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.
Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?
> 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.
Indeed. I believe that if you're a shareholder employee owner, you are likely incentivized to not kill the golden goose versus folks at the top making decisions unilaterally, but you also need some ability to say no to bad decisions. Like Costco, employee and customer happiness first, profits after.
(big fan of employee ownership and control contributors, aligning incentives and outcomes and all that jazz)
> Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?
The only peers at the company who were enthusiastic about the decision were the ones who were buying more company stock and wanted it to go up. They thought that anything that increased the bottom line would increase the stock price, and therefore they were on board.
So, no, I don't think increased employee ownership solves anything.
Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.
> "Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?"
Employee control doesn't reduce investor pressure for increased profitability. Employee ownership just means that the employees are now the ones exerting the investor pressure and if anyone thinks employees will be willing to take less total compensation (why? "Loyalty to the company"? "Solidarity"?) instead of hopping to a new job, well, good luck with that.
A good habit to practice is to see how far you can go reconciling apparent contradictions with charitable interpretation. I think in this case, I can see "brand loyalty" on a continuum ranging from "feels good about product" to "so completely loyal that lock-in would be redundant". The furthest extreme would produce an effective contradiction, but anything short of that can make sense of the term while leaving space to understand lock in as a rational, or at-least non-contradictory action.
I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is staged, and profits flow (for better or worse).
The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes, which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines. They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping on.
> Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in.
In this case, the customers were loyal to Synology for the NAS but not the hard drives.
By locking them in further, they thought they could capture their customers' hard drive purchasing, too. They thought the brand loyalty would allow it.
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.
I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project".
DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
I'd be far more weary of the application level services provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context, as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the applications get far less scrutiny.
What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
I find that Linux NAS and router project require essentially no babysitting. You do have to do some initial setup work, but once it's done, there's no maintenance (other than replacing failed hardware) for years and years.
It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM. It really is something special. It's worth a small premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the concerns as everyone else here and will be considering other options.
My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement.
It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.
You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS.
I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.
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As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.
It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.
For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.
It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A common problem apparently.
Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of missing out on a webgui or installing something like FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days.
I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages.
RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that?
I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well.
Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology.
Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to provide a solution to users who are more interested in the verbs than the nouns.
They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives.
Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.
they’re pretty clearly referring to _their_ use case and not everyone’s. i think people are mostly talking past each other about this. there isn’t one feature set that matters for everyone, so of course a synology is perfect for some and for others it can be replaced with “junk”.
In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
> 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.
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.
This is why I don't use NAS from them. I don't understand why I would want to be limited in these strange ways. I have multiple NAS that I have created myself for myself, my family and my friends. If I want to have h264, h265, AV1, or whatever I just install it.
I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.
They probably concluded at this point it wouldn't mean much and they are somewhat right. Every day they fail to address the situation that apology needs to be a lot bigger and it can only get so big.
>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical
As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make
I 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.
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.
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…
Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure there are people who do it and create content about it (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for actually running a high availability system that just works with minimal fussing.
There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.
For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd.
For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't.
But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box...
And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
Exactly the route I took. I had an aging tower machine full of spinning disks running on an old LSI adapter that was doing hardware raid. They were out of space and I began to get nervous the LSI adapter could die and I would trouble replacing it. Decided JBOD for the future.
External drives were on sale, I bought several and setup with a RPI. Lots of headaches. It took effort to iron out all the USB and external disk issues. Had to work out alternative boot. Had power adapters fail for the RPI. Had to enhance cooling. etc. Kept running into popular Docker containers still not having aarch64 variants.
I finally replaced the RPI with a used Dell SFF. Kept the USB drives and it's been solid with similar power draw and just easier to deal with all around.
Though I am considering going back to a tower, shucking the drives (they're out of warranty) and going back to SATA.
I think most LSI adapters you can get a battery backup for. I've got one on mine, plus a spare battery sitting on a shelf somewhere. I admit when I put the system together for the first time I was a little hesitant to go with hardware RAID but it's worked out fine so far.
