Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs | Hacker News Reader

Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

guru3d.com

1,037 pointsbaobun667 comments

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale.

Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.

My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.

What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.

I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated.

The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.

I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.

Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.

Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.

I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2).

So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.

They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding which seems like a baffling position to take given their audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265 and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology OS because they remove the transcoders.

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.

I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago, and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically unusable on the anemic CPU it came with— it would spend multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for a few gigs of digital photos.

After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.

I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.

I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a happy decision so far.

When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.

AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet, either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct their course.

I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.

>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make

I was almost ready to pull the trigger on a few grand of their stuff when the bombshell drooped. Am going with Ubiquiti now.

What are the alternatives that you are considering?

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".

I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...

I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.

> Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject > support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".

All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."

Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being crazily overpriced.

That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the latter without doing the former. Synology actively and painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives.

Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.

This was greenlit as a cash grab first, justify support later.

They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.

If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.

They could also oppose the change simply out of a belief in what's best for the customers, and an ethos of hardware compatibility. It would represent no change to their burden to continue the company's long-standing policy.

Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.

Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.

I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent.

It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.

I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)

What if you were to run your guest ssh in a container with the relevant volumes attached? I can't recall how the base ssh works with Synology DSM, but everything interesting I do with my NAS is done with containers.

I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.

At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.

People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.

Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.

They're a fun bunch.

Sounds like you don't argue hard enough

Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are building their own NAS because they will just see the spec sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very performant to begin with.

And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.

Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.

I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because it's easy.

If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.

I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual contact with the support people in your organization to understand this. If the people answering phones and chats didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in advance to test with.

We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3 (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface. No product is perfect but these interfaces are very well tested and billions of machines run as expected with them. The move from them was purely for money reasons.

Open source alternatives such as OpenMediaVault are able to support virtually any hardware. That's no excuse for a company like Synology

Are you saying Synology’s move to support first party drives was a good thing? Plenty of companies deal with unpredictable hardware and, in fact, Synology has for years, in part thanks to standards.

There are way too many companies where higher ups and marketing will refuse to listen to the engineers about what people actually like about their products.

See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it

Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?

My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.

Because trying to explain stupid decisions is annoying and listening to endless complaints is demoralizing.

Source: worked AppleCare

A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.

I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle.

Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.

In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.

I'm curious, do you know of examples of companies that lost their best engineers despite reversing course on a shitty policy?

My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.

There is a time span between the policy is comitted internally and the time that policy is reverted. In Synology's case it's probably more than half a year, in other companies it could take a full year or more to reverse course.

Half a year is plenty enough to move away.

Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.

Yes and choosing a NAS brand is not something you change your mind like switching an android phone brand after 2-3years. This will stick quite a bit.

Yep. I’d already started moving things out of Docker on my DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology’s police shoved me toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device. It’s going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell.

In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.

A bad reputation never goes away either. Trust once lost is not something that returns easily. Some customers might forgive a company but many wont and any business willing to be this scummy will almost certainly do something else (or the same thing again in a few years).

"That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years" is a strong argument against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you loose in a minute.

Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn’t happen.

https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/

This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to. The reality is that often such leaders can come out net positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to the ground because they extracted out everything in a short term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But at least the company and its products disappear. It's evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some kind of internal hero.

I also believe that this peek into the mentality of the organization leadership makes doubt in customers if the organization can be trusted again. I, personally, will think more than twice before choosing them again. This will be several years of recovery for the reputation, if it ever happens at all. Synology is in the box called 'squeezing cutomers for money' and the customer has no incentive to spend any time or money to test if the classification is still valid. Will stay there, despite this step. There is doubt that they changed their way of thinking. They only reacted to the repercussion to THIS specific action of theirs, that became measurably very bad for THEM. It was not like they revised their action after the outcry, no. They had to bleed, they want to stop THEIR bleeding, not making it good again for the customer. benefit for the remaining customers is just a coincidence here. I am not hopeful for their change of mentality. Which could be something disappointing to hear for faithful employees.

Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O

This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions before a decision is made and before the consequences are revealed. Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the right answer was easily accessible. There's probably some people who got this right who could take a shot at running things, but you can't know without having the dissenting opinions in writing ahead of time.

Lock-in actually helps internal development. If you're targeting fixed hardware, writing software gets a lot easier.

Your "guess" is not logical.

Would you say the same thing about Apple?

The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice.

Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it.

The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).

Synology has equivalent competition. Apple doesn’t.

Because if you say something bad about Apple you get downvoted to oblivion.

In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the leadership who did this not being impacted or punished is even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it’s much worse for morale.

> it also severely impacts internal morale.

I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.

The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.

If their branded hard drives are so good, they needn't be afraid of their customers having a choice.

If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them.

Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.

We shouldn't normalize referring to managers as leaders. Leadership didn't make this decision, management did.

High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.

The ship has sailed. I'm eyeing the Unifi UNAS 8 which ships this month.

Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a bad decision (or even a decision that’s seen to be bad)? In my experience internal morale often suffers before the customers catch on.

This really feels like they hired a study from one of the big 3 and this the recommendation they came up with.

It's this level of out of touch with their market that gives me zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times according to their package manager, rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They deserve their own downfall, utter corporate stupidity.

> killed their Videostation product ... rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders

YES, yes, a million times yes.

Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.

> That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years.

People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.

It's an interesting lesson.

I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:

* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.

* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.

So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.

If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.

But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.

To me it's obvious why they initially chose to use validated hardware:

1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.

2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.

3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.

However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.

The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers.

See the problem there...?

The decision to restrict 3rd party harddrives may be part of the reason why sales (allegedly) plummet, but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part.

Synology has been resting on the laurels for years. They had a "hit" with DSM 6, then did mostly nothing for a decade, released DSM 7, and again, nothing but minor things since. On the hardware side of things, they're mostly still using decade old hardware, but i guess that matches the Linux kernel they're using, which was also EOL close to a decade ago.

Meanwhile the NAS market has been flooded by viable alternatives with better hardware, equal or better software, and usually cheaper. UGREEN and others have released more or less drop in replacements, and Ubiquiti released the UNAS line, and while it doesn't work as an application server, will run around circles any similarly specced (drive wise) Synology in raw file transfer performance, for half the price.

I'm guessing the 3rd party drive removal was simply just the final push that caused many people to switch to something else. Transcoding removal was likely also a big driver, as many people also use their Synology NAS as a Plex server.

As someone else mentioned here, I'd wager a large part of Synology customers were people who'd have had the technical ability to setup their own NAS server but didn't want to bother, instead electing a "setup and forget" solution. I know that's who I was when I bought my first Syno DS several years ago.

A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpriced, outdated hardware that weren't worth DSM's ease of use. Got Ubiquiti's UNAS with a couple of HDDs, a Beelink mini PC, and for a little time and roughly the same budget of a DS, got something far superior in specs and basically matching in ease of use.

