Q:

Synology volumes vs shared folders

What is the benefit of making more than 1 volume on disk group on Synology DiskStation? Or, in another words, what is the benefit of organising data into a) many volumes vs b) many shared folders on one volume? I'm interested in any considerations in: access, administration, maintenance and backup context.

A:

In terms of resiliency and maintenance, it seems to me the number of volumes would be beneficial in case of High Availabilty (HA) system design due to replication. Let's say you have 2 or more volumes on 2x Synology hosts configured on HA shared storage and face drive failure on a single host. It would take less to replicate each volume across hosts (restore and bring HA volume online), instead of a case of single volume, where, obviously, it takes more time to get a single volume replicated.
For a single node, shared folders on a single volume would be beneficial due to I/O performance. In the case, the data on each shared folder would be available with speed of overall storage performance, reads and writes would be performed from the whole storage array. 

