has gotten stuck in the process every single time and I have to cancel the restore. Best case scenario, I plug this into a different PC with a thumb drive or other removable storage as well, copy over the image I want to restore from and use that as the restore USB without the fancy Acronis or WD software. It's garbage.

i've owned a 5 bay Drobo for years and lately wanted to see if there was any firmware updates and notices that their company website is offline and was not too happy with them shutting shop. So i started investigating a suitable upgrade and came across your very informative RU-vid videos, and made the switch to the DS723+ for me it's more than sufficient as a home user. I need it up an running and will go though your vault of videos to configure it. Keep up the good work.

Thank you. Very helpful and honest.

Thanks for putting this video together. I am a 25 year veteran IT professional. I work with the MUCH bigger RAIDS. But I am unfamiliar with these smaller newer devices. I just purchased (hasn't arrived yet) a 2 bay NAS to drop a pair of 18T's into for a media/movie server for the family. SO the kids can watch their favorites on one TV and other watch something else. The Data is already backed up via other means and all I need for it to do is stream movies. My plan is to do a RAID 0. I am investigating the best fie system to use. something with as little overhead and latency as possible as I wont be serving outside my LAN.

Thanks for the great info.

Great Will thanks a lot as usual

That was a great roundup; always enjoyed and appreciated. A topic for a future video perhaps - opening ports on a NAS vs opening ports on a router and best practices. I still find the whole thing a bit confusing but fortunately, I don't need internet access to my home network. And a question : I would like to backup my Synology NAS to my QNAP NAS using Rsync. IIRC, that uses SSH which requires a port to be opened. Does that create much, if any, risk to a home network not connected to the internet ? ( The alternative, which I currently do, is to use an old PC with FreeFileSync backup/sync software to act as a backup agent between the NAS's. It's free and easy but is one more machine on the network. )

I love your honesty and clarity in the message. THANK YOu

Thank you so much! Do you have a video explaining about DAS as well?

Very informative, thank you!

Again, very helpful!!

Good video. Nicely divided into chapters. I will get a Synology today. Not sure about RAID. I need a lot of space, calculated my need at ~14 TB or a bit more. Movies, series, music, game ISOs, ebooks, comics.

Thanks. Yep, I think I'll get the four bay when I upgrade my 720+ in a couple of years time. Btw, for anyone who's interested, for backups I use the USB Copy package- not sure if it was you or someone else who recommended it. Simple and easy to copy the desired shared folders monthly to a portable USB drive and store off site.

I sort of fall into the first category, because when I bought my NAS 12 months ago, I got a 2 bay Synology NAS DS220J. Although I have not used the space as I have only used close to a 1TB of the 4 available. But subsequently I have started digitising my DVD/ Blu ray movies, and TV series to stream them. So Now I am thinking maybe of eventually upgrading the NAS. I have more or less closed the NAS down so I can only access it through my Home network, not from the wider world.

Great video, to the point.

Yea, I may need to re-evaluate considering more than just having 1 drive for a backup in case of a failure. I may decide to go to a 2 drive Raid. Thanks for the info.

Some great info Will, that cable behind your TV is really making my OCD kick in

Fantastic video (coming from a tech enthusiast that worked as a Security Engineer)

Great video!

Thanks great video

Point 1 , so right! I came to that really quick lol. 🙏

I got a 2 bay 4 years ago, now wishing I had gotten a 4 bay. I’ll probably build one when it comes time. Just bumped it up to 18tb disks for more storage space.

To add to the RAID discussion, I messed that up on my first NAS. I saw the options and said to myself "I'm familiar with RAID-5" and chose that. This was a mistake. If I had chosen SHR1, I would have had the same initial storage, and would have had the ability to replace drives with higher capacity HD's later to increase my storage space. So ... I wasn't able to do that with RAID-5. That's now been rectified, but it was a major pain in the brass to fix it.

When I started out a year ago, I bought the DS220j and set it up with EXT4... no BTRFS as an option, had it about a week and the DS220+ went on sale so I bought that and returned the 220j. I wish now that there was an easy way to convert it to get the extra benefits.

Thank you so much for all your videos - this really helps! I'm using a Drobo and moving everything over to Synology. I'm hoping to use a 10gb ethernet adapter to be able to backup my photo shoot libraries from commercial shoots to this archive for long term storage. They can be pretty big with TIF files and raw files. So I use a local copy to work on while I backup to the archive and also a seperate External portable drive for each year of working. Along with this - I use Backblaze to have an offsite version that always backsup while I'm sleeping. I'm new to NAS and wondering if it's possible to backup to BackBlaze using this? Wondering what you would recommend. Thank you! x

Good tips ;)

Thanks for the point by point for us nubies. .

