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Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

• rpcope1 1y ago
  Honestly given how lots and lots of things just build on Debian, seems easier to me to just use an off the shelf older Supermicro motherboard with an plain IT mode SAS HBA and something like an Enthoo Pro case and just call it a day running stock Debian. Certainly far few surprises and bullshit.
  • ThomasGlanzmann 1y ago
    I do the same for a few years and use that also for friends with failing NAS. Most of the time two big HDDs or SSDs in RAID 1 is sufficient.
• kyrofa 1y ago
  > When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon. In a way this is a valid point, but it also feels a bit silly. Do people really make use of devices like this and then try to overnight a drive when something fails? You're building an array-- you're designing for failure-- but then you don't plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.
  • tiew9Vii 1y ago
    A lot of these are home power users. They build the array to support a drive failure but as home power users without unlimited funds don’t have a hot spare or store room they can run to. It’s completely reasonable to order a spare on failure unless it’s mission critical data needing 24/7 uptime. They completely planned for it. They’ve planned for if there is a failure they can get a new drive within 24 hours which for home power users is generally enough, especially when likely get a warning before complete failure.
  • gambiting 1y ago
    >>You should have spare drives on hand. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a home nas. I have one and I don't keep spare drives purely because it's hard to justify the expense.
    • 1oooqooq 1y ago
      always run the previous drive gen space. i budget 300usd each, for 2 or 3 drivers. that is always the sweet spot since forever. get the largest enterprise model for exactly that price. that was 2tb 10yrs ago. 10tb 5yrs ago. so 5yrs ago i rebuilt storage on those 10tb drivers but only using 2tb volumes (coulda be 5, but i was still keeping the last gen size as data haven't grow), now my old drivers are spares/monthly off-machine copies. i used one when getting a warranty for a failed new 10tb one btw. now i can get 20tb drivers for that price, i will probably still only increase the volumes to 10tb at most and have two spares.
    • Hamuko 1y ago
      I had a hot spare in the form of a backup drive. It was a 12 TB external WD that I'd already burned in and had as a backup target for the NAS. Then when one of the drives in the NAS failed, I broke the HDD out of the enclosure and used it to replace the broken drive. It hadn't been in use for many months and I'd rather sacrifice some backups rather than the array. I also technically had offsite backups for it that I could restore in an emergency.
    • kyrofa 1y ago
      Heh, I suppose you've heard of one now. Fair enough, I could be in the minority here.
      • TiredOfLife 1y ago
        Yeah. If you don't have a couple spare 100TB ssd nases you can turn on in the event of failure yoh are doing it wrong
    • topspin 1y ago
      I do. Also, I have an unopened 990 EVO Plus ready to drop into whatever machine needs it. I'm not made of money. I just don't want to make excuses over some $90 bit of junk. So I have have spare wifi, headset, ATX PSU, input devices, and a low cost "lab" PSU to replace any dead wallwart. That last one was a life saver: the SMPS for my ISPs "business class" router died one day, so I cut and stripped the wires, set the volts+amps and powered it that way for a few days while they shipped a replacement.
  • cm2187 1y ago
    I agree, I don't buy spares, but when I have a drive failure, the first thing I do is an incremental backup, so that I know my data is safe regardless, while I am waiting for a drive. Also worth noting that I don't think I experienced hard fails, it's often the unrecoverable error count shooting up in more than one event, which tells me it's time to replace. So I don't wait for the array to be degraded. But I guess that's an important point, monitor your drives. Synology will do that for you, but you should monitor all your other drives. I have a script that uploads all the smart data off all my drives across all my machines to a central location, to keep an eye on SSD wear levels, SSD bytes written (sometimes you have surprises), free disk space and smart errors.
    • nicolas_t 1y ago
      Do you have a link to your script? Mostly I'd love to have a good dashboard for that data.
      • cm2187 1y ago
        Not the full script but can share some pointers. Using smartctl to extract smart data as it works so well. Generally "smartctl -j --all -l devstat -l ssd /dev/sdXXX". You might need to add "-d sat" to capture certain devices on linux (like drive on an expansion unit on synology). By the way, synology ships with an ancient version of smartctl, you can use a xcopy newer version on synology. "-j" export to json format. Then you need to do a bit of magic to normalise the data. Like some wear level are expressed in health (start = 100) or percent used (start = 0). There are different versions of smart data, the "-l devstat" outputs a much more useful set of stats but older SSDs won't support that. Host writes are probably the messiest part, because sometimes they are expressed in blocks, or units of 32MB, or something else. My logic is: if (nvme_smart_health_information_log != null) { return nvme_smart_health_information_log.data_units_written * logical_block_size * 1000; } if (scsi_error_counter_log?.write != null) { // should be 1000*1000*1000 return (long)(double.Parse(scsi_error_counter_log.write.gigabytes_processed) * 1024 * 1024 * 1024); } var devstat = GetAtaDeviceStat("General Statistics", "Logical Sectors Written"); if (devstat != null) { return devstat.value * logical_block_size; } if (ata_smart_attributes?.table != null) { foreach (var att in ata_smart_attributes.table) { var name = att.name; if (name == "Host_Writes_32MiB") { return att.raw.value * 32 * 1024 * 1024; } if (name == "Host_Writes_GiB" || name == "Total_Writes_GB" || name == "Total_Writes_GiB") { return att.raw.value * 1024 * 1024 * 1024; } if (name == "Host_Writes_MiB") { return att.raw.value * 1024 * 1024; } if (name == "Total Host Writes") { return att.raw.value; } if (name == "Total LBAs Written" || name == "Total_LBAs_Written" || name == "Cumulative Host Sectors Written") { return att.raw.value * logical_block_size; } } } and even that fails in some cases where the logical block size is 4096. I think you need to test it against your drives estate. My advice, just store the raw json output from smartctl centrally, and re-parse it as you improve your logic for all these edge cases based on your own drives.
  • sersi 1y ago
    My synology NAS is for my own use. I do not keep spare drives on hand, I would go to the nearby shop that's 20 minutes away from me to get a new drive. They wouldn't have synology branded drives but they have the toshiba MG series, Western Digital and Seagate. Within my NAS, I have 2 different pool, 1 is for important data, it's 2 hard disk with SHR1 replicated to an offsite NAS. Another pool is for less important data (movies, etc), it's SHR1 with 5 hard disks, 75TB total capacity, none of the hard disks are the same batch or production date. Not having the data immediately is not a problem. Losing that data would suck but I'd rebuild so I'm fine not having a spare drive on hand.
