We’ve rebuilt storageDRIVE — around one clear idea: the virtual hard drive for every computer. On your own machines it mounts via SMB as a drive; on any other computer the browser is enough — File Station there is a full file manager, no installation. And everything sits on our hardware in Germany.
What’s new
SMB is now included in every plan — direct, no tunnel. You connect your storageDRIVE as a drive in the Mac Finder, in Windows Explorer or as a mount on Linux and work with it like a local disk: open, save, move files, straight from any program. Until now, this required a VPN add-on at €4.90 per month — that’s gone entirely. The step-by-step guide is in the knowledge base.
A Time Machine target for your Mac. Because the drive is a real SMB share, macOS accepts it as a Time Machine backup volume — hourly, automatic, versioned. Plain talk on this: the initial full backup runs over your upload bandwidth and, on typical DSL, takes days depending on how much data you have. After that, Time Machine only backs up changes.
What’s gone
A rebuild without a cut list wouldn’t be one. Out are:
- Synology Calendar and Contacts (CalDAV/CardDAV) — barely used, and if you want calendars and contacts in your own cloud, you’re far better served by Nextcloud Hosting.
- Hyper Backup Vault as a backup target for Synology boxes — we have a dedicated product for that: Hyper Backup Storage.
- NFS — the mount path is now SMB: one protocol that runs out of the box on Mac, Windows and Linux alike.
What stays
Five plans from Solo (1 TB) to Archive (20 TB), one user account per plan, unlimited devices. The full file manager in the browser, the Synology Drive client, automatic photo upload, WebDAV, FTPS, SFTP and seven preinstalled DSM apps. Need more? Up to 100 TB per account at €3.50 per TB and month — no hidden tiers.