8 ms·

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 W

by 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.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    It can't be programmatically identified because manufacturers actively hide them. There are ATA commands for that, DM-SMR drives lie to it. I wouldn't be sure why Toshiba M-prefixed 7K2 drives would be bad for NAS use cases. They're descendants of what were used in high performance SPARC servers. Hot, dense, obnoxious, but that's just Fujitsu. They're plenty reliable, performant, and perfect for your all-important on-line/near-line data! You just have to look away from bills(/s). 0: https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-red-hdds-allegedly-use-smr-a-big-nono-for-nas-and-raid https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-r... 1: https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undisclosed-smr-on-certain-internal-hard-drive-models-too-report https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undiscl... 2: https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313 https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313
  - m000 1y ago
    TBF, the picture in TFA only shows rack-mounted Synology devices, where noise is not really a concern. Synologoy SMB/SOHO NAS devices should not be affected by the drive lockdown (for now).
    - Heliosmaster 1y ago
      but that's the proposed change, that their Plus lineup which is generally targeted for SMB/SOHO/enthusiast market, will be working only with their drives
      - m000 1y ago
        Then the photo with the U-factor servers is obvs. a distraction. Thanks for the clarification.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units. I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement). Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR). I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.
      - Melatonic 1y ago
        So basically buy one of the older models now ? Will new firmware updates to everything before this require the Synology branded drives ?
        sokoloff 1y ago
        Seemingly not, at least not for the moment, based on the experiences of people migrating arrays [successfully] from older units and the massive backlash that would result if they trashed currently working arrays. If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.
- spease 1y ago
  > That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery. Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tech friend to keep it within their budget. Synology is seen as the premium choice in the consumer NAS argument, so vertically integrating and charging a premium to guarantee “it just works” is not unprecedented. There are definitely other NAS options as well, if someone is willing to take on more responsibility for understanding the tech.
  - yurishimo 1y ago
    I don’t think anyone would care if Synology gave priority to their own drives. A checkbox during setup that says “Yes, I know I’m using these drives that have not been validated blah blah blah” would be plenty. That’s not what Synology did however and that’s the main reason everyone is pissed.
    - netruk44 1y ago
      Funny you mention that… I have a DS1515+ which has an SSD cache function that uses a whitelisted set of known good drives that function well. If you plug in a non whitelisted ssd and try to use it as a cache, it pops up a stern warning about potential data loss due to unsupported drives with a checkbox to acknowledge that you’re okay with the risk. So…there’s really no excuse why they couldn’t have done this for regular drives.
      - spease 1y ago
        That assumes that the person setting up the NAS is the same person using it, which is not going to be the case for non-tech-savvy users. Everyone will understand it costing more, fewer people will understand why the NAS ate their data without the warning it was supposed to provide, because cheap drives that didn’t support certain metrics were used. If Synology wants to have there be only one way that the device behaves, they have to put constraints on the hardware.
wetbaby 1y ago
Which WD drives specifically were misleading customers? It's fine to have 'Synology supported drives' which guarantee compatability, but requiring them is absolute bollocks.
- jjcob 1y ago
  WD Red drives. They released a new version of their WD Red drive, and the only difference they stated in the specs was that it had more cache. So I thought, great, this is their updated model with more cache, it's going to be faster. After some time, people started to post about problems with the new WD Red drives. People had troubles restoring failed drives, I had a problem where I think the drives never stopped rewriting sectors (you could hear the hard drives clicking 24/7 even when everything was idle) Then someone figured out that WD had secretely started selling SMR drives instead of CMR drives. The "updated" models with more cache were much cheaper disks, and they only added more cache to try and cover up the fact that the new disks suffored from catastrophic slowdowns during certain workloads (like rebuilding a NAS volume). This was a huge controversy. But apparently selling SMR drives is profitable, so WD claims the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives, and all is well. They are still selling SMR drives in their WD Red line. Edit: Here's a link to one of the many forum threads where people discovered the switch: https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228 https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives That's half of it ... maybe? Last time I looked drives that offer host managed SMR still weren't available to regular consumers. In theory that plus a compatible filesystem would work flawlessly. In practice you can't even buy the relevant hardware.
  - MortyWaves 1y ago
    For future reference which WD drives are actually suitable for NAS? I remember someone saying you need to look for a specific more expensive type.
DHolzer 1y ago
buying HDDs these days currently feels a little like navigating the dark web.
mappu 1y ago
I have a mix of SMR and CMR drives in my NAS and it works perfectly (on mdadm). I understand ZFS hates it but what is the problem on Synology?
- Hikikomori 1y ago
  Afaik it's not much of a problem until you need to rebuild the raid.
- Arrowmaster 1y ago
  My rough understanding is an SMR drive has a small section that's CMR and where the data goes when you do a write. Then when the drive is idle it moves the data to SMR because SMR writes are slow. If you fill up the small CMR section it starts writing directly to SMR and you see a huge performance loss. Without adaptation for SMR drives a lot of systems recognized this slowdown as a failure and would hault a restore. Even with that corrected for now you are looking at 10x the rebuild time of a CMR drive which increases the odds of another drive failing during the rebuild.
kmacdough 1y ago
This is an argument in favor of all anti-competitive walled garden moves. But we've seen time and again the degrading service and price gouging that ultimately comes. People have a right to use the things they own as they please. Companies don't have a right to protect their image that supersedes this basic human right of independence.
izacus 1y ago
I heard its about EU CYA directive, which requires IoT companies to deploy security patches in firmware within X months of those patches being released. This would explain why they'd only want to support HDD models the Synology OS can flash firmware updates to. (It's also convenient to get more margins.)
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Nah. That wouldn’t require them to apply patches to someone else’s hardware than an end user installed after the fact. By analogy, Samsung isn't obligated to patch the firmware of an AirPods connected to it.
gwbas1c 1y ago
A friend of mine who moved from Communist Russia to the US once explained to me the "tyranny of choice." He explained that, in the US, sometimes we get overwhelmed with many, many options. To be quite blunt: After choosing my NAS, the act of choosing hard drives is actually harder and somewhat overwhelming. To be quite honest, knowing that I can choose from a narrower set of drives that are guaranteed to work correctly is going to really tip my scale in favor of Synology the next time I'm in the market for a NAS.
- wiether 1y ago
  Locking non-approved drives does absolutely nothing for your case though. They can sell "guaranteed to work" drives for people like you who don't want to go through all the picking process, while letting other people the choice to put any drive they want.
j45 1y ago
Western Digital misrepresented their Red drives being as suitable for NAS as they advertised, which ended up with them receiving a class action lawsuit against them. Luckily all of the settings can be searched for and verified. Seagate and Hitachi have seemed to treat me well over the years and I was giving WD a chance. Next drives to buy will be from this list: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...