  • snowwrestler 1y ago
    Failures should be rare, which means a spare HD might be sitting in a drawer without spinning for years, which HDs don’t like to do. When you need to replace a drive, it’s better to purchase one new. It was manufactured recently and not sitting for very long.
    • AlexandrB 1y ago
      > a spare HD might be sitting in a drawer without spinning for years, which HDs don’t like to do. How so? Does this imply drives "age out" while sitting at distribution warehouses too?
• dmoy 1y ago
  I bought a Synology last year and then had to return it because it didn't support two of the enterprise drive model revisions I have (but worked with the others, even one that's the same make). For the same hardware cost I got a random mATX box that can hold 2.5x more hard drives, a much much beefier CPU, 10x the RAM, and an nvme. And yea it took an hour to set up trueNAS in a docker image, but w/e. Same exact hard drives working perfectly fine in fedora. If it weren't for hard drive locking I'd have stuck with the Synology box out of laziness.
• romanhn 1y ago
  Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.
  • Magma7404 1y ago
    That's the first time I have heard about them but it looks very interesting and pretty. Synology has become way too expensive for me as I only need a 4-bay NAS and Ugreen is cheaper than the Synology. My only concern would be the software itself, and if they can avoid all the security holes that plagued some brands like Qnap. Last but not least, they seem to have Docker support which was restricted to more powerful Synology models, and it's a nice bonus for self-hosting nowadays.
  • mschild 1y ago
    I've been looking into a NAS myself. I think self-built is the best bang for buck you're going to get and not have any annoying limitations. There's plenty of motherboards with integrated CPUs (N100 same as cheaper Ugreen ones) for roughly 100. Buy a decent PSU and get an affordable case. For my configuration with a separate AMD CPU I'm looking at right around 400 Euros but I get total control. And as far as software is concerned, setting up a modern OS like TrueNAS I find about the same difficulty as an integrated one from Ugreen.
    • _cenw 1y ago
      Just keep in mind that Intel is keeping the total PCIe bandwidth out of those CPUs very constrained on purpose.
      • cm2187 1y ago
        The best solution in my opinion is to buy 5y old, used, server motherboards and CPUs (like AMD Epyc 3 right now). They are fairly cheap, it is durable products designed to work 24/7, and it comes with a huge number of PCIe lanes and extensibility. Same with enterprise SSDs for home usage, which is usually very little write. A used enterprise SSDs with a ton of endurance and very little writes is probably the best bang for your bucks. Wouldn't do that with hard drives though.
• senectus1 1y ago
  I have a DS920+ for home lab purposes that I'm very happy with, but this sort of bullshit is going to make me drop that brand from any future recommendations or purchases. I'm likely to go down the BYO NAS path going forward. Just a stupid customer punishing policy. A real slap in the face. I bought a N100 based device from AliExpress that supports two drives for my backup server. its a cracker and runs debian wonderfully. Very smooth and responsive. runs quietly and transfers data fairly quickly.
• Renaud 1y ago
  Synology isn't about the NAS hardware and OS. Once setup, it doesn't really matter as long as your config is reliable and fast, so there are many competitive options to move to. The killer feature for me is the app ecosystem. I have a very old 8-bay Synology NAS and have it setup in just a few clicks to backup my dropbox, my MS365 accounts, my Google business accounts, do redundant backup to external drive, backup important folders to cloud, and it was also doing automated torrent downloads of TV series. These apps, and more (like family photos, video server, etc), make the NAS a true hub for everything data-related, not just for storing local files. I can understand Synology going this way, it puts more money in their pocket, and as a customer in professional environment, I'm ok to pay a premium for their approved drives if it gives me an additional level of warranty and (perceived) safety. But enforcing this accross models used by home or soho users is dumb and will affect the good will of so many like me, who both used to buy Synology for home and were also recommending/purchasing the brand at work. This is a tech product, don't destroy your tech fanbase. I would rather Synology kept a list of drives to avoid based on user experience, and offer their Synology-specific drives with a generous warranty for pro environments. Hel, I would be ok with sharing stats about drive performance so they could build a useful database for all. They way they reduce the performance of their system to penalise non-synology rebranded drives is bascially a slap in the face of their customers. Make it a setting and let the user choose to use the NAS their bought to its full capabilities.
  • j45 1y ago
    Other manufacturers like Qnap also have this app ecosystem. It doesn’t address the mandatory nature of drives when at most dell and hp have put their part number on drives for the most part.
    • lazide 1y ago
      The issue is QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level compared to Synology (also with Apps). The number of times I’ve broken things on QNAP systems doing what should be normal functionality, only to find out it’s because of some dumb implementation detail is over a dozen. Synology, maybe 1-2. Roughly the same number of systems/time in use too.
• j45 1y ago
  Spot on. I’d add that mandatory drives when they aren’t the experts in it making drives a bad move. Maybe other manufacturers are the way.
  • nicolas_t 1y ago
    They're just white labeling Toshibas
    • j45 1y ago
      If the drives must identify as a QNAP secured drive, they could be whitelabeled toshibas but a user can only buy their white-labeled toshibas I'm presuming.
• emmelaich 1y ago
  I have some sympathy for this. With the disasters of the WD 'Green' series and the recent revelations on how used disks were being sold for new. Synology doesn't want to be lumped with other companies problems. They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.
  • _cenw 1y ago
    Slapping Synology stickers on Seagate drives doesn't make them magically immune from being mislabeled out of refurbishment. This is the same old tired argument Apple made about iPhone screens - complain about inferior aftermarket parts while doing everything in their power to not make the original parts available anywhere but AASPs. Except here we have the literal same parts with only a difference in the firmware vendor string.
    • emmelaich 1y ago
      Of course. But my hope is Synology does a little bit of QA before slapping that sticker on.
      • _cenw 1y ago
        Honestly, you should just buy used enterprise drives. That they have hours on them is actually an upside, since most drives die either very early or very late into their expected lifespan. Our NAS is all Exos drives, no problems. On the other hand, an NVMe drive from Crucial that lied about syncing data caused a write hole in ZFS and the associated pool broke to the point where we could only mount it with lots of flags in read only mode.
