If you have N hard drives and a USB drive, the traditional method is to use the USB drive as the boot device while installing the system onto each hard drive individually.

A 2-in-1 system works differently: part of one hard drive is allocated as the boot partition, while the remaining storage space stays unchanged. The biggest advantage is that it eliminates the need for a USB boot drive. This is especially suitable for machines like the Snail Star Interstellar NAS that come with a built-in SSD. After flashing the 2-in-1 system, the NAS can still boot into the system even if all other hard drives are removed.

At present, the 2-in-1 system supports:

mSATA SSDs
SATA SSDs
NVMe SSDs

By modifying the underlying code, we also enabled support for pure NVMe-based Synology systems, providing features that are not even available on official Synology devices.

This 2-in-1 solution is exclusively recompiled and optimized by our store based on the RR bootloader, and was first released by us. We are also the first to achieve online upgrade support for the 2-in-1 system.

Most other “2-in-1 systems” sold by other shops are actually based on our early versions and may contain various bugs, such as:

Windows virtual machines causing blue screens
AME activation failures
Slow boot times
Other compatibility issues

Please be careful when purchasing and do not choose counterfeit or low-quality products simply because they are cheaper, as this can seriously affect your user experience.