by jjcob 1y ago

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.
- numpad0 1y ago
  It can't be programmatically identified because manufacturers actively hide them. There are ATA commands for that, DM-SMR drives lie to it. I wouldn't be sure why Toshiba M-prefixed 7K2 drives would be bad for NAS use cases. They're descendants of what were used in high performance SPARC servers. Hot, dense, obnoxious, but that's just Fujitsu. They're plenty reliable, performant, and perfect for your all-important on-line/near-line data! You just have to look away from bills(/s). 0: https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-red-hdds-allegedly-use-smr-a-big-nono-for-nas-and-raid https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-r... 1: https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undisclosed-smr-on-certain-internal-hard-drive-models-too-report https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undiscl... 2: https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313 https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313
- m000 1y ago
  TBF, the picture in TFA only shows rack-mounted Synology devices, where noise is not really a concern. Synologoy SMB/SOHO NAS devices should not be affected by the drive lockdown (for now).
  - Heliosmaster 1y ago
    but that's the proposed change, that their Plus lineup which is generally targeted for SMB/SOHO/enthusiast market, will be working only with their drives
    - m000 1y ago
      Then the photo with the U-factor servers is obvs. a distraction. Thanks for the clarification.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units. I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement). Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR). I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.
    - Melatonic 1y ago
      So basically buy one of the older models now ? Will new firmware updates to everything before this require the Synology branded drives ?
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        Seemingly not, at least not for the moment, based on the experiences of people migrating arrays [successfully] from older units and the massive backlash that would result if they trashed currently working arrays. If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.
spease 1y ago
> That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery. Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tech friend to keep it within their budget. Synology is seen as the premium choice in the consumer NAS argument, so vertically integrating and charging a premium to guarantee “it just works” is not unprecedented. There are definitely other NAS options as well, if someone is willing to take on more responsibility for understanding the tech.
- yurishimo 1y ago
  I don’t think anyone would care if Synology gave priority to their own drives. A checkbox during setup that says “Yes, I know I’m using these drives that have not been validated blah blah blah” would be plenty. That’s not what Synology did however and that’s the main reason everyone is pissed.
  - netruk44 1y ago
    Funny you mention that… I have a DS1515+ which has an SSD cache function that uses a whitelisted set of known good drives that function well. If you plug in a non whitelisted ssd and try to use it as a cache, it pops up a stern warning about potential data loss due to unsupported drives with a checkbox to acknowledge that you’re okay with the risk. So…there’s really no excuse why they couldn’t have done this for regular drives.
    - spease 1y ago
      That assumes that the person setting up the NAS is the same person using it, which is not going to be the case for non-tech-savvy users. Everyone will understand it costing more, fewer people will understand why the NAS ate their data without the warning it was supposed to provide, because cheap drives that didn’t support certain metrics were used. If Synology wants to have there be only one way that the device behaves, they have to put constraints on the hardware.