Similar, but slightly different story for me. I ended up buying it as an enthusiast ‘Apple-grade’ product where UX was there to do something I would be able to do on my own. Then they got high on their own supply and started to believe they can be as restrictive and up charging as Apple, forgetting that they’re still a product for primarily fairly technical people.

Also, for all server needs I’m running a Raspberry Pi at a single digit fraction of the ongoing power use of my Synology, and it just no longer makes sense to have this weird rare platform as my base when I could just be running things on Debian and systemd.

More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have the mental capacity and willingness to maintain something like a Synology. The only large content I back up are my family’s photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.

Yep. I was one of those. Started with QNAP, went to Synology because their stuff was more powerful for the price (Could run Docker stuff on it and upgrade memory)

Then it stopped booting and the light just blinked -> it happened to be close to Black Friday and I had been thinking about moving to a bespoke build with Unraid for a while. Pulled the trigger and dropped some cash on the problem.

Finally I found out the issue was a bad PSU: it kinda-sorta fails, a common problem, just enough to start booting the system but it fails when all the drives start up.

Bought a 3rd party PSU from Amazon and now it's my offsite backup.

I literally built a NAS this past weekend and put TrueNAS on it and man has it been humbling learning to administer it. I’m able to get basic stuff working now after drowning in permissions hell for a day but I’m basically getting myself out of that by doing the linux equivalent of running more and more things as administrator in Windows until I stop getting errors. I might well have been a Synology customer before they did this nonsense but now I’m going to end up learning how to run a Linux server at least semi competently.

Exactly that. Their hardware and software hardly improved over a decade, instead they dropped features. The whole HDD ordeal and researching alternatives also made me realize that I’d rather have ZFS (even at the price of less flexibility with mixing drive sizes). Synology reversing course on the proprietary HDDs therefore won’t win me back.

Their btrfs is using a very old branches with tons of change, which is probably a strong reason why they're locked on that old kernel.

They need to do something about it urgently.

They're too busy using an EOL Docker engine that hasn't seen a security update in 16 months.

Oh nice, thanks for mentioning UGREEN. I had a quick look at the website and it looks fairly cheap. I wouldn't trust their software but the base system comes on an MMC, does it mean I can flash it with TrueNAS or Unraid?

Yes, their units come with a HDMI out, and you can connect them up to install onto them like any other server - but if you ever want the (admittedly very, very good) factory software back on them I'd recommend imaging the internal storage first as I couldn't find a way to get their OS installed back afterwards.

While I'm using UGOS happily, yes you can install other OSes. For better or worse they have a very active Discord server with a ton of great information.

The base software is modified Debian Bookworm and it's been stable and pleasant to use.

Yes, see here: https://nascompares.com/guide/truenas-on-a-ugreen-nas-instal...

Can you run Unraid on MMC? Its licensing is tied to the GUID of a USB stick.

It is 100% normal x86 mini-PC, just with HDD bays.

Synology was in the back of my head for years as a straightforward home server product, but emphasis on "years". The other day I saw a competitor that had a hand grenade sized alternative, a cooling with 4 or 8 1 TB M2 SSDs arranged around it. And I thought, why the fuck is Synology still top of mind?

I suppose they have plenty of corporate customers still, companies that are too small for their own proper servers (self managed or hosted) but who do want some central storage and more importantly the tech support that comes with it. But those would just as likely go to Dell for all their requirements.

I think they are for premium segment creators like photographers, videographers or musicians. They have the money to invest and want a plug and play experience.

I have to wonder how much to 3 new NAS systems from Ubiquiti played into this. They seem pretty targeted at Synology at a great price. I have the original UNAS pro and it has been fantastic.

Sure I can't run apps on it, but how much do people really run apps on their synology vs just use it as a basic NAS to begin with? I never found any of the apps really all that great to begin with. The only one I kinda liked was synology sync but really don't need something like that with freesync.

In my mind app support is the main reason to pick Synology. They may not always be as capable as the best self hostable and/or commercial alternatives, but they are easy for people with intermediate skills to set up and maintain. That makes them a good deal for prosumer homes and SMBs without a dedicated IT guy. And with the way the Synology apps are designed you're then somewhat locked in.

You can get basic network storage more or less anywhere, for much cheaper, so in my mind apps and the polished GUI + integration are the only reason you would even consider Synology unless you're already locked in. Maybe technical support contracts at the higher end, but you can get that, done better, from other vendors too.

Regarding lack of innovation: They still haven’t made the jump to NVMe.

They have things with two slots, which I guess is good enough for raid 1, but those models also have HDD bays, which wastes space in network closets.

I’d expect them to have something with 4-8 incredibly well-cooled m.2 slots by now. The nic is only 2.5G, so the slots wouldn’t need to be full speed.

I’m happy with my ancient 2TB synology NAS, but it’s bigger, slower, noisier and hotter than my mini-pc, which also has two (toasty) nvme slots.

IIRC the only devices supported in the NVMe slots are their own Synology branded ones at a steep markup. It would be nice if they backed down on that too but I bet they won't.

" i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part."

Totally. Whenever a company runs out of ideas they pull BS like this to increase profits.

> as a Plex server

Well, Jellyfin. Plex pulled a Slymology long ago.

I have an old lifetime license, so I’m still using it. No issues at all. I also have a lifetime license for Emby but plex is way more polished.

>>> but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part.

It's a NAS. It just needs to be reliable.

There are plenty of NAS boxes out there with better specs, lower power consumption, faster networking, and half the price.

Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.

In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.

Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).

And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.

If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).

Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.

The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.

If you know what Synology is, you know it's more than just network based storage.

But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it, as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can’t upgrade the component and should buy the whole unit. The construction is plastic.

I have a 920+, and it’s too slow, frequently becomes unresponsive when multiple tasks are run.

They lag, and need to be constantly forced to improve?

Min/Max pricing theory?

Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.

Why?

Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics, office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.

Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.

So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.

There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of the above.

But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid running the show.

The economic notion is called marginal profitability. Better sales are a good thing if the marginal profit is positive, ie, each extra unit sold still increases the overall profit, so in your example it's still profitable if the new model brings $1.5 profit per unit, and you stop only when the marginal profit per unit turns negative.

In tech the model is often misleading, since the large investments to improve the product are not just a question of current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.

Shouldn't you be pricing the increased cost of support/sales/marketing into your profit calculations?

> So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.

This will never work in a competitive market like for NAS. The only thing that will get you higher profit margins is a good reputation. If you're coasting by on your reputation, sales and customer experience matter. Less sales one quarter means less people to recommend your product in the next one, which is a downward spiral. A worse customer experience obviously is also a huge problem as it makes people less likely to recommend your product even if they bought it.

They went for a triple-whammy here from which they likely won't recover for years. They now have less customers, less people who are likely to recommend their product, and their reputation/trustworthiness is also stained long-term.

Crappier products at higher margins only works if you're a no-name brand anyways, have no competition, or have a fanatical customer base.

This seems to be the model that Broadcom is going with VMware.

