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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
- jqpabc123 1y agoI'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.
- aranw 1y agoI believe they were basically saying a set list of approved hard drives
- jqpabc123 1y agoSo you're saying the photo of a Synology branded (rebranded) 4TB HDD from the article is fake?
- aranw 1y agoNo I wasn't saying it was fake. I believe that was one of the approved but rebranded drives You can find the compatible drives here https://www.synology.com/en-uk/compatibility https://www.synology.com/en-uk/compatibility
- tunney 1y agoNo, it was their drives or nothing. The only approved ones were theirs. I am also a long term Synology user is is shopping around for a different brand for my replacement.
- mkl 1y agoThey rebrand drives made by Toshiba and Seagate: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_M2_volume/wiki/Synology-HDDs-and-SSDs https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_M2_volume/wiki/S..., https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-hard-drives-and-ssds-vs-seagate-wd-toshiba-and-everyone-else/#:~:text=Synology%20rebrands%20OEM%20hardware%20from%20established%20vendors https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-hard-drives-and-ssds-...
- bapak 1y agoWhat is there to understand? They want to sell you the drives directly. This is extremely common practice, see ink cartridges.
- jqpabc123 1y agoI think I understand. Synology willingly chose to emulate one of the most anti-consumer products on the planet. And now I won't buy Synology for the same reason I won't buy ink jet.
- numpad0 1y agoThis 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.
- blitzar 1y agoFA ... FO
- joshstrange 1y agoThank 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.
- closewith 1y agoIf you just want storage and not apps, Ubiquiti's UNAS line is a much better choice, especially if you're in their ecosystem.
- aranw 1y agoYeah UNAS is one option I'm exploring. But the only thing I'm wanting on top of all that is something like Plex or Jellyfin and I don't know how well it will play with a UNAS if running on a external server
- lostlogin 1y agoIt’ll be fine. I eventually managed to get a Mac mini to work nicely as a headless docker + VM server. It’s a moster, and averages just 7w of power draw. A neat saving for a solar house (the old nuc 9 was 70w).
- jychang 1y agoIt works fine as a NAS, but you need to run Plex on a different server. You can't run Plex directly off the device like a DS224+ would.
- mlrtime 1y agoA N100 or other type of cheap hardware will be much better than the synology.
- kristofferR 1y agohttps://cwwk.net/collections/nas/products/cwwk-eight-slot-10g-nas-motherboard-n150-n305-n355-dual-2-5g-network-card-10g-10g-port-single-ddr5-dual-nvme-nas-motherboard https://cwwk.net/collections/nas/products/cwwk-eight-slot-10... (NAS-N150-8P) That + a Jonsbo N2 is a great option, it's what I run.
- closewith 1y agoHowever, 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.
- matheusmoreira 1y agoI'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.
- immibis 1y agoBankrupting every company who tries it is also a pretty good strategy.
- Aleklart 1y agoIt was a bald strategy move, but market was just not ready for the innovation
- aborsy 1y agoBut 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?
- RedShift1 1y agoI 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.
- nosianu 1y agoThere must be more than that, another explanation, if they are slow. Ten year old CPUs were plenty fast already, far more than enough even, to power an NAS device. My Windows 11 often takes many seconds to start some application (Sigil, Excel, whatever), and it sure isn't the fault of the CPU, even if it's "only" a laptop model (albeit a newish one, released December 2023, Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, 3800 (max 4800) Mhz, 16 Cores, 22 Logical Processors). Whenever software feels slow as of the last 1+ decades, look at the software first and not the CPU as the culprit, unless you are really sure it's the workload and calculations.
- close04 1y agoOn a DS920+ users will run various containers, Plex/Jellyfin, PiHole, etc. The Celeron J4125 CPU (still used in 2025 on the 2 bay DS225+) is slow when used with the stuff most users would like to use on a NAS today, and the software runs from the HDDs only. Every other equivalent modern NAS is on N100 and can use the M.2 drives for storage just like the HDDs, which makes them significantly more capable.
