In the popup that appears, enter the address of the network drive.Open Finder, click Go, and select Connect to Server.Cheap to buy and simple to set up, they are very popular indeed. NAS drives are useful to home users for sharing movies, music, files, or games across multiple computers within the same house, apartment block, dorm, etc. These typically aren’t used in a home setting, considering that they’re typically overkill and not very affordable. It’s a great way to have central storage that multiple people can use.Ī SAN is essentially a more complicated NAS that can have multiple drives available from within the network. Either way, the device attaches to your router via ethernet and makes its drives available to authorized users. A NAS device can be as simple as an external hard drive connected to your home router or as complicated as a dedicated NAS device with its own hardware and multiple drives. Network drives are usually made up of computers that act as servers to provide storage, generally in the form of a NAS or SAN device. NAS vs SANĪnd that’s where NAS and SAN come into play. It’s like having your own personal iCloud or Google Drive. This also means that any device connected to your network can access these files as well. This means that you can access the files stored on a network drive any time you’re connected to your network, not just when the device is plugged into your computer. However, rather than plugging directly into your computer, it plugs into your wireless router. This will bring up the Connect to Server menu from Finder.A network drive is fundamentally the same as these drives – it has a fixed amount of storage and is used to store files. Simply open Finder and type the shortcut Command + K. Connect from FinderĪfter allowing SMB Connections from within Synology, the next step is to connect your Mac to your Synology using Finder. You have now enabled SMB connections on your Synology NAS. If you do not have a Static IP Address assigned to your Synology, I would recommend using a hostname. The hostname is an easy-to-remember name that you can use in place of an IP Address or web address anywhere on your home network. While you are on this page, you can also add Hostname (under Mac (Finder)).

This will allow your Synology NAS to accept SMB connections. Select File Services as shown below: File Services from Control Panelįrom within File Services, select Enable SMB Service and hit Apply. To do this, login to DSM and open up Control Panel. The first step is to enable SMB on your Synology NAS. Once you have all of these set up, you can go ahead and get started.

You are a user with permissions to the account.

You have Shared Folder on your Synology.

To access your Synology remotely (over the internet) setup a VPN Server.

You are connected to the same network as your NAS.

Before you try to connect to your Synology NAS from Finder, make sure:

Mac network drive connect