I totally agree with you.

The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.

As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464. The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip, 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.

Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing only good things about their own system AND (except for the smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and flexible with support for the own OS.

As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2 for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.

Surprising to read your take

Transcoding was the reason I moved away from Synology. The rest was fine, not great but ... Okay

But there was no way to improve transcoding performance. If a stream lagged, it would always lag. Hence I jumped ship and just made my own

I sold my synology for an AOOStar WTR Max. It arrived with an issue (usb4 port didn't work) but replacement was quick and easy. So far, I'm rather happy. Really hesitated with Minisforum.

There's some DIY chassis that are pretty small like Jonsbo n2, great since you can upgrade CPU later on. https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/11/diy-nas-2025-edition.ht...

Ugreen, aoostar and terramaster are also good alternatives.

I wish transcoding was available on my 1819+. (It isn't.)

I've had a couple of Synology drives for many years (DS1520+, DS918+). They've always worked fine (still chugging away).

I have had terrible luck with Drobo.

Yep, I had two different models that had been running for about seven years each and had an excellent experience overall until Synology tried to change their drive policy.

I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.

They have way underpowered cpus compared to what you can get for the same money elsewhere. They're just a bad deal.

What kind of tasks?

I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.

Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).

This kept me from buying one too. One of the models I considered would make me choose between an M.2 cache OR a 10gbe nic. I didn't know they are plastic now either. It's a shame, I really want to like them. I also heard it some "bootleg" OS you could install over DSM but not sure what it's called. Synology were trying to silence it iirc

Are there any other NASes out there that a) support ZFS/BTRFS, b) support different-sized drives in a single pool, and c) allow arbitrary in-place drive upgrades?

Last I checked, I believe I didn't find anything that satisfied all three. So DSM sits in a sweet spot, I think. Plus, plastic or not, Synology hardware just looks great.

I don't know why you got downvoted, you're right. Many models that are currently on sale as new models have CPUs that are 10 years old.

I have a 10G NIC in my DS923+.

I agree with the rest, though.

10G. You're cute.

My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.

NOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read:

https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...

The article is about the changed actual policy deployed with DSM 7.3, that only just started rolling out. Your link hasn’t been updated in over two months, so doesn’t reflect that yet.

Edit: Updated KB article is here: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...

This is not "my" link. That link is part of their press release.

Because I am no longer sure people are all getting shown the same content for that URL, here is what is shown to me (no local caches or proxies):

Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series

Details

FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP

Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.

Last self-reply on this, I promise:

If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:

AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.

So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.

Thanks for sharing.

It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure.

Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.

Nah, not really. They already have a compatibility page of known-good drives and they recommend people stick to it. They could also have an incompatibility list showing known-bad drives, and alerting if you install one of them.

If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don’t blame Toyota. But if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase wouldn’t have that same limitation.

Just commented here to point out that this news story spreading is wrong (and that other IT news outlets have since corrected/retracted it), don't have any eggs in that basket, but:

Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models, putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers identical NAS drive model is then listed as incompatible.

There is nothing remotely connected to actual technology involved in this story at all. This is a sales-strategy-only subject.

Any example of such damaging blowback that is ravaging other NAS vendors who carelessly allow their users to recklessly use inappropriate drives?

Exec summary for those who think their time is not worth this evil madness:

The only change is that they now allow you to use any 2.5" SATA SSD. Everything else, meaning: 2.5" SATA HDDs (the by far most common thing you would want to use) and NVME SSDs: Still a no-no.

No, there was no lesson learned here by them at all.

The liked article specifically is wrong here:

"Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs"

No, not hard drives. 2.5" SSDs only.

Very sorry to spoil the party, but sadly Synology STILL hasn't learned the lesson. :(

Let's check again after they have lost 95% of their customers...

> DS Plus series (DSM 7.3): > HDD > Not Listed > Supported for: > New installation and storage pool creation

This is the main change. Other series (not Plus) are still locked down.

Regardless, the fact that this is even a question or has ambiguity/uncertainty in any way is enough to get me to never use a Synology NAS.

What are you talking about. This is a quote directly from the page you’ve linked to:

> At the same time, with the introduction of DSM 7.3, 2025 DiskStation Plus series models offer more flexibility for installing third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs when creating storage pools.

> Last updated:Jul 30, 2025

Appears to be stale documentation.

Incompetency.

Good to get this fact about the Synology organization.

Thanks Synology, but it's too late. I have found out TrueNAS and ASUSTOR (which can run TrueNAS if I want to). I'll continue from that path.

Thanks for all the fish, that was an enlightening experience.

OTOH, I wish them luck. They look fine for un-techy folks to store their data locally. Would like them to stick around. Also, competition is always good.

Same - replaced my smaller Synology with a UGREEN, put TrueNAS on it first thing, runs great. The HDD thing was only the final nail in the coffin, but before that, there were plenty of ridiculous "upgrades" that made products worse than in the previous generation. Literally removing features, or continuing to use the same outdated hardware. That's what companies do that don't think they have competition.

ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a PCIe slot...

You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental erasure.

All over great design.

Yes, it's not cheap, but it's almost enterprise class hardware for home, and that's a good thing.

Interesting how it seems a bunch of competition entered the market right as they did this as well. Unifi UNAS just came out and looks pretty compelling

Asustor is not new. I remember seeing it at the university (probably) a decade ago. It was a much simpler 4 disk unit without any screens or fancy specs. My professor told that the looks might be deceiving but it was a good unit.

I took a note of them mentally at that point, but their latest gen hardware is something else. Since I'm a sysadmin by trade, having some of the features that I have in the datacenter at home is a compelling proposition for me.

They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them.

Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.

And they might only be backtracking to get a few more sales until re-applying the restrictions, feeling justified because that's how the devices were originally advertised.

The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your device if you catch it in time").

I agree with the first.

For the second, Synology has an option to apply important updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret the new option to mean something like still installing the updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with stories of bricked machines.

What I don't get is, what's the point of doing it quietly? Bad publicity hurt your sales.

How is sneaking in a fix and hoping people notice going to help sales?

Meh.. i do kinda forgive them. They tried, they lost, they reveserd their decision and hope to keep their customers (read:sales) happy. There are plenty of companies which would double or triple down their bad decisions and flatly tell the customer is the problem.

Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we could not put in any harddisk we'd wanted, but most of our customers did not really care, so we didn't as well. If you absolutely need superb storage you should stop using NASes anyway and get a far better (but more expensive) solution.

Then again if i myself want some NAS functionality, i'd fire up a Debian with Samba using any hardware i want.

They did that though. They have doubled down and told the users they were wrong & that this was a needed

Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-removes...

"Synology fucks around and finds out, more at 11"

Don't get confused here: they didn't decide that their policy change was wrong — they just didn't expect quite as much backlash.

Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.

Yes exactly - and they still have aging hardware, only 1Gb Ethernet and have recently nerfed H.265 support.