wetbaby 1y ago

Which WD drives specifically were misleading customers? It's fine to have 'Synology supported drives' which guarantee compatability, but requiring them is absolute bollocks.

jjcob 1y ago
WD Red drives. They released a new version of their WD Red drive, and the only difference they stated in the specs was that it had more cache. So I thought, great, this is their updated model with more cache, it's going to be faster. After some time, people started to post about problems with the new WD Red drives. People had troubles restoring failed drives, I had a problem where I think the drives never stopped rewriting sectors (you could hear the hard drives clicking 24/7 even when everything was idle) Then someone figured out that WD had secretely started selling SMR drives instead of CMR drives. The "updated" models with more cache were much cheaper disks, and they only added more cache to try and cover up the fact that the new disks suffored from catastrophic slowdowns during certain workloads (like rebuilding a NAS volume). This was a huge controversy. But apparently selling SMR drives is profitable, so WD claims the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives, and all is well. They are still selling SMR drives in their WD Red line. Edit: Here's a link to one of the many forum threads where people discovered the switch: https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228 https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives That's half of it ... maybe? Last time I looked drives that offer host managed SMR still weren't available to regular consumers. In theory that plus a compatible filesystem would work flawlessly. In practice you can't even buy the relevant hardware.
- MortyWaves 1y ago
  For future reference which WD drives are actually suitable for NAS? I remember someone saying you need to look for a specific more expensive type.

DHolzer 1y ago

buying HDDs these days currently feels a little like navigating the dark web.

mappu 1y ago

I have a mix of SMR and CMR drives in my NAS and it works perfectly (on mdadm). I understand ZFS hates it but what is the problem on Synology?

Hikikomori 1y ago
Afaik it's not much of a problem until you need to rebuild the raid.
Arrowmaster 1y ago
My rough understanding is an SMR drive has a small section that's CMR and where the data goes when you do a write. Then when the drive is idle it moves the data to SMR because SMR writes are slow. If you fill up the small CMR section it starts writing directly to SMR and you see a huge performance loss. Without adaptation for SMR drives a lot of systems recognized this slowdown as a failure and would hault a restore. Even with that corrected for now you are looking at 10x the rebuild time of a CMR drive which increases the odds of another drive failing during the rebuild.

kmacdough 1y ago

This is an argument in favor of all anti-competitive walled garden moves. But we've seen time and again the degrading service and price gouging that ultimately comes. People have a right to use the things they own as they please. Companies don't have a right to protect their image that supersedes this basic human right of independence.

izacus 1y ago

I heard its about EU CYA directive, which requires IoT companies to deploy security patches in firmware within X months of those patches being released. This would explain why they'd only want to support HDD models the Synology OS can flash firmware updates to. (It's also convenient to get more margins.)

kstrauser 1y ago
Nah. That wouldn’t require them to apply patches to someone else’s hardware than an end user installed after the fact. By analogy, Samsung isn't obligated to patch the firmware of an AirPods connected to it.

gwbas1c 1y ago

A friend of mine who moved from Communist Russia to the US once explained to me the "tyranny of choice." He explained that, in the US, sometimes we get overwhelmed with many, many options. To be quite blunt: After choosing my NAS, the act of choosing hard drives is actually harder and somewhat overwhelming. To be quite honest, knowing that I can choose from a narrower set of drives that are guaranteed to work correctly is going to really tip my scale in favor of Synology the next time I'm in the market for a NAS.

wiether 1y ago
Locking non-approved drives does absolutely nothing for your case though. They can sell "guaranteed to work" drives for people like you who don't want to go through all the picking process, while letting other people the choice to put any drive they want.

j45 1y ago

Western Digital misrepresented their Red drives being as suitable for NAS as they advertised, which ended up with them receiving a class action lawsuit against them. Luckily all of the settings can be searched for and verified. Seagate and Hitachi have seemed to treat me well over the years and I was giving WD a chance. Next drives to buy will be from this list: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...