  • cm2187 1y ago
    And SMR sold as NAS drives mostly.
• 7bit 1y ago
  I will never use their plus line, but I care about the company, so this is really sad. They provided security updates over a very long time. Recently they cut automatic updates (not updates at all) for older models to make it inconvenient to run older models. Now this. With that development, I'm not sure that I will buy my next NAS from them.
• locusm 1y ago
  The only moat Synology have is their software. How far is Truenas from catching up?
  • mtillman 1y ago
    In my opinion, truenas is already caught up if you understand hardware and networking basics. The more advanced you are, the more likely truenas is right for you until you’re eventually ready for a proper zfs+bsd. The other nice thing about truenas is it does what you tell it to do in my experience.
    • locusm 1y ago
      Synology have excellent backup apps for O365 / Google Suite - Ill have to see what latest Truenas has to offer.
• trumpeta 1y ago
  The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR "filesystem", where you can continue adding heterogeneously sized disks after constructing the FS and it will make the most use possible out of the extra capacity in the new disks. When I researched it ZFS did not yet have the resizing feature merged, now it does, though I think it is still not able to use this extra space. I'm wondering if anybody has any better recommendations given the requirement of being able to add storage capacity without having to completely recreate the FS.
  • niuzeta 1y ago
    I'm in exactly same situation myself.
  • TiredOfLife 1y ago
    Windows storage spaces
    • lostlogin 1y ago
      I don’t think that is comparable with a good NAS.
      • p_ing 1y ago
        NAS? No, but SAN or DAS, yes. It provides similar features, plus any bog standard x86 application you wish to run.
      • TiredOfLife 1y ago
        Why not?
    • RedShift1 1y ago
      It's all fun and games until your volume shows up as RAW and you're dead in the water.
  • ycombinatrix 1y ago
    Same here, went with synology for SHR. However I did notice that the performance was substantially worse when using heterogeneous drives, which makes SHR somewhat less valuable to me.
• niuzeta 1y ago
  I've been very happy with my Synology NAS that has served me so well, but forcing this sort of vender lock-in is simply unacceptable. I suppose this means I'll have to look for some other solution. The problem is - I've formatted my drives with SHR(Synology Hybrid RAID - essentially another exclusive lock-in) and this would mean a rather painful transition to the new drive, since this now involves getting a whole new drives to format and move data to, rather than a simple lift-and-drop. Ugh.
  • beagle3 1y ago
    It’s readable / writable in any Linux system if mounted properly - the SHR is just an (extremely well done and convenient) UI for setting up standard raid partitions in a way that uses the entire disk.
  • theden 1y ago
    Like the adjacent comment mentioned it's mountable in linux, so I wouldn't call it a lock-in in the normal way https://zarino.co.uk/post/synology-shr-raid-1-ubuntu/ https://zarino.co.uk/post/synology-shr-raid-1-ubuntu/ Not sure why people are saying SHR is proprietary in some of the comments I read, it's effectively a wrapper for mdadm — though I suppose the GUI itself could be called proprietary.
• system2 1y ago
  We've deployed Synology across multiple client environments for almost a decade, and it's been an incredibly reliable platform. Barring the usual hard drive failures (which are inevitable over time), we've had zero issues with SSO integration, expanding arrays with expansion units, seamless hardware upgrades, or the application layer. It just works. That’s why I’m hoping Synology rethinks its position. Swapping out trusted, validated drives for unknowns introduces risk we’d rather avoid, especially since most of our client setups now run on SSDs. If compatibility starts breaking, that’s a serious operational concern.
• badmonster 1y ago
  How might Synology’s decision to lock its 2025 Plus NAS models to only support its own branded hard drives impact long-term reliability, upgradeability, and customer trust—especially when compared to more open alternatives like QNAP or TrueNAS?
• GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
  Good. Will stop collègues from buying that crap. Managing an aging fleet of those is a PITA. Why bother with a crippled Linux, if a full-blown, real OS is available on better hardware anyway.
  • thelittleone 1y ago
    Full blown OS is a valid option, but installing and maintaining a full blown OS with the equivalent of their ecosystem apps is more complex and time consuming. Some will consider that a PITA and that audience likely isn't bothered by a crippled Linux.
• jwr 1y ago
  I am very disappointed to see that. I've been using Synology NASs for the last, oh, 14 years or so, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. Most importantly, their software works and requires nearly zero maintenance in the long term. I care a lot about this: I have too many things in my life that require my attention and impose on me. I am OK with paying more for things that Just Work, and Synology has been in that category. The locking-down is disappointing and unnecesary. Sure, give me the option of using "certified" drives, but don't take away the option of using any drive I have.
• 404NotBoring 1y ago
  So if I don’t use Synology’s own drives, my NAS gets slower on purpose? That sounds kinda unfair?
• bayindirh 1y ago
  I personally thank Synology for removing themselves from my NAS shopping list and ceding the top of the list to Unraid.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  I never understand these kind of short sighted decisions. It takes a long time to build a brand, this could potentially hurt their customer willingness to recommend and even buy their brand. People aren't stupid, they know that yet they do it. I believe Amazon became so popular because it treated its customer fairly well until recently, now that they are in extremely dominant position. But Synology is far from it.
  • alt227 1y ago
    > I never understand these kind of short sighted decisions. Thats probably because you are not a CEO or a member of a board of directors.
• doanchu 1y ago
  Time to move to Truenas.
• zigmig 1y ago
  Running Ubuntu + Docker + Portainer on a NUC10i5FN (32GB RAM, 1TB HP EX900 M.2 SSD) — I’ve got containers for: AdGuard Home (DNS filtering) Scrypted (bridging CCTV to Apple Home) Jellyfin (media streaming) Immich (photos) WireGuard (secure VPN) The 2TB SSD is handling everything pretty well, but I’ve got a 2.5" SSD slot left unused. Thinking about adding a second SSD for either storage or backups, or maybe caching for media. Any cool apps or tools people would recommend for setups like this? Also, curious about how others are using that extra SSD space in a home lab/NAS setup.