This is a mixed bag. As someone who worked in the storage industry for ~10 years, there are a lot of poorly defined behaviors that are vendor/model specific and I can see how its easier to just pick a particular model, test it and declare it the blessed version having done similar stuff myself.

Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a disk should be replaced, or the user warned about possible impending doom, to simple things like how one sets cache WT/WB and flushes the caches (range based flushing is a thing, doesn't always work, etc) for persistence.

OTOH, much of this is just 'product maturity' because it is possible to have a blessed set of SMART/etc attributes that are understood a certain way and test to see if they exist/behave as expected and warn the user with something like "this drive doesn't appear to report corrected read errors in a way that our predictive failure algorithm can use". Or "This drive appears to be a model that doesn't persist data with FUA when the caches are set to write back, putting your data at risk during a power failure, would you still like to enable writeback?"

And these days with the HD vendors obfuscating shingled drives or even mixing/matching the behavior in differing zones its probably even worse.

So initially I wanted to give you a knee-jerk response about how Synology could have gone with a warning rather than an outright ban. Then I read the article...

It seems that this was never an outright ban, but non-blessed drives either generated a warning or they had reduced functionality. What TFA fails to mention is what this "reduced functionality" is.

If it's something like RAID rebuilds take longer because other drives might not have the requisite SMART attributes or some other function that's required is one thing. But halving the drive speed just because it's not a Synology drive is another. This knowledge would put me in a better position to know if I should harshly judge them or not.

I think it's totally fair to raise a warning that a particular drive has not been tested/validated and therefore certain guarantees cannot be met. I can fully respect how challenging it must be to validate your product against a basically infinite combinatorial collection of hardware parts. I've learnt long ago that just because a part fits does not mean it works.

They could have a list of supported vendors then.

Thank god they reversed course. I’m coming up on needing another NAS and I was not looking forward to digging through alternatives.

I’ve run raw Linux servers, I’ve run UnRaid, and now I have Synology and it’s been the best “set it and forget it” solution yet. Yes, the hardware is overpriced but it works and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.

That's a shame IMO. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go down the right path. I built a NAS 5 years ago in a Fractal Design Node 804 and put TrueNAS Core on it (back then it was called FreeNAS). It's been totally "set and forget" for me. The only thing I've done in 5 years is upgrade TrueNAS, which has always worked flawlessly.

I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly corrupt the data.

I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.)

If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to ship this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as Network Attached Storage, after all.)

You should still look at alternatives. A NAS company that is willing to consider a move like this even once is not a trustworthy company.

It shows you that their management is probably not making the right decisions in other areas as well.

I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots and other maintenance.

On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.

I've always opted for building my own and running linux every time it has come down to replacing, but I might split out NAS and compute this time and take a chance on a UGREEN one (maybe DH4300?), the reviews look solid for a new product segment from them.

I'm likely not buying a Synology at this point.

If anyone has one of their (UGREEN) models (or other brands) I'd be interested in hearing perspectives.

Edit: A lot more mentions of their models in the thread elsewhere at this point.

Good luck when it doesn't work though. I decided to take the hit and pay their exorbitant HDD prices on the basis that they came with a warranty etc and one of the drives failed within 3 months.

It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the drive at my own expense from the UK to Germany and they didn't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their warehouse. I had to buy another drive to repair my RAID cluster while waiting. Absolutely outrageous customer support.

If you just want storage and not apps, Ubiquiti's UNAS line is a much better choice, especially if you're in their ecosystem.

For me, it's too late. I've already set up TrueNAS, and I found it a lot more user-friendly than I expected. Particularly now that ZFS AnyRaid is making good progress, I don't see myself going back to Synology.

> According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced. What did NAS customers purchase instead?

I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.

I think they were hoping they had enough "appliance operators" in their userbase that they wouldn't be able to go elsewhere or improvise with gear on hand. Which, given the people most likely to buy a prosumer NAS device is silly

Companies like that will always tried once they believe they are captured enough market shares. If I can influence that kind of decision, I will certainly advocate not to renew Synology gear parcs...

Yeah, I was waiting for the DS1525+, but after it was announced and the HD restrictions were confirmed, I eventually decided to buy the DS1522+ instead.

An older Synology model, in my case. I just bought a DS1522+ for this very reason. Haven't even provisioned it yet.

So, thanks, guys, I guess.

Change Synology with HP, NAS with printer and HDD with ink cartridge. How does that sound like?

> What did NAS customers purchase instead?

I just settled for a budget QNAP unit. Been great tbh

My 918+ was a huge step up from my homebrew homelab server. People who advocate for a duct tape solution for systems that contain their entire lives on their disks are doing most people a disfavor. Having a well baked disk and backup storage system is critical.

I switched a year ago to Ugreen UNAS just given the generational leap of their hardware and reasonable per-disk pricing over synology.

I didn’t trust you agree with OS, but that ended up being incredibly easily remedy by just shoving true Nas on the system.

All that sad if I had waited another half-year, I wouldn’t have gone down that path but instead would’ve picked up a UniFi NAS, which is even more optimal from a cost and integration into my ecosystem. Since that really is just network attack storage - I could just let my old Home lap server act like a server on top of a NAS.

The lessons from this are many. First is that hardware is not a moat. Thanks to china that’s no longer a factor. The second is that software isn’t a moat anymore either. Synology leveraged Linux and then walled garden their solution and decided to not innovate. Now open source and in the future AI have made it so software is significantly cheaper to work with.

That means we are back to loyalty and brand awareness. Both are things that synology has squandered with this adventure.

Too bad. I switched to UGREEN (DXP6800 Pro) will likely stick with them now. It was easy to install an alternate OS (Fedora 42 in my case) on it, and the hardware appears to be very nicely built.

I switched to Ugreen 2800 and very happy so far. Looks promising and n100 gives plenty of room for containers

Also switched to a UGREEN, in this case the DXP4800 Plus. Truenas runs pretty nicely on it! One critique I'd have of this setup is it's a lot noisier than my older Synology setup, but I think that's more to do with the HDDs than the case.

Too little, too late... My current Synology box will likely be my last, I might get another 5-bay expansion, but even that is really iffy. I just don't like the decisions like this that they've continued to make... more lock in, more restrictive features, etc.

For that matter, in the 4-6 drive SOHO range, there are a LOT of NAS products with decent consumer upgrade options and alternative OS support with okay compute power. Not to mention the prosumer options for software that support these devices as well as DIY options are pretty good as well, less than the premium that Synology charges for their hardware.

HA HA HA HA HA I really hope the C-suite that decided this gets no bonus and hopefully a salary cut this year. Stupid, anti-consumer measures like this need proper consequences so they stop happening. Until then, let's keep boycotting companies with anti-consumer practices.

You obviously dont understand capitalism. They'll probably get an increase in bonus with company layoffs occurring.

I installed Seagate Ironwolf Pro in my Synology last night.

It complained it wasn't compatible.

If that drive isn't compatible than I don't know what legitimate criteria possibly could be.