- aborsy 1y ago
- walterbell 1y ago> 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?
- okigan 1y agoUgreen
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoUgreen is king, lately.
- biohazard2 1y ago+1, I replaced my aging DS1812+ with a DXP4800 Plus and I've been quite happy with it.
- Daedren 1y agoThere'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.
- Etheryte 1y agoMany people recommend Ugreen, but looking at their entry-level 2-bay NAS it's nearly a hundred bucks more expensive than a 2-bay one from Synology. Sure, it has higher specs and whatnot, but that overlooks the fact that I don't care about specs. I just need a 2-bay device to backup my home devices, high performance is not a requirement.
- ceritium 1y agoGood, but I lost my trust in them, so my next NAS will be something else.
- piva00 1y agoI 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...
- HelloNurse 1y agoIs Synology owned by some evil equity fund? A healthy NAS company would have predicted the outcome before attempting to squeeze customers like this.
- InsideOutSanta 1y agoFor 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.
- jacquesm 1y agoCustomers lost tend to stay lost.
- jeffparsons 1y agoDon'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.
- tristanperry 1y agoYes exactly - and they still have aging hardware, only 1Gb Ethernet and have recently nerfed H.265 support.
- bapak 1y ago[flagged]
- leakycap 1y ago> Companies exist to make profit. They can only make a profit if people are willing to buy what they're selling > Their business is selling hard drives. Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives. The drives are interchangeable and upgradable, that's the whole point of a hot-swap NAS system. > I bet a large portion of profits come from that I think they wanted a large portion of profits to come from that, but most NAS purchasers know that hard drives are a commodity/standardized and won't pay a premium for ... no benefit.
- dspillett 1y ago> most NAS purchasers know that hard drives are a commodity/standardized and won't pay a premium for ... no benefit. Also, some will deliberately mix drives from various manufacturers to reduce exposure to potential “bad batch” problems where multiple drives fail in a short space of time (possibly extra failures while rebuilding an array after the first failure, rendering the whole array untrustworthy or entirely broken). This is not possible if you can only purchase from one manufacturer.
- bapak 1y ago> > Their business is selling hard drives. > Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives. No you are. You don't have to make something in order to sell it. Composing materials is a business. Selling packages is a business. You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so. You're acting like this isn't normal business administration: companies push products, companies adjust offerings depending on demand. Ask Oracle how they're still in business and raking in billions.
- rwmj 1y agoToo 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.
- jamesu 1y agoAlso 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.
- import 1y agoI switched to Ugreen 2800 and very happy so far. Looks promising and n100 gives plenty of room for containers
- fasteo 1y ago> 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.
- nicce 1y agoChange Synology with HP, NAS with printer and HDD with ink cartridge. How does that sound like?
- baobun 1y agoThe printer market is a cartel with everyone pulling the same bullshit. DIYing an affordable and performant printer is out of reach for the individual. Printer ink is not a commodity otherwise. Consumers don't really have alternatives. Desktop NAS market is very different.
- nicce 1y ago> Desktop NAS market is very different. This was the first step or attempt to change that.
- consp 1y agoHow? You need to restrict the HDD sales and put them into the cartel.
- nicce 1y agoHave you read the whole post...?
- rcxdude 1y agoThe thing is, you can't set up a cartel unilaterally. For this to work, they would need to get not only the other NAS appliance manufacturers on board (who clearly didn't and happily took the business that they were losing), but basically the whole PC and server hardware market. (I think some comments elsewhere in the chain got it right: they were calculating that they had enough brand lock-in and non-technical buyers who would not have much choice, as opposed to a largely technical userbase who could set up any number of options but were choosing them because they were both reasonable value and low maintenance)
- keraf 1y agoYet 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.
- tristanperry 1y agoToo 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.
- bayindirh 1y agoThanks 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.
- Netcob 1y agoSame - 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.
- bayindirh 1y agoASUSTOR'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.
