When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale.
Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.
My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.
What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.
I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical
Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated.
The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.
I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.
Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.
Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.
I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2).
So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.
They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding which seems like a baffling position to take given their audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265 and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology OS because they remove the transcoders.
> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical
They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.
I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago, and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically unusable on the anemic CPU it came with— it would spend multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for a few gigs of digital photos.
After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.
I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.
I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a happy decision so far.
When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.
I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.
>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical
As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make
There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…
While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.
> Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject
> support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".
All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the latter without doing the former. Synology actively and painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives.
Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.
They could also oppose the change simply out of a belief in what's best for the customers, and an ethos of hardware compatibility. It would represent no change to their burden to continue the company's long-standing policy.
Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.
Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent.
It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.
I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)
What if you were to run your guest ssh in a container with the relevant volumes attached? I can't recall how the base ssh works with Synology DSM, but everything interesting I do with my NAS is done with containers.
I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.
At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.
People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.
Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are building their own NAS because they will just see the spec sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very performant to begin with.
And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because it's easy.
If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.
I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual contact with the support people in your organization to understand this. If the people answering phones and chats didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in advance to test with.
We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3 (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface.
No product is perfect but these interfaces are very well tested and billions of machines run as expected with them.
The move from them was purely for money reasons.
Are you saying Synology’s move to support first party drives was a good thing? Plenty of companies deal with unpredictable hardware and, in fact, Synology has for years, in part thanks to standards.
There are way too many companies where higher ups and marketing will refuse to listen to the engineers about what people actually like about their products.
See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it
Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?
I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle.
Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.
In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.
I'm curious, do you know of examples of companies that lost their best engineers despite reversing course on a shitty policy?
My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
There is a time span between the policy is comitted internally and the time that policy is reverted. In Synology's case it's probably more than half a year, in other companies it could take a full year or more to reverse course.
Half a year is plenty enough to move away.
Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.
Yep. I’d already started moving things out of Docker on my DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology’s police shoved me toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device. It’s going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell.
In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.
A bad reputation never goes away either. Trust once lost is not something that returns easily. Some customers might forgive a company but many wont and any business willing to be this scummy will almost certainly do something else (or the same thing again in a few years).
"That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years" is a strong argument against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you loose in a minute.
Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn’t happen.
This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to. The reality is that often such leaders can come out net positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to the ground because they extracted out everything in a short term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But at least the company and its products disappear. It's evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some kind of internal hero.
I also believe that this peek into the mentality of the organization leadership makes doubt in customers if the organization can be trusted again. I, personally, will think more than twice before choosing them again. This will be several years of recovery for the reputation, if it ever happens at all. Synology is in the box called 'squeezing cutomers for money' and the customer has no incentive to spend any time or money to test if the classification is still valid. Will stay there, despite this step. There is doubt that they changed their way of thinking. They only reacted to the repercussion to THIS specific action of theirs, that became measurably very bad for THEM. It was not like they revised their action after the outcry, no. They had to bleed, they want to stop THEIR bleeding, not making it good again for the customer. benefit for the remaining customers is just a coincidence here. I am not hopeful for their change of mentality. Which could be something disappointing to hear for faithful employees.
Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O
This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions before a decision is made and before the consequences are revealed.
Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the right answer was easily accessible.
There's probably some people who got this right who could take a shot at running things, but you can't know without having the dissenting opinions in writing ahead of time.
In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the leadership who did this not being impacted or punished is even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it’s much worse for morale.
I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a bad decision (or even a decision that’s seen to be bad)? In my experience internal morale often suffers before the customers catch on.
It's this level of out of touch with their market that gives me zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times according to their package manager, rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They deserve their own downfall, utter corporate stupidity.
> killed their Videostation product ... rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders
YES, yes, a million times yes.
Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.
> That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years.
People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.
I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:
* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.
* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.
So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.
If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.
But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.
To me it's obvious why they initially chose to use validated hardware:
1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.
2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.
3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.
However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.
The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers.
The decision to restrict 3rd party harddrives may be part of the reason why sales (allegedly) plummet, but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part.
Synology has been resting on the laurels for years. They had a "hit" with DSM 6, then did mostly nothing for a decade, released DSM 7, and again, nothing but minor things since.
