The RAID volume on the Synology RackStation can be expanded directly without having to reformat the existing hard drives, ensuring service continuity during the expansion process. Definitely wouldn’t have been possible without these.When drive capacity is running low on a Synology RackStation, Synology RX1217/RX1217RP offers an easy way to immediately expand storage by providing 12 additional drive slots. Massive shout out to the guys at Synology for their EPS download links. If you need a diagram with one shape that’s this big then you’ve got other issues! Then comes the scaling… I’ve tested scaling up a shape over 48 A4 pages and the quality was great. Whoever thought of this initially is a genius.

Then moving the shape around a page, the lines stay attached to their respective ports. My favourite part by far are the connection points the ability to attach a line to a physical port instead of it snapping to the side of the shape is pretty much the whole point of using Visio. So each of the shapes has a set of data associated with it (Manufacturer, Serial Number, IP address etc), seemed pointless to create them without it.

I could have stuck with a 1920×1080 PNG which would look good enough but who wants a 10MB shape in their document?!

So, that set me on a mission to actually do something useful for me and maybe share with the community at large.

Scalability (yes an EPS can scale but will Visio read it natively?!).

In all fairness these could be used to decorate the diagrams (JPG/PNG/EPS files) but they lacked the actual bits I actually need from a stencil. I found a post which led to the “ Official Visio Stencils“. So I started digging around in the usual places: Visio Cafe, Reddit, Netzoom (this is behind a paywall, with good reason – it’s their bread and butter!) so I ended up on the Synology Forums.

Granted with the current situation in the world it’s not the biggest priority, but when you’re trying to sort a diagram for your home lab / network to make it easier for the wife to understand… a picture goes a long way towards the WAF (wife acceptance factor). That’s exactly what I had when I was looking for Visio Stencils for my Synology NAS (DS1515+). Have you ever been scouring the web only to come up a little short in what you’re looking for?! Update: I’ve finally moved the link to Github, hopefully this should stop it from expiring 🙂

Synology visio stencil download