This however is a deal breaker for me as I'd hate to be locked in to their drives for all the reasons in TFA but also as a matter of principle.
I hope Synology will reconsider!
The first one I bought is still in service at my parents' place, silently and reliably backing up their cloud files and laptops.
I was fully expecting to buy more in the future, but this is a dealbreaker. If a disk goes bad, I want to go to the local store, pick one up, and have the problem fixed half an hour later. I do not want to figure out where I can get approved disks, what sizes are available, how long it will take to ship them, etc.
I've recently installed Unraid on an old PC, and the experience has been surprisingly good. It's not as nice as a Synology, but it's not difficult, either. It's just a bit more work. I've also heard that HexOS plans to support heterogeneous disks, and I plan to check it out once that is available.
So that's the direction I'll be going in instead.
Sounds like this is the problem with Synology... How are they going to make money when their products are so good!
Which is along the same trend line I'm seeing for my purchases.
That's pretty solid for hardware sales.
My guess is that they've over invested in things like their "drive" office software suite, and don't know how to monetize it or recoup costs.
I like Synology, but locking me to their drives is a hard "no thanks" from me.
Next NAS won't be from them if that's their play...
Forcing their drives is a tax on top of an already existing tax. Synology already charges a premium for lower end specs than the competition. If that's not enough to compensate for the longer upgrade cycles, and they want a hand in every cookie jar it's just going to be a hard pass for me.
I upgraded my Synology box every few years and this is exactly the time I was looking to go to the next model. And I'd pull the trigger and buy a current model before they implement the policy but the problem is now I don't trust that they won't retroactively issue an update that cripples existing models somehow. QNAP or the many alternative HW manufacturers that support an arbitrary OS are starting to be that much more attractive.
Synology seems to have gone entirely the other direction here. Most of their software is given away for free, but the hardware is being monetized.
Additionally - the hardware has different operating constraints. I think the big deal for Synology is that they probably assumed that storage need growth would equate to sales growth.
EX - Synology may have assumed that if I need to store 1TB in 2010, and 5TB in 2015, that would equate to me buying additional NAS hardware.
But often, HDD size increases mean that I can keep the same number of bays and just bump drive size.
Which... is great for me as a user, but bad for Synology (this almost single handedly explains this move, as an aside - I just think it's a bad play).
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I'd rather they just charged for the software products they're blowing all their money on, or directly tie upgrades to the software products to upgrading hardware.