On the hardware side of things, they're mostly still using decade old hardware, but i guess that matches the Linux kernel they're using, which was also EOL close to a decade ago.
Meanwhile the NAS market has been flooded by viable alternatives with better hardware, equal or better software, and usually cheaper. UGREEN and others have released more or less drop in replacements, and Ubiquiti released the UNAS line, and while it doesn't work as an application server, will run around circles any similarly specced (drive wise) Synology in raw file transfer performance, for half the price.
I'm guessing the 3rd party drive removal was simply just the final push that caused many people to switch to something else. Transcoding removal was likely also a big driver, as many people also use their Synology NAS as a Plex server.
As someone else mentioned here, I'd wager a large part of Synology customers were people who'd have had the technical ability to setup their own NAS server but didn't want to bother, instead electing a "setup and forget" solution. I know that's who I was when I bought my first Syno DS several years ago.
A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpriced, outdated hardware that weren't worth DSM's ease of use. Got Ubiquiti's UNAS with a couple of HDDs, a Beelink mini PC, and for a little time and roughly the same budget of a DS, got something far superior in specs and basically matching in ease of use.
Similar, but slightly different story for me. I ended up buying it as an enthusiast ‘Apple-grade’ product where UX was there to do something I would be able to do on my own. Then they got high on their own supply and started to believe they can be as restrictive and up charging as Apple, forgetting that they’re still a product for primarily fairly technical people.
Also, for all server needs I’m running a Raspberry Pi at a single digit fraction of the ongoing power use of my Synology, and it just no longer makes sense to have this weird rare platform as my base when I could just be running things on Debian and systemd.
More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have the mental capacity and willingness to maintain something like a Synology. The only large content I back up are my family’s photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.
Yep. I was one of those. Started with QNAP, went to Synology because their stuff was more powerful for the price (Could run Docker stuff on it and upgrade memory)
Then it stopped booting and the light just blinked -> it happened to be close to Black Friday and I had been thinking about moving to a bespoke build with Unraid for a while. Pulled the trigger and dropped some cash on the problem.
Finally I found out the issue was a bad PSU: it kinda-sorta fails, a common problem, just enough to start booting the system but it fails when all the drives start up.
Bought a 3rd party PSU from Amazon and now it's my offsite backup.
I literally built a NAS this past weekend and put TrueNAS on it and man has it been humbling learning to administer it. I’m able to get basic stuff working now after drowning in permissions hell for a day but I’m basically getting myself out of that by doing the linux equivalent of running more and more things as administrator in Windows until I stop getting errors. I might well have been a Synology customer before they did this nonsense but now I’m going to end up learning how to run a Linux server at least semi competently.
Exactly that. Their hardware and software hardly improved over a decade, instead they dropped features. The whole HDD ordeal and researching alternatives also made me realize that I’d rather have ZFS (even at the price of less flexibility with mixing drive sizes). Synology reversing course on the proprietary HDDs therefore won’t win me back.
Oh nice, thanks for mentioning UGREEN. I had a quick look at the website and it looks fairly cheap. I wouldn't trust their software but the base system comes on an MMC, does it mean I can flash it with TrueNAS or Unraid?
Yes, their units come with a HDMI out, and you can connect them up to install onto them like any other server - but if you ever want the (admittedly very, very good) factory software back on them I'd recommend imaging the internal storage first as I couldn't find a way to get their OS installed back afterwards.
While I'm using UGOS happily, yes you can install other OSes. For better or worse they have a very active Discord server with a ton of great information.
The base software is modified Debian Bookworm and it's been stable and pleasant to use.
Synology was in the back of my head for years as a straightforward home server product, but emphasis on "years". The other day I saw a competitor that had a hand grenade sized alternative, a cooling with 4 or 8 1 TB M2 SSDs arranged around it. And I thought, why the fuck is Synology still top of mind?
I suppose they have plenty of corporate customers still, companies that are too small for their own proper servers (self managed or hosted) but who do want some central storage and more importantly the tech support that comes with it. But those would just as likely go to Dell for all their requirements.
I think they are for premium segment creators like photographers, videographers or musicians. They have the money to invest and want a plug and play experience.
