Setup & Installation

Installing the DS1515 is as straightforward as it can be: you place drives in hot-swap bays, run DiskStation Assistant from the supplied CD to configure disks and install the operating system, and that's pretty much it. You then gain access to the DiskStation Manager by connecting to the DS1515 with a web browser.

There is also an even easier method that doesn't require a legacy optical drive thanks to a tool called Web Assistant which helps guide you through the installation process without having to use a CD. With the declining use of optical drives, Synology needed to find a more modern approach and it has.

The Web Assistant is launched by typing "find.synology.com" in your web browser and this will locate any and all DiskStation devices on your local network. Once you have found the device, the Web Assistant software logs onto the local version of the software and begins the installation process.

This time rather that setup everything from scratch we decided to try out the migration feature, as we had previously installed our drives in the DS2015xs. Automatically the Web Assistant detected that we were coming from the DS2015xs and asked if we would like to migrate our data to the DS1515, which we chose to do.

Next the user can choose to migrate their data and settings or just their data, we decided to try migrating everything.

The next step was to install the DSM software and Synology gives the user the choice of manually loading a DSM version or they can quickly proceed by installing the latest version via an automatic download.

Since we are migrating from a previous setup we didn't have to select the storage volume that we wanted to use or configure any network settings.

Once the migration was complete we were free to login to the DSM via our default web browser.