• jjcob 1y ago
  There is one argument for Synology doing this: There have been cases where hard drive companies mislead their customers. I personally fell victim to this when Western Digital started selling SMR drives as WD Red, without labelling them as SMR drives. So lots of customers thought they were buying a drive that's perfect for NAS, only to discover that the drives were completely unsuitable and took days to restore, or failed alltogether. Synology had to release updates to their software to deal with the fake NAS drives, and their support was probably not happy to deal with all the angry customers who thought the problem was with Synology, and not Western Digital for selling fake NAS drives. If you buy a drive from Synology, you know it will work, and won't secretly be a cheaper drive that's sold as NAS compatible even though it is absolutely unsuitable for NAS.
  • franga2000 1y ago
    That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them
    • formerly_proven 1y ago
      For a BYOD product it would be fine to add a blacklist of DM-SMR drives imho. Or have a big red banner and a taint flag. But that's not what Synology did. Also, if the image on the Synology page is accurate, they are relabeled Toshiba drives. Which doesn't really seem a good choice for SMB/SOHO NAS devices, because the Toshiba "Machine Gun" MGxx drives are the loudest drives on the market.
      • sersi 1y ago
        I had some 12TB WD ultrastar that I happily replaced with some Toshiba MG09ACA18TE. To my ears at least the toshiba sound signficantly more bearable than the ultrastar were (lower pitch so less disturbing). Due to living in a small apartment my NAS is in my living room so noise matters. That said, I've since added an ssd and moved almost everything to the ssd (docker, the database and all apps) and it's much nicer in term of noise.
      • 1y ago
• npunt 1y ago
  Something I haven't seen emphasized enough with this move is that by obfuscating a drive's vendor and manufacture date, you won't know if your drives are from the same batch. This is important because if there's any manufacturing defects in a given batch of drives, the failures are likely to happen around the same time, greatly increasing the chance of losing data. Basically, Synology drives are not only more expensive, they're also statistically speaking less reliable when building a RAID with them, negating the very purpose of the product. What a dumb move.
  • dredmorbius 1y ago
    I still love the example some here may recall, where HN itself was hit by this with two disks within a RAID array AND THE BACKUP SERVER all failed within hours of one another: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148> Resulting in, FWIW, my top-rated-ever HN comment, I think: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048149>
• TabTwo 1y ago
  I'm not sure what customers Synology is targeting. Small office/home office (SoHo) was their original market, but these customers won't be willing to pay high prices per drive. Medium-sized businesses? They mostly move their infrastructure to the cloud, which probably leads to low sales volumes. Plus, they're very price-sensitive too. Large enterprises and corporations? This is the domain of established providers like NetApp. Synology might dream about the high prices that these major storage vendors can charge, but this market is difficult to enter without years and years and years of proven reliability in hardware and service. I don't think this will work the way Synology imagines it.
• valunord 1y ago
  Isn't this a simple solution?: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db Some of us are using that with great success to eliminate the locking situation.
  • theden 1y ago
    Also https://github.com/007revad/Synology_M2_volume https://github.com/007revad/Synology_M2_volume for NVMe M.2 drives (some synology models only allow NVMe drives to be used as read/write caches without this script)
  • sersi 1y ago
    Yes but the worry is that they might get rid of this eventually
  • Shank 1y ago
    I personally think if you spend the money on a Synology setup and you depend on this script, you’re playing with fire. If you intend to keep DSM updated, you run the risk of Synology playing a cat-and-mouse game that doesn’t end well. Sure you can do this now, but forever? Who knows how long it will last.
• darkwater 1y ago
  I built my own NAS loosely following this tutorial [1] (mostly for the bill of materials), currently with just 3 4TB disks. Installed NixOS w/ ZFS + K3s on it (I want to use it as a learning playground as well), and deployed a lot of software on it using TrueCharts helm charts, or some other random/self-written charts, and deployed with ArgoCD. Yes, I don't have a nice UI or a nice cloud integration, I have to do almost everything by hand but it's a side-project in itself and fun. For example, now I'm playing with a Postgres operator to manage the databases resources. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNMtmUOCtwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNMtmUOCtwI
• atoav 1y ago
  As someone who was in the marekt for getting a Synology, this has moved Synology onto my "do not trust and avoid"-list. It is very hard to get of that list and I will warn everybody wbo asks me about tech advice (so literally everybody in my vicinity) about vendors on that list. Good luck Synology.
  • alt227 1y ago
    The thing is they dont care about you anymore. They have moved firmly into the SME market which is why they are making decisions which dont really affect company purchase policies, but really upset personal users.
    • atoav 1y ago
      Well it is good then that I did not trust that company.
• m4r1k 1y ago
  As a Synology user, I don’t just feel a huge letdown by such a short-sighted company but I’m compelled to boycott them. And it’s not about the money but the major lock-in and nonsense decisions. My DS1821+ is full, no more purchases from Synology, no further expansions, and no good publicity.
  • topspin 1y ago
    That's understandable. It's a genuine betrayal. Synology, QNAP, et al. exist as a response to the traditional storage vendor lock-in, gouging and rent seeking.
    • m4r1k 1y ago
      Synology seems to have been on the wrong track for a while now: - They completely missed the NVMe transition. The vendor is still very much focused on the HDD world. Yes, NVMe/SSDs in the consumer space don't yet offer the same capacity as HDDs, but the technology is evolving rapidly. It feels like being a music executive in 2007 believing CDs were the future. - They dropped detailed S.M.A.R.T. access from the main UX, which is also the standard for NVMe health reporting. I personally run scrutiny, but Synology's built-in health reporting system in recent DSM versions feels not up to this fundamental task. - DSM updates around 7.2.2 negatively impacted H.265/HEVC codec support, affecting a large user base relying on their NAS for media [1]. - Synology is fundamentally a hardware company. While DSM is polished, their hardware is the centerpiece, and it has been lagging behind for a while now (NAS refreshes, CPU choices, Ethernet speeds, etc.). - Even package updates seem slower and further apart (e.g., Docker was stuck on 20.10.23 until relatively recently in the DSM 7.2.1 cycle). I have had a Solaris ZFS filer that I've ran for a long time (due to historical reasons, I jumped on OpenSolaris when it came out and never had a chance to move off Oracle's lineage). I moved to Synology about three years ago b/c I was sick and tired of managing my own file server. Yet, I feel like at this point the cons of Synology are starting to outweigh the manageability advantages that drew me in. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1feqy62/synology_722_proves_that_this_company_doesnt_care/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1feqy62/synology_...