I have to wonder how much to 3 new NAS systems from Ubiquiti played into this. They seem pretty targeted at Synology at a great price. I have the original UNAS pro and it has been fantastic.
Sure I can't run apps on it, but how much do people really run apps on their synology vs just use it as a basic NAS to begin with? I never found any of the apps really all that great to begin with. The only one I kinda liked was synology sync but really don't need something like that with freesync.
In my mind app support is the main reason to pick Synology. They may not always be as capable as the best self hostable and/or commercial alternatives, but they are easy for people with intermediate skills to set up and maintain. That makes them a good deal for prosumer homes and SMBs without a dedicated IT guy. And with the way the Synology apps are designed you're then somewhat locked in.
You can get basic network storage more or less anywhere, for much cheaper, so in my mind apps and the polished GUI + integration are the only reason you would even consider Synology unless you're already locked in. Maybe technical support contracts at the higher end, but you can get that, done better, from other vendors too.
IIRC the only devices supported in the NVMe slots are their own Synology branded ones at a steep markup. It would be nice if they backed down on that too but I bet they won't.
There are plenty of NAS boxes out there with better specs, lower power consumption, faster networking, and half the price.
Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.
In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.
Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).
And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.
If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).
Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.
The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.
But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it, as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can’t upgrade the component and should buy the whole unit. The construction is plastic.
I have a 920+, and it’s too slow, frequently becomes unresponsive when multiple tasks are run.
They lag, and need to be constantly forced to improve?
Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.
Why?
Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics, office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.
Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.
So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of the above.
But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid running the show.
The economic notion is called marginal profitability. Better sales are a good thing if the marginal profit is positive, ie, each extra unit sold still increases the overall profit, so in your example it's still profitable if the new model brings $1.5 profit per unit, and you stop only when the marginal profit per unit turns negative.
In tech the model is often misleading, since the large investments to improve the product are not just a question of current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.
> So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
This will never work in a competitive market like for NAS. The only thing that will get you higher profit margins is a good reputation. If you're coasting by on your reputation, sales and customer experience matter. Less sales one quarter means less people to recommend your product in the next one, which is a downward spiral. A worse customer experience obviously is also a huge problem as it makes people less likely to recommend your product even if they bought it.
They went for a triple-whammy here from which they likely won't recover for years. They now have less customers, less people who are likely to recommend their product, and their reputation/trustworthiness is also stained long-term.
Crappier products at higher margins only works if you're a no-name brand anyways, have no competition, or have a fanatical customer base.
The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.
As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464. The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip, 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.
Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing only good things about their own system AND (except for the smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and flexible with support for the own OS.
As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2 for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.
I sold my synology for an AOOStar WTR Max. It arrived with an issue (usb4 port didn't work) but replacement was quick and easy. So far, I'm rather happy. Really hesitated with Minisforum.
Yep, I had two different models that had been running for about seven years each and had an excellent experience overall until Synology tried to change their drive policy.
I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.
I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.
Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).
A significant part of the prosumer NAS market isn’t running these for storage exclusively. They usually want a media server like Plex or Enby or Jellyfin at minimum and maybe a handful of other apps. It would be better to articulate this market demand as for low power application servers, not strictly storage appliances.
Not OP, I went back and forth about having containers etc on my NAS. I can of course have a separate server to do it (and did that) but
a) it increases energy cost
b) accessing storage over smb/nfs is not as fast and can lead to performance issues.
c) in terms of workflow, I find that having all containers (I use rootless containers with podman as much as possible) running on the NAS that actually stores and manage the data to be simpler. So that means running plex/jellyfin, kometa, paperless-ngx, *arrs, immmich on the NAS and for that synology's cpu are not great.
In general, the most common requirements of prosumers with NAS is 2.5gbps and transcoding. Right now, none of Synology's offerings offer that.
But really the main reason I dislike synology is that SHR1 is vendor locked behind their proprietary btrfs modifications and so can only be accessed by a very old ubuntu...
