My NAS is reaching the end of its design. Twenty terabytes usable across five bays, a few hundred gigabytes left, and it’s warned me twice now that I’m nearly out. I’ve bought time where I could, moving what I can to the pool meant for cold archive. But the design is aging out on more than one front. Swapping the drives to bigger ones won’t fix the root of the problem. With the new home lab feeding the queue, the need only grows until the backlog clears. The clock is ticking.
Tagged Synology
How to Secure Erase Synology DSM FVE Drives
My old post on wiping retired Synology drives covered most use cases with two big caveats: one, Synology has since introduced full volume encryption on DSM, and two, the FVE implementation on DSM does not guarantee clean disposal. I will get into details in the tangent, but the short version is — DSM does not encrypt the whole drive; it still leaves a small area in plaintext. Paired with the unit itself, that area is a significant risk vector.
How to Migrate Docker Containers from Synology
Synology DSM has been shipped with a Docker Engine for a while, but it failed to keep up with the latest version of Docker Engine, let alone stay within the EOL life cycle. DSM was given an updated 24.0.2 of Docker Engine in February 2025, the version already declared EOL in June 2024. At the time, the latest version of Docker Engine available was 27.5, at least 3 major versions past what Synology offered. In short, running multiple Docker containers as part of a home lab on the DSM platform is unreliable.
How to Upgrade NVMe on Unsupported Synology NAS
Synology is known for making reliable HDD network storage, not NVMe. The few articles I found often recommended building your own NAS for NVMe, given the general reliability of SSD and price to performance ratio. While I agree on the principle, for those of us who already own a Synology branded NAS, there is no reason to avoid using M.2 slots on Synology NAS. There are scripts to enable a pool creation for this very purpose. And this is the part where I could not find documentation on. How do I go about upgrading a storage from 512 GB to…
App to Reverse Proxy on Synology DSM
Synology DSM is equipped with rudimentary level of reverse proxy feature, but after few home lab projects, I believe a user ought to notice the inherent reliability issue. In my setup, I keep my NAS unexposed the to the internet — the only way to access it is via Tailscale or VPN. The problem with the certificates were expected in the old setup; a certificate on DSM is issued on the premise NAS is exposed to the internet with the necessary ports.
How to Find UID and GID on Synology DSM
If you are running home server using Docker containers, you would often see PUID (UID) or PGID (GID). The only problem is, as far as I could tell, Synology DSM does not offer GUI way to get these numbers. In fairness, in Docker territory, you are above the pay grade of consumer NAS products. For home servers, I believe it is customary for manufacturers to provide bare bone software support — it’s up to the users, and possibly the community they can rely on, to find answers.
App to Create Synology SSD Pools on M.2 NVMe Slots
As I am migrating from Pi setups to one NAS, one of the immediate upside and downside was HDD. I get more storage out of the physical machine, but HDDs are still slower than microSD cards on Pi. Fortunately, I had some old NVMe drives sitting around and decided to make use of it. The only problem was, DSM 7.* currently does not allow creating a pool from NVMe drives for my model.
How to Add SSL to qBittorrent on Synology
One of the main reasons why I chose qBittorrent was its web UI. However, if you are using qBittorrent from SynoCommunity, chances are, each and every browsers are raising alarms about lack of secure (https) connection. While the risk is negligible if the web UI is correctly set to be accessible only by local users, it’s can be annoying to see the popup every time. But simply adding the path to the certificate didn’t quite do the trick for me.
App to Add Third-Party Packages on Synology NAS
Synology had a rough year in 2025 with its new policy — now retracted — on HDDs, but it didn’t outright kill the consumer NAS brand. In fact, when I did some research into what could be the possible alternatives to Synology as a platform, there weren’t many that offered community supports and different builds one could try for themselves. Raspberry Pi came close, but as the hardware was never meant to be a NAS, most of the builds and softwares were geared toward performance and had the appearance of rat’s nest.
App to Add Incompatible Drives to Latest Synology NAS
Synology, as of April 2025, Synology announced newer models will have tighter restrictions on what drives can be used with NAS. It appears only the Synology branded drives are touted as “compatible”, albeit Synology, the company, does not manufacture any physical drives. The new policy will not retroactively affect older NAS, but seeing as Synology-branded NAS’ core strength was its streamlined experience regardless of drive compatibility, (i.e. even if a drive is not listed on the compatibility DB, it will still work on the unit) the new turn of the event ends on the rather sour note.
App to Test Internal Network Bandwidth
As I was upgrading to a new router this week, one of the things I immediately wanted to test was the existing ethernet cables and ports. As reliable as they are, cables and ports are also physical objects with lifespans. If cables running behind the walls are damaged, that’s a major headache; and if one of the cables running between switches is damaged, albeit minor, it’s still a headache to find out which.
How to fix Time Machine “Disk Not Ejected Properly”: “Backups of [mac]” pt. 2
I’ve written in the past about Time Machine errors with the same error messages, and this is yet another one of the troubleshoots. I didn’t realize hibernation managed by Synology DSM could have an effect on the client side’s Time Machine.
How to Fix Firefox “Unable to Access” DSM Web on macOS
If you are having trouble connecting to Synology DSM via web with recent influx of Firefox and macOS updates, this is likely the cause. The odd bit of it all is that in my case, it didn’t happen after an update. I didn’t get any updates on either one, it just happened out of the blue. Many tips I found on DSM often recommended creating a certificate or look into Firefox’s certificate related settings, but I didn’t have my NAS set to be exposed to WAN; if I am only using it locally —with VPN, you don’t need external access—,…
How to Upgrade RAM on Synology NAS DS1520+
Synology NAS is weirdly customizable for a NAS. This one is a compliment. Not only Synology offers various NAS models, each models have usually have few upgradeable points, namely m.2 SSDs and RAM. This piece is about choosing the RAM, why someone would consider upgrading the RAM, and what would be the potential downsides of choosing third-party RAM. All in all, I do recommend it even for general users, especially if your NAS has slowed down significantly with DSM 7.
Synology, Encryption, and Unicode
The whole shenanigans behind encrypted shared folder (ESF) goes way back. Personally I would start counting from pre-unicode era, during the period when each developers had whipped up its own solution for the problem. It is a problem that most developers did not truly understand, therefore most of their solutions were either flawed or limited.