• asdswe 1y ago
  I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.
  • jitl 1y ago
    Time is money, I would rather buy a NAS these days even though in the past I ran my own FreeBSD ZFS server NAS. Much cheaper use of my time to pay a 2-3x premium on hardware if it means I spend 4 hours on build and 1 hour on admin per year vs 12 hours build, 6 hours admin per year.
  • saltysalt 1y ago
    Thanks for the OS recommendations! I'm a soon to be ex-Synology user looking for a new home (their killing of Video Station also irked me).
  • sumtechguy 1y ago
    I am very capable of building my own. But the plug and play of it is really nice. I basically popped in some drives and had a share up and running in a couple of hours. The same sort with DIY was do a part picker list build it (1-2 days) and then pop the drives in then figure out how to configure it correctly (another day or so because I do it very rarely). Then at that point yeah for what I use it for they are equivalent. Other than now I get to keep track of the CVE's that syno is doing for me with the occasional patch. Now I could put a stripped linux distro or trunas or something like that and get the same. Possible and ease of use are also a spectrum to weigh against. When you are young you have all the time you need. When you are older you just want to put it together and serve some files and do something else, because I have done this 6 times already. But there is actually one reason I am going DIY next time. 'uname -a'. They ship with very old kernels. I suspect the other utilities are in the same shape. They have not updated their base system in a long time. I suspect they have basically left all of the amazing changes the kernels have had over the past decade out. They are randomly cherry picking things. Which is fine. But it has to be creating a 'fun' support environment.
• palmeida 1y ago
  My understanding is that they will just block drives that are not in the compatibility list and that list includes drives from all major vendors. Right now when you add a non compatible drive you just get a warning. Am I missing something?
• jorvi 1y ago
  Apparently no one remembers that a while back Synology already "locked" a whole bunch of people their drives, by ripping out BTRFS support on their NAS budget models. And they pushed this update without warning ahead. Your disks just suddenly up and stopped mounting. Their answer to your drives no longer mounting is "connect them to a PC, pull the files and reformat". Where you are supposed to intermediate 20TB of data is left up to the customer to deal with. Fuck Synology.
• Shank 1y ago
  I personally think that in 2025, you should treat the NAS as a purely storage product and buy your hardware from that perspective. TrueNAS or UniFi’s new NAS product fulfill that goal. From there, supplement your NAS with a Mac Mini or other mini-PC for storage-adjacent tasks. Synology’s whole business model (arguably QNAP’s too) depends on you wanting more drive bays than 2 and wanting to host apps and similar services. The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier. But the fundamental suggestion I make is to consider a NAS a storage-only product. If you push it to be an app and VM server too, you’re dependent on these relatively closed ecosystems and subject to the whims of the ecosystem owner. Synology choosing to lock out drives is just one example. Their poor encryption support (arbitrary limitations on file filenames or strange full-disk encryption choices) is another. If you dive into any system like Synology long enough, you’ll find warts that ultimately you wouldn’t face if you just used more specialized software than what the NAS world provides.
  • beaviskhan 1y ago
    > The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier. Yeah, but then you have a PowerEdge with all the noise and heat that goes along with it. I have an old Synology 918 sitting on my desk that is so quiet I didn't notice when the AC adapter failed. I noticed only because my (docker-app-based) cloud backups failed and alerted me. Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world.
    • Shank 1y ago
      > Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world. I would recommend a mini-ITX NAS enclosure or a prebuilt system from a vendor that makes TrueNAS boxes. iXSystems does sell prebuilt objects but they’re still pricey.
  • timcobb 1y ago
• poulpy123 1y ago
  It's really the apple for NAS. I'm not concerned since they are anyway to expensive for me but I would be pissed to be obliged to buy their rebranded hard drive
• jbverschoor 1y ago
  Synology sells hardware and you get the software without yearly license. Investors want bigger returns. They know they will not get away at this point by selling a monthly license. A large percentage would not buy anymore. What other options do you have for recurring revenue? Cloud storage, but I don't think that's a great success. And then... yes, harddisks. They are consumable devices with a limited lifespan. Label them as your own and charge a hefty fee. The disks in a (larger) NAS setup are more than what the NAS costs. They want a piece of that pie by limitting your options. No more syno for me in the future
• itsanaccount 1y ago
  just chiming in, I have 3 synology products, recommended them for a decade. As they've betrayed me, and I'll never buy another one, and I'll help friends move to whatever I move to. Thinking rock64 appliances with TrueNAS, will start donating to that project. I don't know what sect of leadership (MBAs?) sees continual enshittification as the strategy but I'll fight this economic warfare forever.
• techlatest_net 1y ago
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• bhouston 1y ago
  I used to be a Synology fan with owning many of their devices for work and office. But I've moved on to TrueNAS now and haven't looked back. TrueNAS with ZFS is just amazing.
  • Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    It would be interesting to know the negatives of Synology, and why did you move from them. Gaining nothing from your comment, it could be that your boss was pissed his ex- got a job as security there.
    • bhouston 1y ago
      My biggest reason is flexibility in machine configuration. I found a lot of flexibility in bringing my own machine to the table. I can set any mix of HDD or SSD or Nvme or ram in my machines. With synology or any other premade box I am stuck in a specific config. For example my current TrueNAS at home has 128GB of Ram, 32TB of NVMe (live data) and 72TB of HDD (archive data) with significant cpu and gpu (well compared to synology box, I am running a Ryzen 5700G) and 10G networking. It didn’t start out here but because TrueNAS works with your own hardware I can evolve myself incrementally as hardware costs and needs change. It is a beast of a machine and it is no work to maintain - TrueNAS makes it an appliance. I’ve written up previously on my home setup here: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/home-network-lessons https://benhouston3d.com/blog/home-network-lessons
• miek 1y ago
  Synology provided more info to the owner of YouTube channel NASCompares, who then posted it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1k53gk0/official_response_from_synology_on_using/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1k53gk0/official_... It starts with "Synology's storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model." As a long-time user, all of this collectively moves Synology from "highly recommended" to "avoid."
