Well aren’t I the idiot lol, Ok well I will do it like that until I have a spare drive to copy the data across to so I can format this one.
Thank you VERY much, you sir have been amazing.
So there is no way I can use a usb hub then, not if I want to then use it on plex.
Is there any way to expand the storage further like a addon bay or anything that you are aware of ?
No you can’t use them but it’s not a Plex limit, it’s a Synology limitation. They don’t include the USB hub driver with DSM. I tried many times to convince them. Their position, which makes sense, is to put in bigger drives and do it right.
Does the DS916 have only USB ports on it? My DS1815+ has 2 eSATA ports as well. I got external eSATA enclosures. Those work great and are faster than USB 3.0
You can expand storage.The most expandable formatting is if you use SHR RAID and that’s what you used.
When you do this, you shut it down, replace with a bigger drive, start up, have Storage Manager rebuild the volume (because the drive is ‘new’). When it’s done, you tell it to ‘Expand’ the volume. When complete, You have more space to use
Actually it’s not too bad it has 3 usb3 and a esata port so thats a extra 4 hdd.
Ok sorry but one more question can you recommend any esata or usb 3 enclosures for a standard 3.5inch sata 3 hdd, I am think wd red ?
I use WD Red Pro drives. WD Red is just as good. They are a very well made drive and highly rated.
For enclosures, I tend to use Vantec external enclosures. I’ve never had compatibility issues with Synology.
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Ok just plugged drive in directly, fingers crossed. I clicked problem solved a bit prematurely lol
Still no luck, I feel like such a idiot.
You’re not an idiot. Synology has a unique way of doing things. 
(really, they do! )
I’ve unchecked the answers for you. When resolved, you can pick them again.
What are you now seeing in Control Panel → Shared Folders? Are you seeing the USB disk as a share ?
Sorry about the images being in 4k.
Could it be a different partition thing be causing a issue, being a windows user I know using fat32 when I should have been ntfs could cause all sorts of issues.
That’s fine.
While you were doing that, I pulled some cables around and hooked up an external USB drive to my machine (been a while)
They’ve changed what we can do. We can’t export the USB directly anymore… BUT
if you’re willing to work with me, We can rig something up for short term.
In this text, I’ve logged into the Synology and am looking at how the Syno made the disk accessible
sh-4.3# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 2385528 900856 1365888 40% /
none 4078108 4 4078104 1% /dev
/tmp 4082400 592 4081808 1% /tmp
/run 4082400 7324 4075076 1% /run
/dev/shm 4082400 12 4082388 1% /dev/shm
none 4 0 4 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgmfs 100 0 100 0% /run/cgmanager/fs
/dev/vg1/volume_1 31097310564 24274011704 6823282476 79% /volume1
/dev/sdq1 7811927692 7143709216 668202092 92% /volumeUSB2/usbshare
sh-4.3#
Notice it’s showing up as volumeUSB2. This matches what they make it available in DSM as: usbshare2
I know you’re new to all this so this there is no right or wrong answer. How comfortable are you typing at the command line?
I haven’t done it on the synology but I am a old windows and dos user so that end is not a problem, if I can copy and paste even better. The migraine is MOSTLY gone now so that will help more.
All the data on the drive is replaceable so as long as I don’t fubar the actual synology I am up for trying it.
Synology is the least of the worries. I’ve been at Unix for 35 years now. (yeah… old guy haha)
I would like you to do the following to gather the info we need.
- Control Panel - Terminal & SNMP - Enable SSH access (don’t forget to turn this back off when done to restore full security)
- Control Panel - Users - make sure the default
adminuser is enabled. - Using Putty (on Windows) sign in as user
adminusing the admin password orssh -l admin ip.addr.of.synoin a Mac or Linux terminal window. - When signed in, you’ll see the command prompt.
- type
dfand see the free disk space report. What’s important to us is where it’s mounted (the rightmost column) - (for me, it’s
/volumeUSB2/usbshare) Yours will be dependent on which port it’s plugged in on. - What we will see is if Synology actually recognizes the drive correctly and HOW it recognizes it.
- From there, we can ‘tweak’ it
[chuck@lizum ~.103]$ gom
admin@moesern's password:
admin@moesern:~$ sudo -su root
sh-4.3# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 2385528 900880 1365864 40% /
none 4078108 4 4078104 1% /dev
/tmp 4082400 592 4081808 1% /tmp
/run 4082400 7324 4075076 1% /run
/dev/shm 4082400 12 4082388 1% /dev/shm
none 4 0 4 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgmfs 100 0 100 0% /run/cgmanager/fs
/dev/vg1/volume_1 31097310564 24274011740 6823282440 79% /volume1
/dev/sdq1 7811927692 7143709216 668202092 92% /volumeUSB2/usbshare
sh-4.3# pwd
Sorry it took me a while I was putting in the port and it didnt need it
I’ve just gone through the possible ways of doing this. For reasons I don’t understand but something must have changed in DSM,
- I can mount the external USB directly with NFS from Linux. (as I always do and the premise I’ve been basing my actions on)
sh-4.4# mount moe:/volumeUSB2 /mnt
sh-4.4# ls /mnt
usbshare
sh-4.4# ls /mnt/usbshare
4k animated lost+found movies
sh-4.4#
- I cannot mount the external USB with CIFS (SMB)
sh-4.4# mount //moe/volumeUSB2 /mnt2
Password for chuck@//moe/volumeUSB2: *************
mount error(95): Operation not supported
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)
sh-4.4# mount -o ro //moe/volumeUSB2 /mnt2
Password for chuck@//moe/volumeUSB2:
mount error(95): Operation not supported
sh-4.4# man mount.cifs
sh-4.4# mount -o ro,username=root //moe/volumeUSB2 /mnt2
Password for root@//moe/volumeUSB2: ****************
mount error(95): Operation not supported
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)
For this step, I can only suggest asking/looking in the Synology forum.
I am VERY sorry but they are not allowing this for me using SMB/CIFS (at least on Linux)
No thank you, you have been amazing. Do you think it’t worth me trying it on a different usb port or maybe formatting it again incase something got corrupted the first time ?
Might be easier in the long run
There is no benefit to reformatting or plugging into a different port. Linux doesn’t work that way (what DSM is based on).
There might be something I don’t know about using Windows/Mac with Synology and external drives that has been solved.
It might take some special tweak somewhere. I do not know.
The only thing I can suggest is to start hunting the internet “How to share a USB drive on Synology” or something to that effect.
You might get lucky with Google or the Synology Forums. Somewhere there’s a definitive answer.
I’m sorry i can’t give you the answer.
Chuck does this mean we cannot use External USB drives with Plex on Synology at the moment? I was planning to use a usb drive for Plex DVR (when RealTek gets Plex).
Ok sorry again…
I tried creating a new internal partition on the synology the plex could already see but it couldnt see that and on top of that it wont play any of the original content it just gets a spinning golden circle or just flat out crashes now.
I appreciate your time I am sorry to be taking up so much of it.