The most important thing i'm taking from this video, is the simple fact i don't need a NAS, i need a DAS, and i was not aware these even existed.

Hey! Thank you for the video! It clarified many of the questions I had. I have a small question: If I buy a 4-bay NAS and configure it with 2 HDD as Raid 1, how easy is it to add the 2 other disks later to turn it into a Raid 10? Does it require restarting everything or is it more straightforward? Thanks!

Large storage is so cheap, my personal opinion is that a two-bay NAS is fine for most home users. With a two-drive NAS using RAID 1 for data redundancy, you can have 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 16 or even 20 TB of storage space. I have been storing data to my NAS for 15 years, including a few videos, about 150 ripped CDs, and document backup from multiple computers. Still, I am using less than 0.3 TB (300 GB) of storage space. Also, Synology recommends using the BTRFS file system, which seems good for RAID 1, but even the BTRFS developers recommend against using it for RAID 5 or RAID 6.

I am curious on your thoughts of using two 2-bay NAS units and sync these to provide two NAS network storage units (redundancy) and full backup capability. I have been using this setup and feel the chance of both 2-bay NAS units failing at the same time is low and, in this case, I have four synced hard drives from which to recover my data. I am not a data hoarder so over time I just increase the capacity of the hard drives if storage volume starts to become a problem. You make the point very well of reminding everyone that a NAS unit is not a "backup" but with this setup I believe it works better than a 4-bay NAS unit at a little more in price. Any thoughts?

A Raid 1 setup for a 2bay nas is correct. I have upgraded my 2 bay nas from 4TB to 12TB. Now as the end of life of this nas appears I am looking for a 4 bay nas that and raid 6. Unfortunately, with my current NAS, the raid setting was lost twice. Which took ages to rebuilt.

Don’t forget to set a static IP I do mine thru lansetup in the router . Usually this is never mentioned .

Hey man, just saw your video, it si great! I am doing 3D renderings, video, phography...like every single project is gigabites...and want to make even more stuff...and I want also ssd for my textures, footages that I use in comp, so as I go through the video maybe with 2 slots is not for me? Where do I attach the ssd? If I buy with 2 slots and I put 2 HDD do I have extra space for SSD?

Great summary. Best part the video is at 5:37.

I'm behind CGNAT and have had issues getting my NAS to be internet facing via DDNS (also due to double NAT, unsuccessful port forwarding)- managed to solve it via Docker + Cloudflare Zero Trust and a spare domain name. Also good point about SHR, thought it was one of the cool things about my two-bay but I may have to redo the storage pool eventually when capacity is up. By the way, curious what watch you're rocking! Looking great, thanks again for the content. Ignore those bozos.

nice vid! I get one more topic being asked by many users, which I think can be considered another "common issue" with relatively new users: expanding the NAS with bigger drives vs buying NAS with more bays (various disk capacities, and also quite often moving from 2-bay -> 4-bay, and more importantly 4-bay -> 6- or 8-bay), what's your suggestions on that?

I have disabled my default admin and guest account. I already knew I'll be using btrfs file system since I use this also on my Linux PC and knew the benefits. I have also enabled 2fa for better security. Recently, I have configured my hardware firewall in a way that unless I'm using a VPN (with a specific ip address I configured before hand), I won't be able to connect to my NAS. My NAS only have one port open to the Internet but if anyone tries to connect to it without the VPN I specified, it will not even respond and would appear to be offline (not closed) as to trick the other that it doesn't even exist. 😎

Thanks Will

Great content! Question, about speed, I use a DS720+ with 2x3TB storage, and I've set it up like you suggested to use it with Lightroom (based on your video). But when connected, i feel it's not "loading" fast. I have apple M1 devices and a wired connection, so that isn't the issue. Is it possible the disks are (to) slow? Would this be any better if I swapped them for SSD disks? Thanks.

Very good points, but a NAS is many times more than just a big, shared file system. Docker, VMs, and SCSI devices open a whole new world!