• _spduchamp 1y ago
  A friend of mine ditched his Synology for a very low cost multidrive chassis from Aliexpress, and this... https://unraid.net/ https://unraid.net/ Seems like a good setup.
• crazygringo 1y ago
  I'm confused. It sounds like only certain features will be unavailable for non-Synology drives: > Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled. It sounds like you can still use non-Synology drives just fine, but not do certain advanced things with them? So why is this being called "locking"? I use Synology at home just as very basic RAID. Am I correct that this wouldn't affect me at all? And are there any reasons why this is justifiable (e.g. hard drive manufacturers lying about health information) or is it just a cash grab?
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    Not automatically applying firmware updates to 3rd-party drives is reasonable. Disabling filesystem features when using them is insane. Whats next — no encryption if you're using a Seagate?
    • crazygringo 1y ago
      It sounds like deduplication is already a pretty advanced feature requiring Synology SSD's: https://kb.synology.com/en-me/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/volume_btrfs_dedup?version=7 https://kb.synology.com/en-me/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/vo... It might be more about performance, that they'll require their own drives with custom firmware that works better? That's what I'm trying to understand here. Is Synology really removing important basic necessary features, or is this more about high-end consistency and performance?
      • kstrauser 1y ago
        The former. They say it’s the latter but almost no one else in the space makes those goofy claims. If I buy an SSD that's too slow, that's on me. And if I deliberately buy a slower one because the cost:performance ratio is better for my needs, then that's my choice. There’s no technical reason why their rebranded devices should capable of doing things the competition can't, other than low-level things like installing firmware updates.
• rufugee 1y ago
  As someone who switched about a year ago from FreeNAS to Synology, this is extremely disappointing. Synology has been a great experience up to this point. I have pools, one on supported WD Reds, and the other on a hodge podge of drives I had collecting dust. Both pools have been very reliable so far. But if they continue down this path, I'll seek a different solution.
• NKosmatos 1y ago
  As an owner of two Synology boxes (and maintainer of a couple more), I’m not happy about these news. Synology needs to rethink its user base, upgrade their hardware offerings and avoid be lead by profit hunting board members. I hope someone high ranking from Synology reads all the comments from this post (and many others from https://mariushosting.com https://mariushosting.com ) and takes the correct decisions. Please don’t let Synology become like the other greedy companies out there.
• donatj 1y ago
  Is there a good alternative these days for someone that only really wants network attached storage, e.g. some drives in a box, easy RAID setup and local network access via SMB? I use my server for everything you'd use NAS Apps for. I have an aging Seagate NAS and had been eyeing Synology but this gives me pause.
  • gh02t 1y ago
    Depends on your skill level. TrueNAS is pretty great at core NAS functionality and its apps situation is also pretty good now that it's stabilizing after working through some growing pains, but it's also not as easy to use as Synology. I've used it for years (since it was still called FreeNAS) and personally wouldn't consider anything else. They offer their own hardware that is not badly priced, or you can load it up for free on your own generic DIY hardware (which will typically save you quite a few bucks over buying any all-in-one solution). Unraid is another good option for DIY that is easier to learn, though not free. Rolling your own from scratch on top of Debian or something also isn't particularly difficult if you're experienced with Linux, and running apps through Docker with something like Portainer. For more direct competitors to Synology in terms of maximum easy user experience there are some decent options out there like QNAP, ASUStore, etc. Youtube is a good place to look for reviews that go in depth to compare.
• yupyupyups 1y ago
  They should've designed a model with open source firmware, written useful technical articles about storage, done PR campaigns, and sold premium versions of said hardware. I imagine that it would create more good will and be a better business move. They could've even sold their own branded drives on the side and explained why they are objectively better, but still let customers choose.
• deleted 1y ago
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• bitwize 1y ago
  Realistically, this will be par for the course among NAS vendors in 10 years, and there will be vigorous defenses of it on Hackernews. "If you want an open NAS, build one yourself. I choose a Yoyodyne NAS because it integrates with the apps I use. And the Yoyodyne disk restriction is no big deal since I know I'll be using something supported and compatible." Any asshole thing a company does, provided they remain solvent enough to stick to their guns for enough time, becomes an accepted industry practice. BonziBuddy generated outrage back in the day because it was spyware. Now Microsoft builds BonziBuddy tech right into Windows, and people -- professional devs, even -- are like "Yeah, I don't understand why anyone would want the hassle of desktop Linux when there's WSL2."
• sylens 1y ago
  Bought a Synology in 2020, been using it for backups and Plex since then. Only recently started doing a little more with it (Immich, Kavita, etc.) Sometimes I brush up against its limitations and its annoying to me; other times I like the convenience it provides (Cloud Sync, Hyper Backup). Even before this announcement, I think that when this thing bites the dust, I would likely build something myself and run Unraid or TrueNAS. IMO what they really needed to do was improve the QuickConnect service to function similar to Cloudflare Zero Access/Tunnels, or integrate better with that. That's really the missing link in turning your NAS into a true self hosted service that can compete with big tech cloud services, in that you won't expose your home IP and won't need to fiddle around with a reverse proxy yourself.
• HackerThemAll 1y ago
  I had asked them for years for the ability to exclude folders by name (or regex) in Synology Drive Sync to be able to keep out node_modules, .git and other garbage from synchronizing to my NAS. Support responded that I can just unselect the folder manually. They have never implemented it.
• hkchad 1y ago
  I have 3 Synology NAS units with about 80TB of total disk space across the 3. When I replace them I will not be replacing them with Synology, they have lost me as a customer. I switched to Synology after having done the homebuilt NAS for years and just wanted something that works. OSS has come a long way since then so time to go back to what I know and can trust.
• fennecfoxy 1y ago
  Look at all the enshittification! It's all profits, at the end of the day. Good for the shareholders!
• Gazwad 1y ago
  I was just about to replace my 2 Drobo units with 2 of 4 bay Synology, my very early Synology single drive NAS is still working so thought I'd go for familiarity. Read about this BS and thought it's bound to end with Synology branded drives costing much more than other brands as people won't have the choice. QNAP took my order instead.