(Yes, I get the criteria is "what we prioritized to test" but my point stands,it's the high end of consumer-available NAS drives, not a compute model or a shucked SMR drive:)

IIRC it was official Synology-branded drives only. And they cost about twice as much as the exact same drives without the Synology brand.

I wish the article put actual numbers or evidence of declining sales. I agree that reduction of sales is the most likely cause, but if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it becomes poor journalism.

Hmm, I couldn't find a source for that elsewhere, just slop rereporting in loops.

If they had insider leaks I would imagine they mentioned that aspect so it's possible that this part is derived from speculation.

I just went ahead and editorialized the title with the insertion of an "allegedly" since the sales drop part is unsubstantiated.

> if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it becomes poor journalism

Proof is a high ask. Evidence would be great. But here yeah, waving the premise of the article away with "some reports say" is hardly journalism.

Too little, too late. The second they made that decision, I struck Synology as a partner for both my homelab (gotta replace the DS1019+ at some point) and in my purchasing capacity at work. That was some NetApp-grade BS and I wasn’t going to tolerate it.

I’m just glad the NAS scene saw the opening left by Synology’s boneheaded decision-making and capitalized on it. Unraid and TrueNAS have stormed the battlefield and shown Synology’s typical plus-line customers that they can get more for less with a bit of DIY, and NUC vendors have capitalized on this misstep with NAS hardware platforms that just require your preferred software/OS to operate.

This singular decision is going to take a decade of good will to undo. Astonishing that they footgunned themselves so bad, so willingly.

I started with a Synology. I still have it running, but it is only used for backups now. My second system was a repurposed PC running Proxmox with various services containerized. I was impressed with it. However, I got to tinkering with Unraid and really love it. It is what synology tries to be, but better in every way (IMO).

After 17 years I dropped Synology recently. I sold my 2 NAS. Company changed focus. Did not like the walled garden and old linux base.

I moved to a second hand beefed-up laptop and a terramaster disk pack connected vi USB. Same wattage.

It does take some effort, but now it is done. I like to tinker anyway. I pulled up Proxmox with a bunch of containers doing SMB/SNF per share.

Just like with Synology, I just look a regular emails with successful backups. edit: typos

Plus, a built-in UPS!

I used to recommend Synology everywhere, but ever since the hard drive lock issue, I'm now trying to dissuade people from buying it. The policy reversal is a good thing, but trust isn't something you can restore simply by "reversing" it.

One week too late for me. Didn't feel like scratch building a new machine and finding a low TDP mobo with a bunch of SATA ports. Wanted to go Synology but dragged my feet for months watching this play out.

In the meantime, I became enamored with the Jonbo cases and started seeing white label N100 ITX mobos pop up with a bunch of SATA ports. Eventually figured out they were Topton when Brian Moses included them (and a Jonbo case!) in this year's NAS build.

So my parts are arriving in a few days and Synology has lost one potential new customer.

Hope the CEO realized when this was instigated that it's not as simple as reversing the decision, every Youtube video about it, every review that mentions it, every tweet that mentions it, every reddit post saying "Don't buy Synology" because of it and every LLM trained on that data will be there and showing up in searches and harming sales for at least a decade.

I think it would be pretty cool if Framework made a TrueNAS targeted NAS box.

I have a ds920 4 bay from synology.

It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes).

But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again.

I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.

I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.

UGREEN isn't really build your own. The hardware is similar to Synology (but I think slightly better made, and definitely with much higher specs). But unlike Synology it's easy to install your own OS. I used Fedora, but a lot of people are using TrueNAS which is almost as turn-key as the Synology software.

For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in future as long as they don't do anything stupid.

>I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.

Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable

Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box that is mostly just an SMB share

I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.

Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.

> just plugs in and works as a tech guy installing TrueNAS likely isn't a barrier for you, and will almost definitely 'just work' more reliably

there are plenty "barebones" NAS offerings that have the nice formfactor but you bring your own HDDs and OS

What are the specifics of the SSDs you chose? I understand you have to go for specific types/models to make sure they don't melt down too quickly.

TrueNAS has solved that for me, by making my computer into a NAS appliance. It's great.

"build your own" just means buy a desktop PC and install an O/S

Six years ago my box shit the fan. Synology could have recovered it for me, but they insisted I "upgraded" to their newest box. That was when I realized that I would never buy from them again. Thank goodness their hybrid raid is at least MDRAID.

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/d3cmq2/ds1512_tha...

Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at idle with no power save mode).

I don't understand. Recovered how? As far as I know, like many electronics companies, they don't do repairs period. If an enclosure fails under warranty, they replace it. They don't repair it.

So if your NAS motherboard died out of warranty and they no longer sold that model, it's not surprising they recommended you buy the current version of that model.

So I don't know what you were expecting? Hardware dies. What did you want them to do?

It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry standard expandable memory and storage.

From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.

Are these devices really better than a Samba server on a plain Linux distro? I run one on a retired gaming PC and access it remotely through a Wireguard tunnel. I feel like any proprietary solution is going to be far less elegant or flexible.

IMHO: No. It's just a Linux box. It may be a Linux box with a neat GUI, but it's still a Linux box. It doesn't do anything particularly unique.

I run [almost all of] my home's network services on my present-day desktop rig, which... these days, runs Linux[1].

ZFS with RAID and snapshots? Backups for intermittently-connected stuff like my laptop? Plex and friends? Containers (oh my!)? Desktop stuff? Samba stuff? Yep. And other than GTA:V Online, it seems able to play everything I try in my Steam library with no particular effort on my part.

I don't notice when backups are happening. I don't notice when people are using Plex, and they don't notice when I'm gaming. It performs fine for absolutely everything that gets thrown at it -- concurrently.

I've got an inkling to upgrade the hardware soon. Unlike a "dedicated NAS appliance," I can accomplish this by buying bog-standard ATX hardware and stuffing it into the existing bog-standard ATX case -- just as people in DIY circles did for ~decades before PCs became more appliance-like (and/or fishtank-like).

Once that's done, I may think about doing some 10GbE stuff and turning the old hardware into a more-dedicated NAS. Separating the storage from the applications, in this way, sounds fun. But it won't improve performance -- it'll just be a homelab exercise that I'll live with and learn from (and may elect to reverse).

All those words, just to iterate that I have zero interest in buying a snaky-feeling Synology box. It doesn't give me anything that I want that I'm not already doing.

If your retired gaming PC is doing everything you want, then: Keep doing that (unless/until power consumption or something else becomes a concern).

[1]: For most of a decade before I decided to go back to using a Linux desktop, I still ran Linux -- but always with the desktop portion being Windows running in a VM (with its own dedicated GPU and USB adapter and...). That was fun, too, but I got tired of working primarily with Windows.

Difficult to answer your question. Sounds like you just want a simple network share, so obviously would not be taking advantage of the other features these systems offer.

After all the complaints and upheaval created after their silly management/leadership decision, they finally understood something.