This kept me from buying one too. One of the models I considered would make me choose between an M.2 cache OR a 10gbe nic. I didn't know they are plastic now either. It's a shame, I really want to like them. I also heard it some "bootleg" OS you could install over DSM but not sure what it's called. Synology were trying to silence it iirc
Are there any other NASes out there that a) support ZFS/BTRFS, b) support different-sized drives in a single pool, and c) allow arbitrary in-place drive upgrades?
Last I checked, I believe I didn't find anything that satisfied all three. So DSM sits in a sweet spot, I think. Plus, plastic or not, Synology hardware just looks great.
There 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.
The Synology DS925+ for example does not have GPU encoding. For an expensive prosumer-positioned NAS this is crazy. They can't let us have both 2.5gb NICs and a GPU.
The article is about the changed actual policy deployed with DSM 7.3, that only just started rolling out. Your link hasn’t been updated in over two months, so doesn’t reflect that yet.
If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:
AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.
So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.
It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.
Nah, not really. They already have a compatibility page of known-good drives and they recommend people stick to it. They could also have an incompatibility list showing known-bad drives, and alerting if you install one of them.
If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don’t blame Toyota. But if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase wouldn’t have that same limitation.
Just commented here to point out that this news story spreading is wrong (and that other IT news outlets have since corrected/retracted it), don't have any eggs in that basket, but:
Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models, putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers identical NAS drive model is then listed as incompatible.
There is nothing remotely connected to actual technology involved in this story at all. This is a sales-strategy-only subject.
Exec summary for those who think their time is not worth this evil madness:
The only change is that they now allow you to use any 2.5" SATA SSD. Everything else, meaning: 2.5" SATA HDDs (the by far most common thing you would want to use) and NVME SSDs: Still a no-no.
No, there was no lesson learned here by them at all.
The liked article specifically is wrong here:
"Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs"
No, not hard drives. 2.5" SSDs only.
Very sorry to spoil the party, but sadly Synology STILL hasn't learned the lesson. :(
Let's check again after they have lost 95% of their customers...
What are you talking about. This is a quote directly from the page you’ve linked to:
> At the same time, with the introduction of DSM 7.3, 2025 DiskStation Plus series models offer more flexibility for installing third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs when creating storage pools.
Thanks Synology, but it's too late. I have found out TrueNAS and ASUSTOR (which can run TrueNAS if I want to). I'll continue from that path.
Thanks for all the fish, that was an enlightening experience.
OTOH, I wish them luck. They look fine for un-techy folks to store their data locally. Would like them to stick around. Also, competition is always good.
Same - replaced my smaller Synology with a UGREEN, put TrueNAS on it first thing, runs great. The HDD thing was only the final nail in the coffin, but before that, there were plenty of ridiculous "upgrades" that made products worse than in the previous generation. Literally removing features, or continuing to use the same outdated hardware. That's what companies do that don't think they have competition.
ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a PCIe slot...
You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental erasure.
All over great design.
Yes, it's not cheap, but it's almost enterprise class hardware for home, and that's a good thing.
Interesting how it seems a bunch of competition entered the market right as they did this as well. Unifi UNAS just came out and looks pretty compelling
Asustor is not new. I remember seeing it at the university (probably) a decade ago. It was a much simpler 4 disk unit without any screens or fancy specs. My professor told that the looks might be deceiving but it was a good unit.
I took a note of them mentally at that point, but their latest gen hardware is something else. Since I'm a sysadmin by trade, having some of the features that I have in the datacenter at home is a compelling proposition for me.
They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them.
And they might only be backtracking to get a few more sales until re-applying the restrictions, feeling justified because that's how the devices were originally advertised.
The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your device if you catch it in time").
For the second, Synology has an option to apply important updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret the new option to mean something like still installing the updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with stories of bricked machines.
Meh.. i do kinda forgive them. They tried, they lost, they reveserd their decision and hope to keep their customers (read:sales) happy. There are plenty of companies which would double or triple down their bad decisions and flatly tell the customer is the problem.
Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we could not put in any harddisk we'd wanted, but most of our customers did not really care, so we didn't as well. If you absolutely need superb storage you should stop using NASes anyway and get a far better (but more expensive) solution.
Then again if i myself want some NAS functionality, i'd fire up a Debian with Samba using any hardware i want.