• benoau 1y ago
  Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH, this year's upgrades were to like ~2020 tech and some of these models won't be upgraded again until 2030! The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I've previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I'll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardware options that exist for NAS.
  • lostlogin 1y ago
    > Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH I think this too harsh. I bought a 1821 a few years back. It takes a generic 10gb card and does what it said on the box. It’s quick and reliable. What am I missing?
  • joshstrange 1y ago
    Do you have some examples of the superior customer hardware options? I currently use 2x12 bay Synology NAS and one of my favorite parts of it is the hardware, the easy access to the hotswap hard drives. If I could get that form factor, but with a custom NAS software solution, I’d be very interested.
    • benoau 1y ago
      I don't think you'd get 12x too easily but one recent post here is AMD Hawk Point with 6x 3.5" drives + 5x M.2 drives + OCuLink + up to 128GB of RAM. https://liliputing.com/?s=nas https://liliputing.com/?s=nas
      • joshstrange 1y ago
        Thank you for the link, currently my needs are more 3.5” high capacity drives, and less SSD storage (aside for a TB or 2 of cache. I just don’t need SSDs for my media collection, it seems like a waste when I can pick up 24-26+ TB drives for so much cheaper.
    • CobaltFire 1y ago
      I run a Sliger 3701 [0] with an ASRock Rack Ryzen motherboard (choose B650D4U or X570D4U to suit) using TrueNAS Scale. This replaced my old FreeNAS Atom C2000 setup that ran for over a decade with zero issues. Add in a Mikrotik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIE [1] for high speed networking. Choose your own HBA. 0: https://www.sliger.com/products/rackmount/storage/cx3701/ https://www.sliger.com/products/rackmount/storage/cx3701/ 1: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie
• nodesocket 1y ago
  My next NAS is going to be Ubiquiti UNAS Pro . 7 drive bays for $499. Can’t beat it.
  • transpute 1y ago
    Looks like their $300/4GB/1U/4bay and $500/8GB/2U/7bay half-depth devices with AWS-Annapurna SoC can run either NAS or NVR Linux. Bluetooth in a rackable device is unusual. OS might be replaceable with mainline Debian. https://github.com/NeccoNeko/UNVR-diy-os/blob/main/IMAGES.md https://github.com/NeccoNeko/UNVR-diy-os/blob/main/IMAGES.md
    • bombcar 1y ago
      If it can run Gentoo it might be a big energy savings vs my old off lease machine with ZFS …
      • transpute 1y ago
        There's also a QNAP 1U for $600, which adds M.2 NVME and optional 32GB ECC RAM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855 We need more Thunderbolt/USB4-to-JBOD 40Gbps storage enclosure options, for use with Ryzen mini PC or Lenovo Tiny.
  • joshstrange 1y ago
    At first I was going to balk but then I remembered I paid ~$1.5K for a 12-bay Synology (and again for the 12-bag expansion unit). This is much larger I think (and it bugs me that it’s not an even number of drives, and the offset of the drives is unpleasant) but it’s rackable so that’s a plus. The only thing I’d want to know is sound (and I’m sure I can find a YouTube video). I’ve been looking for an excuse to go all-in on a Ubiquiti setup… Thanks for mention this, I wasn’t aware Ubiquiti had a NAS product.
    • nodesocket 1y ago
      I believe the UNAS Pro is exceptionally quiet. Agree 7 drive is strange but they wanted their touchscreen so. I expect to see additional hardware units in the UNAS lineup released. Perhaps non-pro and enterprise versions. Highly recommended Ubiquiti. I have it all throughout my house.
• bob1029 1y ago
  Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home. I have completely lost patience with maintaining local hardware like this. If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective. This feels like smuggling cargo on a federation starship, which is way cooler to me than filling up a bunch of local disks. I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage. Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.
  • disambiguation 1y ago
    How much does S3 cost these days? I've been burned by their hidden surge pricing before and hesitate to rely on them for personal storage when self hosting is fairly cheap.
    • dmoy 1y ago
      Disk hosting cost isn't much Bandwidth to get all of that back down to your system is much pricier, depending on how much you use that data.
    • mystifyingpoi 1y ago
      Storage cost is nice, data transfer costs are often prohibitively high.
  • 3np 1y ago
    3-2-1 says you want both. Can be convenient to centralize backups on a local NAS and then publish to the cloud from there.
  • cm2187 1y ago
    For large datasets, the cost of that is like rebuying your NAS every 9-12 months.
• dostick 1y ago
  Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensitised to warnings. I submitted this to them at least four times, and they reply that this is fine, it’s already decided to be like that, so we will not change it. Another stupid thing is that notifications about low disk space are sent to you via email and push until it’s about 30 GB free. Then free space goes below 30 GB and reaches zero, yet notifications are not sent anymore. My multiple reports about this issue always responded along the lines of “it’s already done like that, so we will not change it”. Most modern, especially software companies, choose not to fix relatively small but critical problems, yet they actively employ sometimes hundreds of customer support yes-people whose job seems to be defusing customer complaints. Nothing is ever fixed anymore.
  • pixelesque 1y ago
    Not defending them in any way, but I know with my Infrant (then Netgear unfortunately, who last year killed the products) ReadyNASs which also used mdadm to configure BTRFS with RAID5 in a similar way to Synology and QNAP, the recommendation was that you don't want your BTRFS filesystem to run low on space, because then it runs out of metadata space, and if it does that it becomes read-only, and can become unstable. Basically, the recommendation was to always have 5% free space, so this isn't just Synology saying this.
    • pixelesque 1y ago
      Actually, reading the BTRFS docs, they recommend keeping 5-10% free space: https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SysadminGuide.html#Balancing https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/ind...
      • MrDrMcCoy 1y ago
        Yup. After having dealt with that, I err on the side of caution and don't even let it merge small files into inodes for space savings. I still love btrfs for the CoW, snapshots, and compression, but you really gotta give that metadata a wide berth.
• PeterStuer 1y ago
  I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.
  • chrisandchris 1y ago
    That was my first thought too. I am currently a very happy Synology customer and am selling them to B2B customers for storage. I will still have to come accross something like Hyper Vault for backup and Drive for storage that works (mostly) smoothless. I would be happy to self-host, but the No Work Needed (tm) products of Synology are just great. Sad to see them taking this road.