I really like the specs and price for DS 224+. I think 2 bays are enough for me. I need 1-2 TB for photos and 2TB for computer back up. 2x 8 TB drives with lots of extra room

I have the ReadyNas, Buffalo and lately tried the Synology. My goal is just to store movies and pictures in the server and I can access them in all my TVs, PCs, phones and tablet. I also like to download these files when I am travelling. The ReadyNas is the easiest on to setup for that. The buffalo takes more time to setup. The Synology seems like the most powerful of all but is difficult to set up and after loading 2.4T of files in to a 16TB NAS, it started to go in and out. Do not know the reason, might be indexing. Trying to use Kodi to access the server ends up in failure. A firestick + Kodi works much better for older TVs. Their support is very light also. After a week, finally gave up and return the system. I have seen many of your very good tutorials but there is no way to control the unstable TV media server access (File access from PC is OK).

Hi, I've been using the Drobo 5D3 for a long time, I like the workflow and speed of the drive connected directly onto my Mac via Thunderbolt 3 whilst I edit a lot of 4K videos almost without any lag. Unfortunately, we all know by now what happened to the company and it's gone down. I need a replacement and what I understand is that the Synology has the capability of being connected directly unto the Mac via a Thunderbolt 3 to ethernet adapter. Do I need any other additional add-ons and will this work as well?

It is a very good practice to turn on Geo IP on the firewall and block entries from all countries except your own;) DS1621xs+ does not have SHR .... no comment ........

How much space does the btrfs snapshots take up? I have my NAS ready for this setup, but have not activated it, because I don't know how much space or will eat up.

Cautionary tale: I opened the VPN port, and quickly had some brute force attacks. I ended up setting up the firewall to block everything except the site where the other synology is connecting to the VPN from. It's not worth the stress and potential of being hacked to leave it open.

Thanks!

If you use basic instead of raid0 or jbod do you need multiple storage pools?

Is there really no way to change from ext4 to btrfs? What about a full hyperbackup + config backup done on ext4, reformatting discs to btrfs and applying the backups? Will I still have to setup stuff anew?

I was planning on RAID 1. I bought the appropriate sized drives knowing I’m getting half and a backup. How does SHR differ from RAID 1?

Hi, can you please send me the link for your NAS backup guides?

Most people tend to over spec the capacity of their NAS, I'm talking about the home office and personal use. There's a lot of unused capacity out there.

With smb can't you just enable auto block after a certain amount of tries

I got a DS920+ and I set up port forwarding between the two network cards and I have two network and wanted to use my DS920 as brigde, buuuuut now have I forgotten where to set it up in the control panel. I remember that I needed to have a name and not an IP for the forwarding to work and I did ste it up and when I now ping that name do I get a response though a little delayed as it seems like the other NAS on the other network is the one responding. Can you or anuone give me at hint to find this feature again as I would like to set more up and change the port number and name ? I do hope I am making sense 🙂

One thing about ports. Use reverse proxy if you know how to. As far as port forwarding goes (short of using only VPN), it is the smallest opening possible, and only one port is needed (e.g https).

If we back up a back up, does that make it a front up or back down? If a 4 bay nas dies, does it take the drives down with it or do you mean back up so in case of fire or something like that?

Im ok with a 2 bay nas the synology ones support up to 108 tb. I have 2 20 tb harddrives installed with shr and btrfs. I can switch to a higher drive if needed. Maybe i do when 100 tb hdds get cheaper. I use my nas with my family for audiostation chat photos drive and office and we use 2 tb at the moment so its enough.

Regarding the Btrfs snapshots, is it possible to set up so standard users can browse their files in #snapshot (requiring them to have access to /homes) without seeing other users’ home / files?

Easily the best synology channel on youtube.

Hey @spacerex do you keep your NAS turned on 100% of the time? How do you maximise the health of your hard drives?

my NAS just get attacked by Ransomware, about a month ago, but lucky me the virus just encrypted 2 from 8 shared folder and not the Critical folder one... bit i want to know what kind of backup more easy to setup and also secure to this kind of virus..

What do you recommend for a DAS?

My first NAS was a 2-bay Asustor. I outgrew it pretty quickly and I’m looking into buying another one, like 6 or 4 bay and use my old as a backup. Should I go for another Asustor (like lockerstor gen2) or switch to Synology? I’m a bit scared of Asustors recent ransomeware attacks =/

totally agree.. 2-bay NAS was the biggest mistake i recommend 5+ bay even when you don't use it. ssds become cheaper and cheaper and you'll need the bays

I'm completely new to this and all of the videos that I am finding seem to be in a super technical language. Primarily i want to manage my blu-ray and DVD collection . Can someone recommend some videos on this subject in English?

Thx for this video Please lt me know this detail: I working alone with my foto-video, but need a saceure backup for all my files. When I put there two hdd in RAID1, with the SHR and BTRFS systsem file - what when one of the disk will failing? - Can I take the secound one out of the NAS and have acces to it in normal windows PC (all the drive in PC are NTFS system file) and what after this fail - buy a new drive and put it together to the NAS with the secound RAID1 copy - this will make a check and copy all files so they will be synchronized?

That must have been the fastest "Hi how is it going you all" since i subbed. Ouch :D

Hey, cool video. Have a question. I'm gonna swipe from DS220j to DS723+. Based on your tip no.3, is it possible, when I'm gonna use the same HDDs from DS220j, swipe on BTRFs without mowing data and formating HDDs? The DS220j did not allow me to use this file system from beggining.

How much better is ext4 for Surveillance Station? I setup mine with Btrfs and I'm solely using it as a NVR.

May I ask how would synology work if i migrate my HDDs there I have like 5 HDDs whit capacities from 4 to 8TB,...

You can hire him his expected years salary is $520,000. 2,080 Hr per year time $250 hourly rate.

Ok i set it up as ext4 and i use it now for years witout problems🤔🤷🏻‍♂️

bro said so many things that I didn't understand and ended the video saying this was a super basic guide for noobs. FeelsBadMan

Gosh I am lost on which way to go NAS or DAS . I just want to rip my TV shows and stream through PLEX. My old external does not cut it anymore.

Have a WD my cloud ex2 mite upgrade to a synology 4 bay nas soon.

Make a backup and keep it with a friend in case your house burns down. Most don't think about that

My PC motherboard comes with raid. How reliable to use? Softrware Raid?

Hello, im planning to use WD Red 4TB as file storage with Orico HDD Enclosure is that good idea can i use it like that or has to be specific enclosure ?

does synology with 4 bays allow for a set up of 2 drives in RAID-1 and 2 as basic? I Have some documents I wish to keep for now (photos, documents, purcharsed music and movies), so that would go to RAID-1, but also I need a lot of storage for random garbage that I don't really care if one of them dies

Regarding Point 4: I only need a DAS, it's true, but there isn't a DAS with RAID big enough for what I need to store. I'm limited to 22TB dual bay, when I have an estimated 30TB to back-up. I wish that company that made grunty DAS had not gone bust. It's what the world really needs. C'est la vie.

Backup is ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY necessary. I had a drive fail on my 4 bay hybrid raid system a couple of weeks ago. When I replaced the drive the whole volume crashed. The good news is that I'd invested in a second nas which I keep offsite. All it took was to restore from hyperbackup and a couple of days for the data to sync and not one mb of data was lost. (I had about 150000 photos) If I'd neglected the backup there would have been tears or at the very least weeks of work to rebuild everything

Hi. I just recently bought a Synology nas. And I have a problem with the network, I can't connect to things like, idrive backup and my printer, When I write a password and a username it says that the username does not exist end Synology assistant does not recognize the nas, but SMB working good. What could be the problem?

Having real issues since moving customers from DSM 6 to DSM 7. Mac users who always worked from the NAS are now seeing multiple crashes when creating PDFs from InDesign. Upgraded 2 out of 12 customers, and 2 out of 12 have this issue.

While I like my Synology well enough, I probably should have gone with a simpler DAS. For some reason my synology disappeared from windows explorer recently. After hours of searching I found a video explaining that I had to check SMB boxes in the windows control panel. They were unchecked. Checked them and the synology reappeared in windows explorer. How they became unchecked is a mystery. Windows update? Dunn'o. I sure didn't change the SMB settings as I was clueless as to their very existence.

It's much more secure to set up a VPN server on your network to remotely access your NAS instead of using port forwarding. Something like Wireguard VPN on a raspberry pi is way more secure.

I have tons of movies and my harddrives and external are getting full, would it be nice to buy a NAS to store my movies and other files? Just wondering. 🤔

But how to use SMB then? I do need access to my Nas from my laptop when I am away from home.

Regarding Point 4, shouldn't you have mentioned that you can get NAS with 10gbps or faster ports? Asking because I don't understand otherwise :)

How does the iscsi work on this? I am considering the 2 bay to just use it for some home labs via virtual box/centos and then hoping to configure this using the isci feature or even SAN to set up a small 2 node cluster and maybe host a small website internally on my lan. Anyone have any experience or comments/feedback for another cheap solution if this is not possible? GREAT video BTW ty for this