As an owner and administrator of many Synology NASes I agree that Synology offerings are a bit underpowered compared to what is available in the market (from H/W point of view), but the ease of use and peace of mind within the Synology ecosystem (DSM software, apps) outweighs whatever drawbacks they have.

If Synology management takes the decision to refresh their H/W with new CPUs, NICs and more RAM, I'm sure they'll stay on the market ;-)

Well, this was a pretty myopic decision.

You can't ever buy a NAS without having complete flexibility in drives, both in the short and long term, because the claims of hard drive manufacturers can't ever be trusted until verified individually, per drive model..

Western Digital lied about their drives having SMR instead of CMR as their RED drives were marketed for NAS usage: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-class-action-lawsuit-sm...

Add to that how one model of a hard drive from a manufacturer will be invincible, while another model next to it will have huge issues.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...

I hear Synology has nice gear, it has always been pretty nice when I interacted with it. I own a different brand just through deciding to have a NAS with more flexibility that I could grow into if I wanted.

I never understood this. The customer type that wants to run an NAS is technically capable. They may choose to run a all-in-one NAS like those from Synology or are ubiquity because of the convenience but if you then make it inconvenient for them by adding these unnecessary hard drive restrictions, they can just as easily go to either another provider or run their own.

Talk about not knowing your customer.

>Critics say the entire episode has damaged Synology’s reputation. The company seemed to believe that after QNAP’s well-known ransomware troubles, it could tighten control of the market without losing customers.

Granted that there might be some bias at work as a Synology customer, but I heard a lot more about Synology's lockdown efforts than I heard of QNAP's ransomware troubles.

If you're looking for a really good alternative: Supermicro makes large chassis that will hold a fair number of drives (I have one that will take drives). They're usually sold cheap on ebay and other such sites when they're written off. If you're willing to replace a couple of fans and do your own software installation they're unbeatable for value-for-money, and they last just about forever. I've still got two Synology diskstations with 12 bays each and one extender. But the Supermicro is far more powerful and seems much more reliable and better engineered, even if it isn't as easy to set up. The downside of the Supermicro chassis is that they're not really made for residential use, they're pretty loud. But other than that redundant power, lots of CPU and RAM for caching.

Same setup here with a Supermicro Denverton board except in an iStarUSA chassis that I got brand new: https://istarusa.com/product/product-detail/?brand=istarusa&...

Though it looks like their SFF-8087 miniSAS chassis are EOL and soon replaced with SFF-8643 HD-miniSAS equivalents: https://istarusa.com/product/product-list/?brand=istarusa&se...

How's the power consumption? Everytime I look at used server deals on ebay that seem too good to be true, the hidden cost is usually power. It's fairly normal for these systems to consume hundreds of watts idle, and $1/watt/year is a decent rule of thumb in the US (but much more in places like CA). And that’s not factoring in running the AC more if you’re in a hotter climate.

I’m looking at a NAS build myself and am leaning toward a consumer mobo and an older Intel, like maybe a 9th gen i5. 6 SATA ports is pretty standard, and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is a lot of storage for most folks. Boot drive could be a small NVME.

What should be noted, a cost effective M365 backup solution "Synology Active Backup for Microsoft 365" has an external server requirement for OAUTH: https://kb.synology.com/en-af/DSM/help/ActiveBackup-Office36... That seems to have created possibility for quite serious exploit: https://modzero.com/en/blog/when-backups-open-backdoors-syno...

Thanks for these links.

I've used Active Backup and never would have guessed it worked like that. Although, the MS365 security and permissions are so complex that I don't have a hope in hell of understanding them. The suggestions to do your own auditing in that post are moot because the target audience for something like a Synology doesn't have the resources or the ability to do that kind of assessment.

For me, I saw the permissions request along with the 'Synology Active Backup for MS365' app registration in my tenant and assumed everything was local to my tenant and NAS. The redirect back to the private LAN IP of the NAS also makes it seem like the communication is between the NAS and MS only.

I can't even tell if the issue has been fixed.

Ignoring the security stuff, my experience with Synology Active Backup for MS365 as a product hasn't been good for OneDrive backups. I have one setup where I reconcile the backup repo against a live (paused to get a consistent point in time) data set that's synced by the OneDrive client.

The Synology Active Backup for MS365 never reconciles correctly. Some files will randomly have things like '(1)' appended. Some files are simply missing. It seems to struggle with certain characters that Windows and OneDrive allow in filenames. For example, dots (.) appear to be problematic.

I monitor it and once it gets to the point where I think we'd suffer an intolerable amount of data loss if needing to restore, I delete it and restart it.

I would strongly encourage anyone relying on it to take the time to reconcile your OneDrive backups against a set of known good data. Pause your OneDrive syncing, restore the backup into a temporary folder, and use something like Beyond Compare [2] to compare the two directories. You can also map a network drive directly to storage location on the NAS which makes it very convenient to reconcile.

VEEAM used to have the same kind of issues with files missing for no reason, but they seem to be better lately if you ignore the way they append the version number to name of every (versioned) file restored (OMG why?). VEEAM has very slow restores and is much more difficult to reconcile due to the modified file names on restore.

Microsoft won't take responsibility for data loss "in the cloud" and the backup solutions all suck pretty bad IMO. Some of the blame for this kind of thing should fall to Microsoft. They've made everything too complex to be reliable.

1. https://oauth.net/2/grant-types/client-credentials/

2. https://www.scootersoftware.com/

Been using Synology for more than 10 years. Very used to DSM and my default would have been to continue.

The drive policy was a calculated insult to customers. I don't buy the argument that Synology was incurring support costs. If true it should have charged for support. It looked price gouging.

As result I switched to Ugreen (2x 4800 Plus units) and think I'm unlikely to buy Synology in the foreseeable future.

Last summer a friend needed help building a huge home backup system, and though I had no real experience with Synology, it was the only brand I was familiar with and some Googling indicated that no other commercial product seems close. A DIY box — TrueNAS or whatever — is out of the question, this friend isn't technical.

I had heard about the Synology HD policy thing, but had forgotten when I ordered the drives. By the time they arrived, the need was pressing and I had no window to exchange the drives, so I had to just hack the damn system.

Now I have to go out of town to unhack the damn thing so I can be sure nothing I did interferes with future updates.

This is the polar opposite of the experience I was expecting. This foolishness cost me a lot of time and is about to cost more.

Too little, too late. You'd have to be nuts to willingly go back into their walled garden now.

I was literally reaching out to friends yesterday to ask about NAS options and Synology wasn't even discussed, where it would have been before this mess.

Even now, after the reversal, it's really not an option. I mean, I have no assurance it won't get reversed again, and I don't want to invest into something that won't necessarily work long term.

Basically, I want to be sure I can access my data and get updates, and right now, Synology is not that from what I see. I'm just looking at this as a home user, but unless there is some guarantee, Synology just seems to be waiting to pull the rug out from you regarding your data.