  • joshstrange 1y ago
    Do you have a plan on what you’re going to move to? I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays. I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I could install whatever I wanted on. I’m just not interested in having to halfway deconstruct a tower to get at 1 hard drive. Hotswap bays are all I want to deal with now.
    • disambiguation 1y ago
      Not OP but TrueNAS is a good alternative - both the software and their all in one NAS builds. I have an unraid on a usb stick somewhere in my rack, but overtime it started feeling limited, and when they began changing their license structure I decided it was time to switch, though I run it on a Dell r720xd instead of one of their builds (my only complaint is the fan noise - i think 730 and up are better in this regard) Proxmox was also on my short list for hypervisors if you dont want TrueNAS.
      • chme 1y ago
• kotaKat 1y ago
  I'm going to buck the nerds and say I wish Drobo was back. I love my 5N, but had to retire it as it began to develop Type B Sudden Drobo Death Syndrome* and switch out to QNAP. It was simple, it just worked, and I didn't have to think about it. * TB SDDS - a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three 'types' of SDDS I and a colleague discovered - "Type A" power management IC failures, "Type B" unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and "Type C" failed batteries. Type B units' SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.
  • mig39 1y ago
    I still have two Drobo 5N2 NAS boxes going strong. One is the backup for the other. I really wish someone would take up the Drobo-like simplicity and run with it.
  • romanhn 1y ago
    My 2nd generation Drobo that I got back in 2008 is still chugging along. Haven't had to replace a hard drive in 10-12 years either. I love it even though it's super slow by today's standards. Been meaning to retire it for years, but it's been so rock solid I rarely have to think about it.
• AndrewDucker 1y ago
  What's better for running Plex? Assuming I want 4 drives and something that can transcode multiple files in real time.
  • Marsymars 1y ago
    You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. You can use an odroid H4 or any cheapo Alder Lake-N laptop for your Plex server, and any NAS solution to store the media.
    • NL807 1y ago
      >You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. Why not? If you are not going to do transcoding, Plex should sit fine on a NAS.
      • benoau 1y ago
        Basically an archaic idea that a NAS has to be only good at one thing which is just file sharing. It's hard to actually buy a computer that bad these days, although Synology still makes it easy lol.
        • nottorp 1y ago
          Tbh another archaic idea is that you need to transcode. All you need is one of those sticks that plug into the hdmi of your tv and can run vlc. I use a chromecast. Vlc can play mkvs directly off samba shares. Done.
          • benoau 1y ago
            TBH the only reason anyone talks about transcoding is Synology's absolute dog-shit hardware options make it a problem. Most Intel CPUs and most AMD CPUs and many ARM CPUs and all the discrete GPUs are absolutely fine with munging video and audio codecs. They're just not well-represented in Synology's lineup.
• aborsy 1y ago
  Can you “btrfs send” snapshots in a raid array in DSM to a Linux server? If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system. I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.
  • 1oooqooq 1y ago
    you really use btrfs send? found it so limiting i assumed only host providers will be using this when btrfs finally have integrated encryption of rest data. always just rsync/scp things and it is less problematic and faster on my weekend tests.
    • MaKey 1y ago
      How do you transfer snapshots with rsync?
• ksec 1y ago
  I think they are on their way to exit the consumer market. Their linux kernel is old. And DSM dont update the kernel.
• codecraze 1y ago
  I have a 8 bay nas from synology and i’m now considering a move out when i’ll have to replace my nas. Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.
  • QuiEgo 1y ago
    Terramaster F6-424. Most of the non-Synology NASes let you install whatever OS you want (but, don't provide any support other than "here's how you install it"). Unraid, TrueNAS Scale, and Open Media Vault are popular OS choices.
• nichos 1y ago
  I wish 1 or more HD manufacturers would get together and sell a NAS that runs TrueNAS on it. Or even an existing NAS manufacturer (UGreen, etc) All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.
  • Kirby64 1y ago
    TrueNAS isn’t nearly friendly enough for the average user. HexOS may fit that bill, although it seems rather immature. It runs on top of TrueNAS.
    • ryao 1y ago
      My doctor was able to switch from Synology to TrueNAS after I advised him to replace his failing Synology NAS with a TrueNAS box and I gave him a link to the TrueNAS documentation. He is fairly average in my opinion.
      • queenkjuul 1y ago
        I think the fact they're a doctor puts them well above the average person's intelligence (or for your sake at least i hope so)
      • Kirby64 1y ago
        Like the other poster said, your anecdote says more about the doctor than the average user. TrueNAS documentation isn't the worst by any means, but it has far too many extremely low level controls accessible. It would be overwhelming to most users unless you stay very within a small window of basic functionality. If you're just using it for network storage, maybe it's fine... anything beyond that though is going to trip up many folks.
• ziml77 1y ago
  Hopefully they don't start pushing this change to older products. I don't want to have to replace my NAS, but if I ever do, it certainly won't be with another Synology product, even if they walk this decision back.
• mgsouth 1y ago
  I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers. However... Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives. [1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)
  • gh02t 1y ago
    Synology is consumer and SMB focused, though. High end storage that level of integration makes sense, but for Synology it's just not something *most of their customers care about or want.
  • thomasjudge 1y ago
    For an entertaining/terrifying perspective on firmware, obligatory Bryan Cantrill talk "Zebras All the Way Down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE
  • cm2187 1y ago
    That being said, there aren't many major HDD manufacturers anymore, nor do they have many models. Synology is using vanilla linux features like md and lvm. You don't think those manufacturers have tested their drives against vanilla linux?
• PrimalNaCl 1y ago
  It's the dumbest move they could make. No one, _no_ one, in a position as the decider on enterprise gear going for a NAS solution in their company is going to buy Synology. They aren't even #last on the list. Only corpos have the deep pockets required and historical "the way it is" mindset on being fleeced wrt vendor lockin BS. Synology just does not have the brand cage to pull that off. So corpos that already aren't buying their shit are still not going to buy it and homelabers/soho types are gonna go elsewhere because they've either ideologically opposed to being fleeced or just can't do it even if they don't know any better due to being priced out. I hope they implode and some even more evil and incompetent predatory corp consumes them and guts what's left of their brand name. The only time I'd wish the Broadcom treatment on a company. Synology deserve it.