If you decide to follow the steps below with disks that contain data backup your data before and read the comments at the end of this post. Do it at your own risk.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Synology DS218+ NAS with two 2TB WD Red disks. After the initial setup, I wanted to remove RAID on Synology DS218 since we use the NAS mostly for streaming films.

I am not deep into RAID configurations and this is my first Synology NAS. So it was not straight away clear how to remove RAID on Synology DS218. I did not want to waste 2TB of usable disk space so I started to dig.

If you initially choose an automatic setup ( as I have done ) your disks will be configured in RAID. To remove RAID I needed to remove the volumes, delete the storage pool, and set up the disks as individual disks.

To be able to delete the storage pool I needed to uninstall the Synology DSM packages that have been installed on the volume I wanted to remove first. The name of those packages is listed when you choose a volume and click remove in Storage Manager within the Volume tab.

In the Storage Pool Creation Wizard I have chosen more flexibility which supports multiple volumes. I see an average 110 MB Read and 93 MB Write performance with this setup.

Next > Storage Pool properties > RAID type basic and 1 drive per RAID

Confirm settings

Then I started to create new volumes from Storage Manager > Volume tab > Create
With a basic storage pool setup you can only choose Custom:

Choose an existing storage pool:

Assign a storage pool:

Specify the size of the volume:

Choose a file system. I have chosen ext4. You can find additional information here.

Confirm settings

Stay safe!

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