Do I really need RAID? What about backups? These and other questions answered during my recent first time Synology setup on a home network.

At first, it seemed daunting. But, it wasn’t. Here is what I did. Most of the time was spent waiting for files to transfer from my old WD My Book Live NAS. So far, both the hardware and impressive DiskStation Manager software are flawless.

I started by installing a single 4 TB drive into my Synology DS223j two-bay NAS. Originally, I thought I could save $100 by doing without RAID redundancy. DSM pretty much automates creating an initial Storage Pool and Volume. All I really had to do was give it a name. Finding the new NAS on the LAN was easy. So was installing DSM 7.2.

I set up two ID’s with passwords, one for me as Administrator and the second as User. All of the connected devices will use the User ID for extra security, while I will reserve the Admin ID for managing the system.

After creating Shared Folders, I transferred all the files from my old NAS. Since my old WD box was not working well, file transfer took a really long time, nearly a day. On the other hand, transferring files from a PC runs fast, around 100 MB/s. Mapping the common shared folder to all my PC’s was easy. And boy, with a new Synology setup, accessing shared files is instant.

As a final step, I installed the Video Station app on the NAS so I could easily stream videos to my Samsung television. This also required installing the DS Video app on the TV.

Synology Setup – Moving to RAID

At this point, I changed my mind and bought a second drive so I could have RAID redundancy. This required making a copy of all the NAS files onto an external USB hard drive. We used the USB Copy app to make this happen.

Then, I did a complete factory reset on the Synology DS223j, which erased all the data. After installing the second drive, I did the whole Synology setup again from scratch. Fortunately, I kept really good notes and was able to re-install all the same folders, users and passwords.

So, now I have a 4 TB RAID NAS up and running on my home network, which is plenty of storage. I have changed the Destination settings in SyncBack Free so all of my automated backups now work just like before.