As a QNAP user, I'm not affected. However, even if I've been unhappy with QNAP in the past sometimes (overall they're OK for me), I would never switch to Synology because of this shortsightedness on their part.

I don't think this matters much anymore. Synology killed themselves.

Many were already in the boat of "sure I'll pay it, if it works and doesn't give me any BS, otherwise there are many options at better prices"

Too Late. Synology and Unity are learning a very hard lesson. When you screw over your customers, then reverse course, it often causes long term damage because people got a chance to see your true behavior and feelings towards your customers.

And if you did it to us once, you're capable of doing it again. To me personally, the "Synology" brand is permanently tarnished. For them to do what they did signals serious moral problems with their decision makers, and the entire move sounded desperate for profit. Just type "alternative to synology nas" and you'll get a whole bunch of options.

When something like this happens, you fire the CEO. I don't care how the decision process works internally, and how much they thought it would "help" the customers and were all in good faith. The company fucked up, the company has to acknowledge that, and the way to show it is to fire the CEO.

To change a company culture, you change the CEO. My view of Synology today is that they will pull the rug for their own benefit, at my expense. There is no way I trust this Synology ever again. Now I'm on TrueNAS, so I'm already lost to them, but I also tell everybody not to trust Synology. And that won't change if they don't show me that the company has changed.

Similar to Sonos, I feel.

MINISFORUM N5 series look like it totally destroys whatever synology has on the market. Also if you don't like their software, you can install whatever you want on it. Why bother with synology?

This is what I did - microcenter sells it now. Wiped the drive and installed fedora and more ram. Such a great deal for the hardware you get

Good, but I lost my trust in them, so my next NAS will be something else.

I was looking into a self-contained NAS to keep my local archive of almost 20 years of photos, Synology was always the most recommended solution but this policy was definitely the reason I did not purchase one.

Unfortunately for Synology I will wait to see if it's a policy they stick to or if they might change it again in the future, I have all my backups synchronised to off-site storage (Backblaze and Glacier), so the local NAS was just a nice to have convenience instead of shuffling through different local disks...

Every time I've looked at Synology, I've been shocked at how anemic the hardware is for the cost. I've always self-built my own NAS. I've sometimes felt regret when I have run into an issue that required more babysitting than I wanted to do, but when considering alternatives, I've always realized doing it myself was the right choice. I wasn't aware they'd even done this, but the fact they did is just more reason to always build your own NAS.

The article says they reversed the ban, but the release notes seem to indicate a temporary change while more certified drives are brought into the market.

This doesn't seem permanent.

It's not a 1:1 comparison, but anyone have experience running Garage[0] as a locally hosted geo-distributable open source S3 clone in place of a traditional NAS? Garage seems to have simpler hardware requirements, native support for geo-replication, and for lots of applications S3 compatibility is actually what you want.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004

> According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced.

What did NAS customers purchase instead?

There's quite some competition even in the same form factor, like QNAP, ASUSTOR or even UGREEN which got their product in not too long ago.

Ugreen

Is this in response to plummeting sales or is this in response to SMR phaseout? IIRC, this began from WD sneaking in DM-SMR drives into WD Red Pro products used for NAS and RAID use cases that can't possibly work with SMRs. I was looking through HDDs and noticed that there aren't many SMR drives at mainstream price zone(which is great).

So who's the one holding the towel? Is it Synology, or could it be WD/Seagate?

Related. Others?

The Synology End Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060920 - Aug 2025 (355 comments)

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706 - April 2025 (403 comments)

I wonder if that's related to UniFi pushing into that market for consumers (https://www.ui.com/integrations/network-storage) recently. It's still not there yet as there's no way to run containers etc. on the appliance itself but this surely will come within the next 1-2 years.

Yeah that’s a really interesting gap in the feature set. Ubiquiti’s new offerings seem like pretty good network storage appliances, but not home servers.

I’ve gone through a couple iterations of home server. First I upcycled an obsolete Dell Power edge. Then a N100 mini PC. Neither was as reliable as I wanted.

Now I’m running persistent apps on Railway and compute hungry stuff on my MacStudio. Pretty good so far.

It's nice to see this. Too bad they lost me as a customer. I was in the market for a NAS for my photography business and was primarily considering one of Synology's 4 bay products, but saw they'd just made this change so I went elsewhere. I've made my purchase and it wasn't Synology... and I won't need another NAS for years to come. Oh well.

While we are on this subject, has anyone found good DIY solutions for similar hardware? I haven't looked recently, but I have always struggled to be able to put together anything that would be remotely similar in size to a small 4-bay NAS.

My "NAS" is a 4U short network racked unit. Pretty large by comparison, but its also mostly empty space.

https://www.servethehome.com/minisforum-n5-pro-review-an-awe...

> Synology has quietly walked the policy back

This is disrespectful itself. If you realize how stupid your decision was, with such bad results and bad sentiment among customers, you publicly admit the mistake not quietly. This also raises doubt how committed they are to reversing it if they don't want to talk about it.

It’s so incredibly easy to build a TrueNAS box these days I don’t know why anyone would go the Synology route.

It's easy to build the hardware, not easy to build the software. Most people aren't aware how feature rich the Synology OS is.

You can get something similar if you download and set up 50 Docker images, but that's not easy. Just look up how you do HDD image backups of your computers to your Synology and to your TrueNAS for example, it's way more complicated.

I'd imagine UGreen - trying to break into this market - probably sent them a thank you gift.

What a wild unforced error...

Their biggest sin in my opinion as a multi-Synology-NAS-owner is their 2025 generation of NASes didn't have a CPU upgrade. I was ready and waiting to get the ds1825+ and when I saw that it had the same CPU as the ds1821+, the same as 4 years back, I gave up on them.

Whenever I hear about a company making a decision like this I no longer trust said company. It says the company no longer is thinking about their product or consumers at all. Anyone who cared about either even a little bit would never even consider such an idea.

Is there a decent (budget) NAS with 2.5" HDD support? I have like ~30 1TB 2.5" HDD sitting on my shelf and would love to put together at least one NAS with them but a Synology slim is like... 500€? Not even all the disks worth that much

Buy any NAS and a bunch of 3.5" installation frames for 2.5" disks? They're like a dollar each, or you can even 3D print them.

Customers lost tend to stay lost.

Sans “we care about your privacy” lie and multiple clicks to object to “legitimate interests” in staking you around the Internet: https://archive.is/0qhXB

Damage is done, will take a lot more on their end than just reversing a decision they may implement again in the future.

Maybe open source your code or do something that is the exact opposite to vendor lock in in addition to the decision reversal.

The people that made and supported this decision need to get fired. When companies pull this bs, and then reverse course, they don't get a pass, or else they will continue to the pull this bs until no one fights anymore.

What is a good alternative that allows me out of the box with no extra hardware to install a plex server, connect to Mullvad VPN and start / monitor downloads directly from the NAS device web interface or mobile App?

