NOTE: Before attempting this, you must already physically install your external hard drive in an enclosure (check prices) and attach them to your NAS. Please format the drive using your NAS in the EXT3 or EXT4 format! Don’t think you’re saving time by formatting your drive in Windows and then copying the files over locally! Some NASes can read and write to NTFS volumes, but they are not native. Seriously, I’ve had a 1.5TB drive perform as slowly as 1MB/s because it was in NTFS format on eSATA. The same drive formatted in EXT4 got 45MB/second (which is extremely good for a modest NAS device). Also note that this drive should forever be connected to your NAS (or another Linux system) because connecting it to Windows will totally screw it up (Windows will write to the drive, making it unusable). Only connect to Windows if you are in a last-ditch data recovery scenario. Again, the example below is using a Synology Diskstation DS 409.
Format your drive from your NAS using the EXT3 or EXT4 file system
To format your external drive, go to Control Panel, External Devices. Click on your drive and then click the “Format” button. You’ll be presented with EXT3 and EXT4 options. EXT4 is recommended as it supports more features and general concensus is that it’s faster.
In order to implement a symbolic link on a Linux device, you need to use a terminal emulator. Before you use a terminal emulator, you must enable “SSH” access on your Linux device. In Synology’s DSM 3.0, you simply navigate to Control Panel, then Terminal, and then click “Enable SSH Access”. If your NAS is public then you’ll want to turn this off after you’re done implementing your symlinks.
SSH must be enabled before you can connect with a Terminal Emulator
The most popular Windows-based one is called PuTTY and can be downloaded here. Just open up PuTTY and type in the hostname (or IP address) of your NAS box. In most cases, you should leave the port to 22. You are then presented with a black text screen and asked to login. Type in “root” and you’ll then be asked for the root password, which should have been set when you first configured your NAS (it is usually “admin”). If you don’t know it, then you’ll have to contact the manufacturer of your NAS for the default password.
On the next page we walk you through actually implmenting the symbolic links…
1 comment
I've tried doing this but is messes up my Playstation. Now I have 2 "TV Shows" directories, and only one of them is live… the original one shows what USED to be there… like it was cached or something.
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