Volumes & Disk Groups - Synology DSM Help

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

Volume

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

Note:

If volumes are used as replicated targets of Snapshot Replication, the replication performance can be improved by adjusting the settings of Record File Access Time Frequency in the Edit window after volumes are created:

Daily: File access time is updated daily or when the file is modified, just like in most operating systems. Some applications' functionalities rely on the precision of file access time. Selecting Daily will impact replication performance but is recommended if you use any of the following functions or applications frequently:
- Least Recently Access Time in Storage Analyzer
- SSD Cache Advisor in Storage Manager
- Any third-party applications that rely on Record File Access Time.
Monthly: File access time is updated monthly or when the file is modified. This option results in a small improvement in replication performance while the applications that rely on Record File Access Time will be able to function, though with a lower precision.
Never: Recommended if you look for the best replication performance and do not need applications that rely on Record File Access Time in your daily usage.

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: