How to make your Synology Router perform as Apple Time Capsule compatible device

Jordan Ostreff -

Once you have found a suitable external USB drive compatible with usb 3.2/type A connector. You connect it to your router, and you're surprised to see that the SRM OS on device says you can't use that disk. You go to the synology website to check if there is a compatibility list and you are unpleasantly surprised by the fact that it is very poor. Of course, the external drive you have already purchased is not on the list.  What next?

Connect the drive to your computer and see what's on it using the command

diskutil list
/dev/disk2
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2000.0 GB    disk2

Is the problem not due to the disk being GPT and not MBR? Let's try to change it. Please note that this operation erases whatever is on the disk.

diskutil unmount /dev/disk2

diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 EMPTY MBRFormat /dev/disk2

If you are using an old version of MacOS ( The error may occur from Mac OS Leopard 10.5 to Yosemite 10.10. )  you will see an error like this:

FAT32 does not appear to be a valid file system format
Use diskutil listFilesystems to view a list of supported file systems

Find the correct filesystem alias by listing all available options:

diskutil listFilesystems

diskutil eraseDisk "ms-dos fat32" EMPTY MBRFormat /dev/disk2

The miracle happens and now SRM sees the disk, can reformat it, etc.
I highly recommend reformatting it as ext4 filesystem.