- sschueller 1y agoASUSTOR looks interesting but none of their desktop units appear have PCIe expansion slots so you can't put a SFP28 card in there. It might be possible via expensive USB4 adapter.
- bayindirh 1y agoI misremembered that Gen3 hardware had a spare PCIe slot, my bad. You can either forego NVMe slots (which looks like an add-on card on [0]) and get the slot, or use one of the USB4 interfaces. OTOH, it has 2x10GbE on board, you can just media-convert it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWgc8W-hIWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWgc8W-hIWM
- fennecbutt 1y agoI 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.
- calini 1y agoWhat 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.
- fennecbutt 1y agoI used seagate ironwolf hdds (which have been reliable but s little noisy). And honestly for the cache ssd I just chucked in an old m.2 Samsung 980 pro or something I had lying around from years ago. I don't need crazy performance or to fine tune the setup or anything, like I said it's mostly just to plug and play.
- mjburgess 1y ago"build your own" just means buy a desktop PC and install an O/S
- kalleboo 1y agoIt's not common for a desktop PC to have 4-6 drive bays these days And besides the OS you need to install and maintain the apps, like backup software, photo management software, etc.
- throawayonthe 1y ago
- computersuck 1y agoYes! Resist the enshittoscene!
- f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y agoI 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".
- AJRF 1y agoThey 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.
- moffkalast 1y ago"Synology fucks around and finds out, more at 11"
- b3lvedere 1y agoMeh.. 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.
- Jaepa 1y agoThey 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-drive-restriction-for-Plus-NAS-10742895.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-removes...
- b3lvedere 1y agoI stand corrected. Thank you. I was under the assumption you could use any type of drive from any brand now again. It appears i assumed wrong. Just use any SSD brand, but forced to use Synology branded platter HDDs is not quite acceptable.
- osivertsson 1y agoWhen 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.
- INTPenis 1y agoDo 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?
- m000 1y agoA tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.
- bapak 1y agoDoesn't make much sense to me? How would they argue that? "Don't ban third party HDDs, you'll earn less on sales and you won't have to pay me". Wut
- glenstein 1y agoEvidently profitability went down due to the change, so if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is coming from.)
- INTPenis 1y agoIt depends on who their target audience is. VMware for example have strict hardware compatibility lists because their target audience is big enterprise. But Synology being a consumer NAS, this decision was perhaps not wise. They're sort of standing in two markets. They need to make a decision as to which products are enterprise and which are consumer. I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.
- haunter 1y agoIs 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
- indigo945 1y agoBuy 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.
- calini 1y agoHA 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.
- michaelsshaw 1y agoYou obviously dont understand capitalism. They'll probably get an increase in bonus with company layoffs occurring.
- esskay 1y agoToo little, too late. You'd have to be nuts to willingly go back into their walled garden now.
- Hamuko 1y ago>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.
- sschueller 1y agoDamage 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.
- julcol 1y agoAfter 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
- xd1936 1y agoPlus, a built-in UPS!
- NewsaHackO 1y agoI 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.
- baobun 1y agoHmm, 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.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoIt's not you, it's just that we've allowed "journalists" to get away with this for so long. They essentially write opinion pieces as new articles with absolutely no research. : Synology is a private company, so I guess they can't use stock filings or stock prices, but they should at least quote something substantial and add to the discussion.
- ByteDrifter 1y agoI 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.
- ChrisNorstrom 1y agoToo 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.
- dspillett 1y agoSans “we care about your privacy” lie and multiple clicks to object to “legitimate interests” in staking you around the Internet: https://archive.is/0qhXB https://archive.is/0qhXB
- throw-10-8 1y agoDamage is already done. It takes decades to build consumer trust, and one stupid MBA driven idea to ruin it.
- leakycap 1y agoWhat 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.
- Havoc 1y agoI'd imagine UGreen - trying to break into this market - probably sent them a thank you gift. What a wild unforced error...