They did that though. They have doubled down and told the users they were wrong & that this was a needed
Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR
This is a mixed bag. As someone who worked in the storage industry for ~10 years, there are a lot of poorly defined behaviors that are vendor/model specific and I can see how its easier to just pick a particular model, test it and declare it the blessed version having done similar stuff myself.
Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a disk should be replaced, or the user warned about possible impending doom, to simple things like how one sets cache WT/WB and flushes the caches (range based flushing is a thing, doesn't always work, etc) for persistence.
OTOH, much of this is just 'product maturity' because it is possible to have a blessed set of SMART/etc attributes that are understood a certain way and test to see if they exist/behave as expected and warn the user with something like "this drive doesn't appear to report corrected read errors in a way that our predictive failure algorithm can use". Or "This drive appears to be a model that doesn't persist data with FUA when the caches are set to write back, putting your data at risk during a power failure, would you still like to enable writeback?"
And these days with the HD vendors obfuscating shingled drives or even mixing/matching the behavior in differing zones its probably even worse.
So initially I wanted to give you a knee-jerk response about how Synology could have gone with a warning rather than an outright ban. Then I read the article...
It seems that this was never an outright ban, but non-blessed drives either generated a warning or they had reduced functionality. What TFA fails to mention is what this "reduced functionality" is.
If it's something like RAID rebuilds take longer because other drives might not have the requisite SMART attributes or some other function that's required is one thing. But halving the drive speed just because it's not a Synology drive is another. This knowledge would put me in a better position to know if I should harshly judge them or not.
I think it's totally fair to raise a warning that a particular drive has not been tested/validated and therefore certain guarantees cannot be met. I can fully respect how challenging it must be to validate your product against a basically infinite combinatorial collection of hardware parts. I've learnt long ago that just because a part fits does not mean it works.
I don't know the details of the warnings either, but from the original articles it sounds like they had moved to a QVL list that didn't include 3rd party devices, only their rebranded ones. Which is possibly because they got seagate/wd/etc to tweak something in the firmware. Which isn't unheard of for large vendors. And it is somewhat fair, qualifying drive persistence is probably some ugly unit test that takes hours to run, and requires being able to pull power on the drive at certain points. So the warning ends up being the equivalent of "we don't know if this drive works, lots of them don't we are going to disable this aggressive cache algorithm to assure your data is persisted" and that kills the performance vs the qualified drive. But because some non technical PM gets involved the warning shown to the user is "This drive isn't qualified".
The other take though, was that it was just a $ grab by rebranding and charging more for drives that were functionally the same. Which for logical people made sense because otherwise, why not say why their drives were better. But sometimes the lawyers get involved and saying "our rebranded drives are the only ones on the market that work right when we do X, Y, Z" is frowned on.
Hard to really know without some engineer actually clarifying.
No, it was a pretty complete ban. From a reputable reviewer[0]:
> New Installations Blocked for Non-Verified Drives
> As discussed in our NASCompares coverage and testing videos, attempting to initialise the DS925+ with hard drives that are not on the 2025 series compatibility list will block you from even starting DSM installation.
and
> Expanding Existing Storage Pools with Unverified Drives is Blocked
> Another key limitation to note is that you cannot expand an existing storage pool using unverified drives — even if your system was initialized using fully supported drives.
and
> To test RAID recovery, one of the three IronWolf drives in the migrated SHR array was removed, placing the system into a degraded state. We then inserted a fresh 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive.
> Result: DSM detected the new drive but refused to initiate RAID rebuild, citing unsupported media.
You could pull all of your drives from an older Synology and put them in the new device, but you couldn't add drives to the volume or replace crashed drives. And if you were starting with a brand new NAS, you couldn't even initialize it when using 3rd party drives.
I'm OK with a warning notice. I'm not even remotely OK with this.
By the way, their official drive compatibility list for the DS923+[1] shows dozens of supported 3rd-party drives. The same guide for the DS925+[2], an incremental hardware update, shows 0. So if you bought a bunch of drives off their official support list, they're useless in newer models. Apparently a Seagate IronWolf was perfectly fine in 2023 and a complete dud in 2025.
