Volumes & Disk Groups

Volumes and disk groups are the basic tools for managing and organizing the storage space on your Synology NAS. In this article, we'll briefly describe the difference between the two.

Volume

Volumes provide the basic storage space on your Synology NAS. All of your stuff -- such as shared folders, documents, and package data -- is stored on volumes. Therefore, before you start storing anything on your Synology NAS, you'll need to create at least one volume.

Disk Group

Disk groups are composed of one or more hard drives combined into a single data partition. You can think of disk groups as the foundation on which one or more volumes or iSCSI LUN can be built. Disk groups provide greater flexibility, allowing you to do the following:

• Choose from various RAID types, depending on the number of hard drives installed.
• Create a single, large volume, or create several volumes with customizable storage capacity.