- matheusmoreira 1y agoAwesome. 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.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoI 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.
- immibis 1y ago> 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.
- leakycap 1y agoThe 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.
- NKosmatos 1y agoAfter 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 ;-)
- palata 1y agoWhen 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.
- submeta 1y agoToo 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.
- liquid_thyme 1y agoIf 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.
- NikolaNovak 1y agoI 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:)
- immibis 1y agoIIRC it was official Synology-branded drives only. And they cost about twice as much as the exact same drives without the Synology brand.
- rcxdude 1y agoYeah, the NAS wants to talk to a customised firmware. Which is what made it so transparently a money grab: they were reselling drives with a firmware modification at substantial markup.
- timmg 1y agoI think it would be pretty cool if Framework made a TrueNAS targeted NAS box.
- 8fingerlouie 1y agoThe 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.
- layer8 1y agoExactly 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.
- eecc 1y agoOh 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?
- its_notjack 1y agoYes, 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.
- oompydoompy74 1y agoIt’s so incredibly easy to build a TrueNAS box these days I don’t know why anyone would go the Synology route.
- kristofferR 1y agoIt'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.
- tjpnz 1y agoHow many will still think this is the policy regardless of its reversal? Good job Synology.
- scotty79 1y agoHow many will never touch Synology because they remember that this company proved to be capable of making incredibly stupid decisions?
- gardnr 1y agoAs 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!
- squeedles 1y agoOne 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.
- aquir 1y agoThis is the reason then that many YT influencers are making Synology shorts...awful original decision but at least they backtracked which is good!
- numpad0 1y agoIs 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?
- Neil44 1y agoNot super different to buying a server from Dell, HP etc. Very different target market however.
- foft 1y agoIt 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.
- dewey 1y agoI wonder if that's related to UniFi pushing into that market for consumers (https://www.ui.com/integrations/network-storage 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.
- pbronez 1y agoYeah 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.
- meindnoch 1y agoI'm glad that I've graduated from Synology to a proper Debian server with ZFS around 6 years ago. Fuck these people.
- Fischgericht 1y agoNOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read: https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibility_policies https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
- Fischgericht 1y agoExec 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...
- avianlyric 1y agoWhat 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.
- Fischgericht 1y agoI do not know if we are getting served different content for the same URL. Content I can see, with server-side timestamp of 2 seconds ago: Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series: FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
- WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 1y agoLooks like you are indeed getting an older page. Try https://archive.is/8aUdC https://archive.is/8aUdC
- anilakar 1y agoToo 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.
- yodon 1y agoIt'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004
- bangaroo 1y agoNobody could have seen this coming. Nobody at all.
- InTheArena 1y agoMy 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Khaine 1y agoIt's too late. They can't be trusted. They have fucked themselves.
- seg_lol 1y agoThe 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.
- reginamary32 1y ago[dead]
- j45 1y agoWell, 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-smr-hard-drive-us-canada 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-test-data 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.
- stego-tech 1y agoToo 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.
- beart 1y agoI 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).
- stego-tech 1y agoAppreciate the insight! I’ve got Proxmox running now but I’m not a huge fan of its UX, personally. Was leaning towards TrueNAS or Unraid for my next storage box, so that sort of feedback helps immensely. Thanks again!
- figers 1y agoWhat 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?
- lenerdenator 1y agoAs 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.
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoHope 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.
- John23832 1y agoI 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.
- zx8080 1y agoSo 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.
- PKop 1y ago> 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.
- etempleton 1y agoWhenever 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.
- Larrikin 1y agoThere 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.
- ricardobeat 1y agoA 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.
- Tepix 1y agoAs 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.
- slowmovintarget 1y agoBack 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.
- TechSquidTV 1y agoWhile 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.
- jdhawk 1y agohttps://www.servethehome.com/minisforum-n5-pro-review-an-awesome-nas-platform/ https://www.servethehome.com/minisforum-n5-pro-review-an-awe...