Oh, and Synology only sells HDDs up to 16TB in size[3], and they only have up to 12TB drives (for $270) in stock today. That price will get you a 16TB IronWolf Pro off Amazon. If you have cash to spend, you can buy a 28TB IronWolf Pro there, which is 2.3x bigger than the largest Synology you can order from the first-party store today.
Readit News
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.
I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated.
The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.
I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.
Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.
Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.
So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.
They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.
After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.
I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.
When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.
As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.
They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.
If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.
Dead Comment
Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.
I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)
People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.
Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
They're a fun bunch.
And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.
See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it
Source: worked AppleCare
Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.
In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.
My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
Half a year is plenty enough to move away.
Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.
In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.
https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/
Deleted Comment
Your "guess" is not logical.
The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice.
Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it.
The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).
I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them.
Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.
High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.
YES, yes, a million times yes.
Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.
People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.
Deleted Comment
I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:
* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.
* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.
So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.
If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.
But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.
1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.
2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.
3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.
However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.
See the problem there...?
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.
A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpriced, outdated hardware that weren't worth DSM's ease of use. Got Ubiquiti's UNAS with a couple of HDDs, a Beelink mini PC, and for a little time and roughly the same budget of a DS, got something far superior in specs and basically matching in ease of use.
Also, for all server needs I’m running a Raspberry Pi at a single digit fraction of the ongoing power use of my Synology, and it just no longer makes sense to have this weird rare platform as my base when I could just be running things on Debian and systemd.
More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have the mental capacity and willingness to maintain something like a Synology. The only large content I back up are my family’s photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.
Then it stopped booting and the light just blinked -> it happened to be close to Black Friday and I had been thinking about moving to a bespoke build with Unraid for a while. Pulled the trigger and dropped some cash on the problem.
Finally I found out the issue was a bad PSU: it kinda-sorta fails, a common problem, just enough to start booting the system but it fails when all the drives start up.
Bought a 3rd party PSU from Amazon and now it's my offsite backup.
They need to do something about it urgently.
The base software is modified Debian Bookworm and it's been stable and pleasant to use.
I suppose they have plenty of corporate customers still, companies that are too small for their own proper servers (self managed or hosted) but who do want some central storage and more importantly the tech support that comes with it. But those would just as likely go to Dell for all their requirements.
Sure I can't run apps on it, but how much do people really run apps on their synology vs just use it as a basic NAS to begin with? I never found any of the apps really all that great to begin with. The only one I kinda liked was synology sync but really don't need something like that with freesync.
You can get basic network storage more or less anywhere, for much cheaper, so in my mind apps and the polished GUI + integration are the only reason you would even consider Synology unless you're already locked in. Maybe technical support contracts at the higher end, but you can get that, done better, from other vendors too.
They have things with two slots, which I guess is good enough for raid 1, but those models also have HDD bays, which wastes space in network closets.
I’d expect them to have something with 4-8 incredibly well-cooled m.2 slots by now. The nic is only 2.5G, so the slots wouldn’t need to be full speed.
I’m happy with my ancient 2TB synology NAS, but it’s bigger, slower, noisier and hotter than my mini-pc, which also has two (toasty) nvme slots.
Totally. Whenever a company runs out of ideas they pull BS like this to increase profits.
Deleted Comment
Well, Jellyfin. Plex pulled a Slymology long ago.
It's a NAS. It just needs to be reliable.
Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.
In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.
Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).
And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.
If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).
Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.
The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.
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?
Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.
Why?
Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics, office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.
Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.
So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of the above.
But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid running the show.
In tech the model is often misleading, since the large investments to improve the product are not just a question of current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.
This will never work in a competitive market like for NAS. The only thing that will get you higher profit margins is a good reputation. If you're coasting by on your reputation, sales and customer experience matter. Less sales one quarter means less people to recommend your product in the next one, which is a downward spiral. A worse customer experience obviously is also a huge problem as it makes people less likely to recommend your product even if they bought it.
They went for a triple-whammy here from which they likely won't recover for years. They now have less customers, less people who are likely to recommend their product, and their reputation/trustworthiness is also stained long-term.
Crappier products at higher margins only works if you're a no-name brand anyways, have no competition, or have a fanatical customer base.
The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.
As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464. The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip, 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.
Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing only good things about their own system AND (except for the smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and flexible with support for the own OS.
