That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them
The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery.
Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tech friend to keep it within their budget.
Synology is seen as the premium choice in the consumer NAS argument, so vertically integrating and charging a premium to guarantee “it just works” is not unprecedented.
There are definitely other NAS options as well, if someone is willing to take on more responsibility for understanding the tech.
I have a DS1515+ which has an SSD cache function that uses a whitelisted set of known good drives that function well.
If you plug in a non whitelisted ssd and try to use it as a cache, it pops up a stern warning about potential data loss due to unsupported drives with a checkbox to acknowledge that you’re okay with the risk.
So…there’s really no excuse why they couldn’t have done this for regular drives.
Everyone will understand it costing more, fewer people will understand why the NAS ate their data without the warning it was supposed to provide, because cheap drives that didn’t support certain metrics were used.
If Synology wants to have there be only one way that the device behaves, they have to put constraints on the hardware.
This copy operation is done either while the disk is idling, or forced by stop responding to read and write operations if CMR buffer zone is depleted and data has to be moved off. RAID softwares cannot handle the latter scenarios, and consider the disk faulty.
You can probably corner a disk into this depleted state to expose a drive being SMR based, but I don't know if that works reliably or if it's the right solution. This is roughly all I know on technical side of this problem anyway.
As long as Synology is up front in the requirement and has a return policy for users who buy one and are surprised, I think they’re well within their rights to decide they’re tired of dealing with support costs from misbehaving drives.
As long as they don’t retroactively enforce this policy on older devices I don’t understand the emotionality here. Haven’t you ever found yourself stuck supporting software / systems / etc that customers were trying to cheap out on, making their problems yours?
Toyota might have great reasons for opening a chain of premium quality gas stations, but the second they required me to use them, I'd never buy another Toyota for as long as I lived.
I want to bring my own drives, just as I have since I bought my first DS-412+ 13 years ago.
I see this kind of arguments “X had to do Y otherwise customers would complain” a lot every time a company does something shady and some contrarian wants to defend them, but it really isn't as smart as you think it is: the company doesn't care if people complain, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this kind of move either, because it raises a lot more complaints. Company only care if it affects their bottom line, that is if they can be liable in court, or if the problem is big enough to drive customers away. There's no way this issue would do any of those (at least not as much as what they are doing right now, by a very large margin).
It's just yet another case of an executive doing a shady move for short terms profits, there's no grand reasoning behind it.
This may be a bad move, and you’re certainly right that Synology expects to make more profit with this policy than without it, but it’s a more complex system than you understand. Irate customers calling support and review-bombing for their own mistakes are a real cost.
I don’t blame Synology for wanting to sell fewer units at higher prices to more professional customers. Hobbyists are man attractive market but, well, waves hands at the comments in this thread.
And when this issue happened with WD drives, I don’t remember a backlash against Synology at all. WD, on the other hand, deserved and received plenty of blame.
Is it though? Most (consumer) NAS systems are probably sold without the drives which are bough separately. When there is an issue with the drive and it breaks, I’m pretty sure most people technical enough to consider the need for a NAS would attribute that failure to the manufacturer of the drives, not to the manufacturer of the computer they put their drives into
Meaning that by default it could require a Synology drive that is at minimum going to work decently.
Want to mess around more and are more technical ? Make it a CLI command or something the average joe is going to be wary about. With a big warning message.
Personally I only like to buy very reliable enterprise class drives (probably much better than whatever Synology will officially sell) and this is my main concern.
But that's not what Synology did.
Also, if the image on the Synology page is accurate, they are relabeled Toshiba drives. Which doesn't really seem a good choice for SMB/SOHO NAS devices, because the Toshiba "Machine Gun" MGxx drives are the loudest drives on the market.
That said, I've since added an ssd and moved almost everything to the ssd (docker, the database and all apps) and it's much nicer in term of noise.
I wouldn't be sure why Toshiba M-prefixed 7K2 drives would be bad for NAS use cases. They're descendants of what were used in high performance SPARC servers. Hot, dense, obnoxious, but that's just Fujitsu. They're plenty reliable, performant, and perfect for your all-important on-line/near-line data! You just have to look away from bills(/s).
0: https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-r...
1: https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undiscl...
Synologoy SMB/SOHO NAS devices should not be affected by the drive lockdown (for now).
I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement).
Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR).
I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.
Will new firmware updates to everything before this require the Synology branded drives ?
If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.