 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here. I want to do a very quick video regarding everything there is to know really about external devices using external devices with your Synology NAS. I'm using the Synology DS920 plus NAS here and I connect from time to time a HDD enclosure. So it's a hard drive in an enclosure and you can connect that directly into the USB on the front of the NAS. You can even actually connect a second NAS to the first NAS. And once you do that you're going to get a initializing message and I just to show you how to access the information about it. So when your external device is connected you're going to see a little icon. This is the latest version of DSM I'm running here in the top right and it says external devices and it says it'll say initializing then hopefully will turn to normal and then you have the option here of ejecting the device and that's very important that to preserve the useful length of your hard drives if you're using them for additional storage that you do this every time. I've covered in a previous video where to find out info about the external device, its capacity it's not listed under storage manager you need to go control panel external devices and then you have this. Now I don't actually unfortunately have if I just go back on to external devices here I don't have those smart testing functionalities appeared for a second then they disappear so unfortunately I don't have the ability to do a smart testing SMART which basically kind of probes the health of the device and gives you early indications that it might be failing so that's really important to do. In any event this is a place where you can see and I've mentioned this in a previous video so I'll just say this quickly this is where you can see how much disk is available so you can see I've used here it's a terabyte hard drive in a enclosure and I've used 203 gigs out of the and you know usually you're going to find the usable capacity is going to be a little bit less than the actual advertising capacity so in this case it's a one terabyte hard drive but I can only use 916 gigs out of that and I have it formatted as exd4 so there's a few more things you can do as you can see in settings you're able to change which users on your nas have access to this external device you're also able to eject it from here and the process I would do when I'm finishing moving stuff onto the enclosure here is I'd firstly eject this then I would safely power it down so I wouldn't just like pull out the plug from the wall which would be one way of doing it but that's that's not the way you're supposed to do it so the correct correct way to do things firstly eject then power off. One final thing to do to note about this and I'll end this video here is that you can actually format the device on the nas so for instance I use Linux as my main operating system so I find exd4 the most convenient file system to work with so when I buy a new hard drive for cold storage let's say and it's another discussion if that's the best medium for cold storage but rather than halting the format into exd4 on the computer I can actually just put it into enclosure hook it up to my Synology and I can actually write the format the disk into exd4 without needing to touch the computer and as you see as you can see you can you can either format the entire disk or if you've formatted it already into partitions you can do it into partitions and your options are the options I'm getting anyways that you can format into exd4 if you're just going to be using it in Linux like I have on this one or you can go for a Fat32 and Fat32 can be used on both Windows and Mac and there's some limitations about characters so depending on your preference you can choose to format it directly here I'm not going to do it because that would basically lose all the data I have on this disk but that's pretty much everything I've sort of figured out so far about using external drives and these it doesn't matter if it goes into a USB and it's compatible with the Synology it can work it could be one of those plugin external hard drive or STDs it can be an enclosure as I'm using etc it'll recognize and then it'll automatically create a file folder and you can move stuff directly from your local files on the Synology onto it by simply cutting and pasting or dragging and dropping so it's incredibly useful and you can even copy from non-DSM Windows just drag and drop into the folder for the external hard drive on DSM hope that video was useful if you want to get more videos from me please subscribe to this YouTube channel