- WesolyKubeczek 1y agoIt shouldn’t be enough for companies to just reverse some lousy decision, they’ve got to show some goodwill for it.
- Eric_WVGG 1y agoLast 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.
- jasonlotito 1y agoI 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.
- piyuv 1y agoBose first, Synology second. Bad execs need to go.
- StillBored 1y agoThis 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.
- magguzu 1y agoThey could have a list of supported vendors then.
- beAbU 1y agoSo 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.
- citizenpaul 1y agoTime 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.
- vermaden 1y agoVote with your wallet. Always works.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoUnless customers believe that they have no choice - see Windows 11 for details
- phoenix3200 1y agoSix 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_that_support_claims_is_a_bad_motherboard/ 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).
- crazygringo 1y agoI 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?
- phoenix3200 1y agoAs best as I could understand, the hardware wasn't dead. It was "soft bricked" due to no fault of my own. And they wouldn't stand behind their product and instead insisted I upgrade to a newer and less capable product. No, I wasn't expecting replacement hardware. I was expecting support for a product that they were still releasing software for.
- crazygringo 1y agoHow was it soft bricked? Is that a known thing, that everyone with that model, it stopped working? So you have good reason to believe that? And if it wouldn't even turn on, what kind of support were you expecting to receive? If a device that is out of warranty fails to turn on, there aren't many companies that are going to give it any support except to tell you to buy a new one.
- 21Pockets 1y agoI 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.
- tristor 1y agoEvery 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.
- ddtaylor 1y agoI 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"
- don_searchcraft 1y agoGlad 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.
- tracker1 1y agoToo 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.
- buccal 1y agoWhat 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-Office365/activebackup_office365?version=7#:~:text=Active%20Backup%20for%20Microsoft%20365%20follows,share%20any%20other%20personal%20account%20information 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-synology-active-backup-m365/ https://modzero.com/en/blog/when-backups-open-backdoors-syno...
- donmcronald 1y agoThanks 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/ https://oauth.net/2/grant-types/client-credentials/ 2. https://www.scootersoftware.com/ https://www.scootersoftware.com/
- georgehaake 1y agoThis was the motivation to swap out my old, reliable Synology for a new Ugreen setup. Pretty happy so far.
- HumblyTossed 1y agoSo, was anyone held accountable for this?
- drnick1 1y agoAre 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.
- beart 1y agoDifficult 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.
- ssl-3 1y agoIMHO: 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.
- lousken 1y agoMINISFORUM 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?
- recov 1y agoThis 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
- jacquesm 1y agoIf 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.
- Lammy 1y agoSame 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&model=M-280-MATX 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&series=SERVER%20STORAGE&sub=M%20Storm%20JBOD%2012G https://istarusa.com/product/product-list/?brand=istarusa&se...
- beala 1y agoHow'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.
- jacquesm 1y agoDepends on how you configure the whole thing. You could add another XEON and not spin down the drives and it would consume quite a bit of power, of you can put it to sleep and conserve but there is of course a spin-up price to that when you need it. It will definitely consume a few hundred Watts, and when you pack it full of drives it will be more than that. But that's kind of logical. A Synology would not consume that much power but it would also be far slower and have less capacity.
- anonymousiam 1y agoI 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.
- animitronix 1y agoToo late. The damage is done and the trust is gone, I won't be coming back.
- eitally 1y agoIt'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.
- greatgib 1y agoFantastic that people managed to make reverse (or even just postpone) this awful decision. A good example of people voting with their money!
- dang 1y agoRelated. Others? The Synology End Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060920 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706 - April 2025 (403 comments)
- blindriver 1y agoTheir 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.
- atoav 1y agoCool. 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.
- mtillman 1y agoEventually an open source project will jailbreak these devices like they did Nintendo devices with similar enshitification tactics.
- foxwolf 1y agoI 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.
- bni 1y agoNever bought anything from Synology, never will.
- mrbadger 1y agoBeen 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.