Getting Started with Your Synology: First-Time DSM Setup

Part 1 of 4 — Getting Started with Your Synology

This is the first guide in a series: getting a Synology NAS from box to daily driver, the way we’d actually walk through it ourselves. This one covers the initial DSM setup — the part that happens before you’ve installed a single package.

Written for DSM 7.2. Menu names and steps can shift in future DSM versions — we’ll revise this guide when they do, not leave it stale.

Step 1 — Find the NAS and start the wizard

With the drives installed and the NAS on the same network as your computer, go to find.synology.com (or Synology Assistant if you’d rather not rely on a cloud lookup). It’ll locate the NAS on your local network and walk you into the DSM installation wizard, which downloads and installs DSM itself. This part is genuinely hands-off — let it finish before touching anything.

Step 2 — Create the admin account properly

DSM will ask you to create the first user account, which gets administrator rights. Two things worth doing here that are easy to skip in the rush to get to the good stuff:

Don’t name this account admin. It’s the single most-guessed username in every automated login attempt aimed at Synology boxes — a non-obvious username is a real, free layer of defense, not just security theater.

Use a real password manager to generate this password rather than typing something you’ll reuse elsewhere. This account can touch everything on the NAS.

Step 3 — Set up storage: Storage Pool, then Volume

Open Storage Manager. You’ll create a Storage Pool first (the raw disk grouping), then a Volume on top of it (what actually gets mounted and used). For most home/small-office setups with mixed or mismatched drive sizes, Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is the right default — it gets you redundancy without wasting as much capacity as forcing a traditional RAID level onto unevenly sized drives.

If this NAS is holding anything you can’t afford to lose, RAID is not a backup. It protects against a drive failing, not against ransomware, a mistaken deletion, or the NAS itself dying. Plan a real backup target (another NAS, cloud, or both) separately — we’ll cover that in a later guide.

Step 4 — Turn on 2FA before you do anything else

In Control Panel → Security → Account, enable 2-factor authentication for the admin account before you open any port or enable QuickConnect. It takes two minutes with any TOTP authenticator app, and it’s the single highest-value five minutes you’ll spend in this whole setup — a NAS admin account is worth protecting the same way you’d protect any other admin account.

Step 5 — Decide how you’ll actually reach this thing remotely

DSM offers QuickConnect (Synology’s own relay service — easy, works through NAT with zero configuration, but it’s still a third party sitting between you and your NAS) as the default path to remote access. The more locked-down alternative is a VPN back into your home network (Synology’s own VPN Server package, or a router-level VPN) with no NAS ports exposed to the internet at all. QuickConnect is a completely reasonable choice for a lot of setups — just make the choice on purpose instead of leaving whatever the wizard defaulted to.

That’s a NAS that’s actually ready to put things on. Next: deciding between Docker/Container Manager and the Package Center →

Theme

Terminal color