I'm posting my experiences with this device, which I've recently bought for home, because at some stage we may consider one of the Synology devices as the successor to Rutabaga. Also the blog now substitutes almost entirely for my memory, so if I don't post this stuff here, I'll never remember what I did.

Initial setup

• Undo the thumb screws at the back; the rear panel hinges down, and the cover comes off.
• Extract one of the drive trays.
• Put in your drive (mine is a 1.5 TB Seagate -- I only have one at the moment, but there are trays for four).
• Screw in four screws to secure it to the tray.
• Slide the tray back in.
• Screw in two screws to secure the tray.
• Put the cover back on, and screw the back up, including the cable clamp which comes as a separate piece in the box.
• Plug in the device and start it up.
• Connect ethernet and power (a HUGE brick, but no matter).
• Run the install.sh to install the software on your PC.
• Start the software.
• It finds the DiskStation on the network, and you go through a basic
• setup which amounts to choosing DHCP or not, and giving it an admin pw.
• You install the firmware on the DiskStation from the CD (it's a
• "patch file" with a .pat extension).
• The DiskStation restarts itself.
• Then you just go to its web interface (on port 5000, although it redirects you there from 80).
• I set up my router so that it always gives the Synology the same ip address, so that it's easy to find.

Next steps

My drive was uninitialized, so the first thing to do was to create a volume. In this case, because I have only one drive, the only kind of volume I could create was a "Basic volume"; if you have more drives, you can create JBOD or RAID volumes of many kinds. My plan is to keep all my drives as separate volumes, and have them backing up to each other, so that I have lots of copies of data on standalone drives that I can pull out of the DS and mount elsewhere if necessary.

It takes a long time to create a volume; it formats the drive (ext3) completely, rather than using a "quick format", and presumably checks every sector. It then mounts the volume as "volume1".

While that was going on, I turned on SSH, and logged in from the terminal. Only the admin user can log in as SSH; my guess is that "users" (see below) are not real users on the BusyBox system it's running. I was able to determine that it's running BusyBox, and that the Ash shell you get is pretty limited in what it can do.

Updating the firmware

A new version of the firmware had been released since the CD I got with the device, so I downloaded it (a .pat file), and installed it through the web interface. Worked a treat. I got a couple of new features with it.

Creating users and shares

• In the web interface, you can create users in a straightforward manner. I created two.
• There's a guest user, but it's off by default, and I left it off.
• I then created some shares. These are just directories on your volume, to which you assign users permissions. It's completely straightforward.
• For each share, you get to set privileges, and also set NFS privileges separately. I turned on NFS for all my shares.

There's a web-based interface for file management called FileStation, which is handy if you need to upload a couple of files quickly, or look through the directories, but mainly I'll be mounting drives and using robocopy and rsync to back things up.

Mounting drives on Linux

• Had to install the NFS client first (sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common).
• Then I created directories in my home folder, one for each share on the Synology.
• I mounted the directories like this (using the IP address of the Synology): sudo mount 192.168.xxx.xxx/volume1/mholmes /home/mholmes/DiskStation/mholmes
• This mounted instantly -- so quickly I thought it had failed, but I copied a file to it, then looked in the FileStation interface and the file was there.
• Eventually I'll set up these mounts in fstab.
• To get some of my key data backed up as quickly as possible, I just copied and pasted hundreds of GB of stuff from my local machine to the DiskStation, using Nautilus. The copy was flawless, and faster than anything I've seen before on my home network.

Mounting drives on Windows

• On Windows, you just go to \\DiskStation\volume1\whatever, in Windows explorer, and it prompts you for a login. It needed DiskStation\[username] rather than just [username].
• I mounted the network drive, and set it to reconnect at logon.
• I ran a huge Robocopy operation, and saw it go much faster than the same operation had ever gone with the TimeCapsule that died last week. In fact it seems to be backing up over the network just as fast as it backs up to its own internal D drive.

Lots more stuff to learn -- I have to set up the scheduled shutdown and startup (a wonderful feature), figure out which of the built-in apps I might want to use, and figure out how I can make it back up between its own drives (for which I need another drive, of course).