He’s (not) dead, Jim Link to heading
The slow, web-focused interface on my recently retired Synology was feeling a little long in the tooth, so I installed Ubuntu and set it up as a simple ZFS backup target. The x86 Atom processor meant that I avoided a lot of common obstacles that present themselves when repurposing an ARM-based NAS.
The Tricky Part Link to heading
The Synology that I have will only automatically boot from a 500MB internal flash drive. And while I didn’t check to see what happened if I pulled the drive off the motherboard, it was easy enough to manually boot from a USB drive and install Ubuntu with the /boot partition on the small flash, and format a larger SSD in one of the bays as the / partition. This still leaves 5/6 bays for larger HDDs, as I plan to populate this Synology with a little over 70TB of raw space.
Walkthrough Link to heading
There isn’t much to this Ubuntu installation, but below are some screenshots that walk you through setting up the / partition on a separate disk.
When you get the storage layout section of an Ubuntu server installation, after you’ve tabbed down to the [X] Custom Storage Layout - you’ll need to set the smaller disk as a boot disk in the Ubuntu installer options.
In my case, this is because my Synology will only boot off this disk automatically, but you could just as easily be installing the boot partition onto a manually paritioned disk or using this strategy to boot a raspberry pi off the SD card but keeping the OS onto a (larger, faster) SATA SSD attached elsewhere.
After your disk is set as a boot device, select the free space available to this smaller disk, (in this screenshot I have manually created a 500MB disk and a 20GB disk for a VM installtion to illustrate this point) and create a GPT partition table, formatting it to /boot
Then, select the larger disk where your operating system will be installed and format it as ext4 as / - that’s it!
Finish the installation and enjoy your newly upcycled Synology, faster raspberry pi, or whatever other weird piece of hardware you pulled from the recycle pile at work.