Setting up hard drives, users, and shares on the Synology DS211+

It’s time to get busy with some hard drives on the DS211+.  I’ve introduced you to the box here and installed the software here.  Finally, we get to have some fun at the hard drive level!  After installation I left you at the login screen.

In this first screen shot you can see the entire desktop of the DSM.  It’s very easy to navigate.  At the top left you will see a drop down arrow that will take you to it’s major admin options like the Storage Manager, Backup and Restore, etc.

There is also a control panel for the rest of the settings and options.

When you first login you will be presented with a Quick Start box that will help you through the rest of the setup.  I’m going to start with setting up a volume on the drives that I have in my DS211+.

Setup a Volume

The Quick Start is not a real wizard but it points you in the right direction to get things done.  In order to work with your drives you need to go into Storage Manager.  Under the storage tab select Create.

Here is your first real decision in the installation.  What RAID level to choose if any at all.  With two drives our options are RAID 1, 0, JBOD, and Standard or SHR.

The standard volume (also known as Synology Hybrid RAID or SHR) can optimize the volume size when combining hard drives with different sizes. If the volume is composed of two or more hard drives, data integrity is protected when one of the hard drives fails.

I’m going to go with SHR since it’s default and many will be tempted to choose this option even though my drives are of the same size.

Here is a table from Synology that describes all of the RAID options that the software supports depending on how many drives you have in your system.

After choosing SHR you need to select the drives that will participate.

Are you in a hurry?  It’s probably better if you choose a disk check rather than not.

Confirm your settings and the DS211+ will prepare the drives.

This could take a while.

All done.

Using SHR with two, 2TB drives.

HDD management shows the SMART information.  In this tab you can check the health of your drives.

Back to the quick start help box.  Time to create a shared folder.

Again, Synology and the DSM make this process so very easy.  Creating a share and a user for the system is very simple.

ACL Control

It’s asking for permissions on the share but don’t fret if you haven't setup a user for the system yet.  The user setup wizard will ask you to set permissions on each share on the box.

Advanced properties of the share is nice to have.

Setup a user

E-Mail notification?  Sweet.

Looks like there could be a setting in here for group rights.

It now takes me through the list of shares to assign privileges.

Quota Control

Application Rights

summary

Back to user list.

That was the entire process for setting up your hard drives, shares, and users for the system.  Once again, mind numbingly, simple.  You can follow the entire review of the DS211+ on this page. I will be going over the abilities of the DS211+ in full detail.