As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2 for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.
Transcoding was the reason I moved away from Synology. The rest was fine, not great but ... Okay
But there was no way to improve transcoding performance. If a stream lagged, it would always lag. Hence I jumped ship and just made my own
Ugreen, aoostar and terramaster are also good alternatives.
I have had terrible luck with Drobo.
I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.
I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.
Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).
a) it increases energy cost
b) accessing storage over smb/nfs is not as fast and can lead to performance issues.
c) in terms of workflow, I find that having all containers (I use rootless containers with podman as much as possible) running on the NAS that actually stores and manage the data to be simpler. So that means running plex/jellyfin, kometa, paperless-ngx, *arrs, immmich on the NAS and for that synology's cpu are not great.
In general, the most common requirements of prosumers with NAS is 2.5gbps and transcoding. Right now, none of Synology's offerings offer that.
But really the main reason I dislike synology is that SHR1 is vendor locked behind their proprietary btrfs modifications and so can only be accessed by a very old ubuntu...
Last I checked, I believe I didn't find anything that satisfied all three. So DSM sits in a sweet spot, I think. Plus, plastic or not, Synology hardware just looks great.
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.
I agree with the rest, though.
My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.
https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
Edit: Updated KB article is here: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...
Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series
Details
FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:
AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.
So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.
It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.
If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don’t blame Toyota. But if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase wouldn’t have that same limitation.
Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models, putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers identical NAS drive model is then listed as incompatible.
There is nothing remotely connected to actual technology involved in this story at all. This is a sales-strategy-only subject.
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...
This is the main change. Other series (not Plus) are still locked down.
> 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.
Appears to be stale documentation.
Good to get this fact about the Synology organization.
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.
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.
I took a note of them mentally at that point, but their latest gen hardware is something else. Since I'm a sysadmin by trade, having some of the features that I have in the datacenter at home is a compelling proposition for me.
Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.
The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your device if you catch it in time").
For the second, Synology has an option to apply important updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret the new option to mean something like still installing the updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with stories of bricked machines.
How is sneaking in a fix and hoping people notice going to help sales?
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.
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...
Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
The other take though, was that it was just a $ grab by rebranding and charging more for drives that were functionally the same. Which for logical people made sense because otherwise, why not say why their drives were better. But sometimes the lawyers get involved and saying "our rebranded drives are the only ones on the market that work right when we do X, Y, Z" is frowned on.
Hard to really know without some engineer actually clarifying.
> New Installations Blocked for Non-Verified Drives
> As discussed in our NASCompares coverage and testing videos, attempting to initialise the DS925+ with hard drives that are not on the 2025 series compatibility list will block you from even starting DSM installation.
and
> Expanding Existing Storage Pools with Unverified Drives is Blocked
> Another key limitation to note is that you cannot expand an existing storage pool using unverified drives — even if your system was initialized using fully supported drives.
and
> To test RAID recovery, one of the three IronWolf drives in the migrated SHR array was removed, placing the system into a degraded state. We then inserted a fresh 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive.
> Result: DSM detected the new drive but refused to initiate RAID rebuild, citing unsupported media.
You could pull all of your drives from an older Synology and put them in the new device, but you couldn't add drives to the volume or replace crashed drives. And if you were starting with a brand new NAS, you couldn't even initialize it when using 3rd party drives.
I'm OK with a warning notice. I'm not even remotely OK with this.
By the way, their official drive compatibility list for the DS923+[1] shows dozens of supported 3rd-party drives. The same guide for the DS925+[2], an incremental hardware update, shows 0. So if you bought a bunch of drives off their official support list, they're useless in newer models. Apparently a Seagate IronWolf was perfectly fine in 2023 and a complete dud in 2025.
Oh, and Synology only sells HDDs up to 16TB in size[3], and they only have up to 12TB drives (for $270) in stock today. That price will get you a 16TB IronWolf Pro off Amazon. If you have cash to spend, you can buy a 28TB IronWolf Pro there, which is 2.3x bigger than the largest Synology you can order from the first-party store today.
[0] https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-2025-nas-series-3rd-p...
[1] https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=drive...
[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=drive...
[3] https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/store#product-storag...