QNAP's QTS/QuTS Hero are generally as "batteries included" as Synology's DSM in that respect. I threw 32GB of RAM in my TS-464 and run ~15 containers (as well as Plex, not in a container) on it with no problem.

Glad they reversed but they could have saved themselves those losses if they had an understanding of what their customers wanted. Anyone putting together a NAS will want full control over the drive selection.

A ridiculously bad idea, coupled to the fact they are trying to sell you Intel Celeron CPUs with 2GB of RAM and SATA only interfaces in 2025, for a lot more than the same product cost ten years ago.

I would say the damage has been done. This policy showed what they were willing to do as a company and not listen to their customer base which is the whole reason the company exists in the first place.

Cool. But they are now on my blacklist until further notice.

I recommend everybody to do the same. Companies shouldn't just reverse feret their way out of trouble. Make stupid decisions have consequences.

I wonder what took them so long to realize that their policy would have the result that it did. I'm glad they've reversed the policy, and I hope that they've learned something.

Too late. The company is permanently on my personal shitlist and I will make sure that the company is excluded from any future hardware acquisitions at the workplace based on vendor lock-in risk.

What is to say they won't add a subscription feature to access your NAS box in future?

Shocking that it took them this long to reverse course on this strongly negatively-received move. The leadership should go.

Too little, too late. I finished my 48TB Unraid build a couple of weeks ago :)

If Synology want me back as a customer, they also need to get modern CPUs, 2.5Gb or 10Gb Ethernet and reverse course on H.265 too.

As a customer, I sent an email saying that it felt like a cash-grab instead of a genuine attempt to improve customer experience.

Pretty sure that email single-handedly push the needle on their decision. Hah!

Back in August, I specifically chose a UGreen NAS over Synology for exactly this reason.

This smelled like "smart" printer cartridges all over again. No thank you.

Is Synology owned by some evil equity fund? A healthy NAS company would have predicted the outcome before attempting to squeeze customers like this.

This is the reason then that many YT influencers are making Synology shorts...awful original decision but at least they backtracked which is good!

Fantastic that people managed to make reverse (or even just postpone) this awful decision. A good example of people voting with their money!

It shouldn’t be enough for companies to just reverse some lousy decision, they’ve got to show some goodwill for it.

This was the motivation to swap out my old, reliable Synology for a new Ugreen setup. Pretty happy so far.

Yet again another company hit by the consequences of being out of touch with their customers and fuelled by greed. Thankfully good alternatives exist, otherwise it would have sent a signal to the industry that this is OK.

Not super different to buying a server from Dell, HP etc. Very different target market however.

I mean, I've never come across Synology branded HDDs. I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.

And part of the magic of a NAS is not necessarily having to have matching hardware. In addition to other design basics like using drives from different batches to minimise the likelihood of multiple failures within data-fatally small time frames.

Monoculture is inherently more fragile; it's antithetical to good storage design.

> I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.

Correct. They were, and they did. The goal was profit - the rebranded drives cost more. Just like printer ink.

How many will still think this is the policy regardless of its reversal? Good job Synology.

How many will never touch Synology because they remember that this company proved to be capable of making incredibly stupid decisions?

Too late. The damage is done and the trust is gone, I won't be coming back.

Never bought anything from Synology, never will.

Bose first, Synology second. Bad execs need to go.

Nobody could have seen this coming. Nobody at all.

So, was anyone held accountable for this?

Too late. Sold my Synology NAS a few weeks ago and moved on to TrueNAS. - I absolutely despise when companies get greedy and try to get the maximum out of their customers. Adobe does this. Apple does this. And some other companies.

If lockin allows you to ship quality software and tight integration across your product line, there is probably a rationale there. People defend Apple - presumably because of this.

However, now we know the direction their leadership would like to take, I can't see much of the tech savvy crowd returning to them, given we know they'll find another revenue screw to turn.

I'm not convinced of the existence of executives who wouldn't do this. It's just like ads. Someone is bound to notice that money is being left on the table. Once it becomes known, they'll either do it or they'll be replaced by someone who will.

We have to start making open source hardware that we can fully control. It's the only way to be free. Corporations cannot be trusted. Any goodwill they build up eventually becomes a resource for them to capitalize on.

There needs to be more of a name and shame culture if companies want to actually win consumers back. Synology as a company did the right thing by reversing this decision, but I still can't trust them unless I know the executives and product managers that introduced this idea and executed it are fired. If they are still lurking around the company, these money over consumers psychopaths are just going to introduce another horrible thing once sales start to tick back up.

Awesome. That's how it's done. They offer people some bullshit take-it-or-leave-it deal, and people leave. I really wish this would happen more often. Normalize this.

It was a bald strategy move, but market was just not ready for the innovation

I don't think anything about this was innovating. I think it was purely a money grab attempt

Vote with your wallet.

Always works.

Unless customers believe that they have no choice - see Windows 11 for details

So what? It will not restore trust.

I will not spend money on Synology which can make pay me more for nothing any time when their management wants some more money next time from users.

So now they will make less money and not more users.

I have a Synology device in my home that we had been planning to upgrade. They may have reversed the ban, but I think Synology has landed on my boycott-for-life list over this BS.

As a person with a DS224+ behind me on my shelf, running my backups, I'm glad to see they at least woke up from their enshittification.

Prodigal son rules on this one.

I'm pretty sure Synology does not manufacture hard drives.

So you can't buy 3rd party HDDs --- but Synology can?

Looks likes a blatant FU to the customer was returned in kind.

They rebrand drives made by Toshiba and Seagate: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_M2_volume/wiki/S..., https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-hard-drives-and-ssds-...

This is actually not that rare. Enterprise server vendors always carried exorbitantly priced third party HDDs in plastic shells effectively as brand merches. But servers are contractor managed and/or severely discounted, so no perceivable harm is usually done.

The differences here are that they actually implemented software checks, for devices bought at MSRP. And so harm is felt.

What is there to understand? They want to sell you the drives directly. This is extremely common practice, see ink cartridges.

I believe they were basically saying a set list of approved hard drives

Eventually an open source project will jailbreak these devices like they did Nintendo devices with similar enshitification tactics.

I'm glad that I've graduated from Synology to a proper Debian server with ZFS around 6 years ago. Fuck these people.

Yes! Resist the enshittoscene!

I wonder what will they try next. I guess they are really jealous of cloud service providers - that get recurring income - instead of just one time hardware purchase.

"You have connected additional HDD. Please select which bay you want to use or try our 'Synology Super Subscription' to use both drives at the same time".

It's too late. They can't be trusted. They have fucked themselves.

Time to move on from Synology. They already showed their sociopathic middle finger to everyone. Now that they are walking it back they will just do the same thing they all do now. They will slowly reintroduce this restriction by removing a few compatible drive models at a time until its too inconvenient not to buy their drives.

I hope they go out of business even though I used to like their product.

Damage is already done.

It takes decades to build consumer trust, and one stupid MBA driven idea to ruin it.

FA ... FO

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