Synology DS620slim Gigabit NAS Review

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Software Installation

Software Installation

After installing your HDD(s), connecting it to your Ethernet and powering it up, within a minute or so the HDD LEDs will light up and you'll hear a beep. Once you heard the beep, it is ready to start configuring. How do you find your NAS? Well, there is a 99% certainly you connected the NAS to your LAN network with DHCP. The device is ready for setup. So you can access the NAS directly from your browser. I assume that you already connected the NAS towards your LAN network. With downloadable software, you can seek the device, but really, the easiest way to find out at what IP the NAS unit can be found at is to browse your windows network and click on the icon to access it.

Tip: you can download and install FING on your smartphone, and simply scan your network. This will find your NAS IP like so:

 

 

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Scan your network and within seconds you'll find what IP the NAS is located at. The NAS accepts a DHCP lease and should be present. If not then your last resort is to alternatively install the software from the manufacturer on your PC, it will detect and install the device. But really, you can scan your network (use your smartphone and install an app like Fing). Once your NAS unit is listed with an IP you can access the NAS by typing that IP into your browser. The screen shown below will now show. 

 

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Once you click next, the first likely thing the NAS will want to do is look if there is new firmware (DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system) available. You should update, the Firmware will automatically download and install, a process that takes a few minutes. These updates not only introduce new software, but they also apply security and vulnerability fixes as well. If you make your NAS publicly available on the web through HTTP / ssh / MariaDB (mysql) or FTP then always update. You can also opt to automatically have these installed with a weekly firmware check (all automated).

Security-wise, we'd advise you to set up a new super-user account and kill the admin account if you connect the box to an open network, for now, admin with your own secure password will be just fine. On the topic of routers; should you like to have your public web-content and, say, FTP available on the internet, then in your router setup open up TCP ports 80 and 21 for IP 192.168.x.xxx / 10.0.0.xxx after which your router will redirect all in- and outgoing requests to the assigned IP. Once the automated setup is complete the unit will log in to the admin interface.  

Once your NAS has installed the firmware you'll hear a beep, then it will be rebooted and continue in your browser. If not, type in the local IP again e.g. 192.168.0.38 or whatever the NAS is located at. You can startup non-complicated install wizard, but if you have a bit of understanding about networking and NAS units, we do recommend a custom setup.

  

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Typically I have one SSD installed for throughput testing, which always has been fast enough for Gigabit testing. However, with this unit, Synology delivered a twofold of Seagate IronWolf SDDs. So today we'll be making use of two 250GB SSDs and set these up in RAID 1 mode. You simply select RAID1 or your preferred RAID mode, select the storage units and then hit apply. 

 

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Once the RAID1 array has been created, you can immediately use it. However the SSDs will need to be initialized and parity checked, that can take hours with regular HDDs (but you can fully use the array already as it is a background process). 

  

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Once the NAS went through a couple of setup stages we can now log in based on the logon/password we just created. We recommend you to register an account at Synology as you will want to have access to their suite of NAS APPs and cloud functionality. 

 

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After the installation has finished, you can log in, and you're welcomed by the DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system slash user interface.

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