Top Synology Forum Questions Answered by Expert

How to Answer Common Questions on the Synology Forum

Synology NAS systems are used a lot in small and medium-sized businesses and large businesses, which leads to regular technical discussions in community forums. Forums can be helpful for getting advice from other people, but businesses need proven, structured solutions instead of experimental fixes.

Here is a list of the most common Synology problems that people talk about in forums, along with professional advice that follows best practices.

1. Why is my Synology NAS so slow?

Common signs:

A lot of CPU or RAM use
File transfers that take a long time
It takes longer to open shared folders
Bad performance of iSCSI or VM
The most common reasons are
Errors in the disk or RAID rebuilding
Not enough RAM
No SSD cache when there are a lot of tasks to do

Bottlenecks in the network

Expert Response: Use Storage Manager and Resource Monitor to find out if your hardware or service is full. Check the health of the drive and make sure that no background rebuild is going on.

If you want to use virtualization or have more than one user, think about:

Adding more RAM
Adding an NVMe SSD cache
Allowing link aggregation
Checking the settings for the SMB/NFS protocol

Problems with performance are more often caused by architecture than by software bugs.

2. Which RAID should I use? SHR, RAID 5, and RAID 6?

This is one of the most talked-about topics on the forum.

Advice from Professionals:

SHR is great for small and medium-sized businesses that use drives of different sizes. It is more flexible and easier to grow.
RAID 5 is a good choice for small to medium-sized deployments where one disk can fail.
RAID 6 is best for big arrays or businesses where it takes a long time to rebuild and protecting two drives is very important.
RAID is not a backup, so remember that. It doesn’t protect historical data; it protects availability.

3. Why aren’t my backups working?

A lot of forum threads talk about
Errors in the Hyper Backup task
Warnings about not having enough space
Backup chains that are broken

Professional Way:

Check the policies for keeping things
Make sure the destination storage has enough space
Do integrity checks on a regular basis
Don’t mix manual file changes with backup directories

Instead of reactive configuration, backup design should be based on structured retention planning and storage forecasting.

4. What can I do to protect myself from ransomware?

A lot of people on forums say to turn on snapshots. It is correct, but not complete.

Best Practice Answer:

Turn on Snapshot Replication with settings that can’t be changed
Use multi-version backup with copies stored offsite
Turn off default admin accounts
Make sure multi-factor authentication is used
Limit open ports and set up firewall rules
A layered strategy greatly lowers the risk
5. Why isn’t remote access working?

Users often say that QuickConnect is slow or that their VPN doesn’t work.

Diagnosis by an expert:

Check the settings for the firewall and port forwarding
Check DNS resolution
Check the validity of the certificate
Don’t connect DSM directly to the internet if you can help it

In business settings, reverse proxy with SSL and VPN access is better than exposing ports directly.

6. The storage pool crashed or the volume got worse

This makes threads that are very anxious.

Advice from professionals:

Don’t take out drives too soon
Look at the SMART data
Only replace disks that have failed after checking their health status
Don’t replace disks at the same time unless you have to

For big pools, keeping an eye on things and having hot spares on hand lowers the risk.

7. Is it possible to run Docker and virtual machines on my NAS?

A lot of people on the forum want to know about hosting containers and services.

From a business point of view:

Yes, but the size of the workload is important. Make sure you have enough CPU and RAM. Keep production storage and experimental workloads apart. Keep an eye on I/O so that backup and file services don’t get affected.

A Look at the Synology Platform

Synology’s DSM comes with built-in tools like Resource Monitor, Storage Manager, Snapshot Replication, Hyper Backup, and firewall controls that take care of most of these problems. The main difference between forum experimentation and enterprise deployment is that the latter has a structured design and proactive monitoring.

The Difference Between Forum Advice and Enterprise Architecture

Forums are great for getting advice from other people, but enterprise IT needs:

Standards for documented configuration
Planning for capacity
Set goals for RTO and RPO
How to manage changes
Testing to make sure backups work

Without these, even good technical advice can be dangerous in production settings.

Epis Technology in a Nutshell

Epis Technology offers enterprise-level Synology consulting, large storage design, backup solutions for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, fully managed PC backups, and business continuity planning. Instead of using trial-and-error fixes from forums, Epis Technology creates structured, secure, and scalable NAS environments that meet operational and compliance needs.