I reckon the issue is more in replacement than transient data loss: what are you going to do when you can't find a replacement controller card, or it only available at ludicrous prices?
With a proprietary on-disk format you can't exactly hook them up to any random controller and expect it to work: either you find a new one from the same controller family, or your data is gone.
Replacing your RAID controller is already major maintenance, so there's going to be downtime. I wouldn't be opposed to just wiping the drives and restoring from the latest backup. I routinely do this anyway, just to have assurance that my backups are working.
And a risk! I've had this on a premium machine put together specifically for that purpose and when the raid controller died something got upset to the point that even with a new raid controller we could not recover the array. No big deal, it was one of several backups, but still, I did not expect that to happen.
I've had mixed experiences with my NUC. It has what I think is a firmware bug that causes display output to fail if you connect a monitor after boot. Very annoying if it ever drops off the network for some reason.
There seems to be a Windows-only update tool available that might fix it, but that's rather inconvenient when it's used as a server running Linux! No update available as a standalone boot disk or via LVFS. So I haven't gotten it fixed yet because doing so involves getting a second SSD, taking my server offline to install Windows on it, just to run a firmware update.
If you use a couple of magnetic disks, the pi is fast enough. The disks will be the bottleneck. There are sata cards that allow up to four magnetic disks, and where you power that card which in turn powers the pi. It's very doable.
It's of course more work to set up than synology, and if you want a neat box, you have to figure that out yourself
You'd be surprised. A single spinning rust drive can hit 200MBps for sequential access, so that's plenty to saturate its 1Gbps NIC.
However, in my experience with a Pi 4, the issue is encryption. The CPU simply isn't fast enough for 1Gbps of AES! Want to use HTTPS or SSH? You're capped at ~50Mbps by default, and can get it up to a few hundred Mbps by forcing the use of chacha20-poly1305. Want to add full-disk encryption to that? Forget it.
The Pi 5 is supposed to have hardware AES acceleration so it should be better, but I'm still finding forum posts of people seeing absolutely horrible performance. Probably fine to store the occasional holiday photo, but falls apart when you intend to regularly copy tens of gigabytes to/from it at once.
So long as the storage system is capable of serving a video stream without stuttering, that covers the 99% performance case for me. Anything beyond that is bulk transfers which are not time sensitive.
The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.
I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after.
Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
> I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after.
They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche. The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux system really doesn't have a competitor at its price point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python program to log the data from the sensors to a spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and it really sparked her interest.
I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning. Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet, and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.
Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in very different directions, hence this dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder.
Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.
And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".
Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.
So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.
On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write directly to frame buffers. I don’t need Linux. I don’t really need a kernel…
Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box):
Coffee table Digital Touch map.
Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo battery.
ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.
Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.
Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.
Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.
Wearables.
Playing with high density distributed computing. (More than 5 machines)
For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less.
For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured.
For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course).
For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it.
For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware.
And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly).
And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
Userspace-accessible GPIOs, I2C, SPI, PCM, and UART on a system that runs Linux. My employer uses them for a bunch of our hardware-in-the-loop test automation, with the GPIOs used for CAN, relays for switching various signals, vibration table control, etc. The USB gets used for SCPI device control (power supply, multimeter, etc.) and DuT connection. It's a lot cheaper to use a Pi for this than it is to use a small form factor x86 machine with a bunch of USB-<protocol> dongles.
Valid, thanks. But to what degree? The light bulb that runs 18h a day in the kitchen likely draws the same power that my mini form factor Optiplex 3060 does.
To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless.
I am much more concerned about data center power usages, especially in the age of LLMs.
Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept preaching we should stop using electric kettles because it's bad for the planet. While the 3 plants in her hometown amounted to ~83% of all power usage and ~92% or all pollution. Boy, was she unhappy when I did that research and pointed it out to her.
Pi-s / SBCs are I suppose very good for computing out there in the meatspace, where you might need a battery because sometimes power stops for 6 hours? Could be that.
Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed.
For $300 I could get an ITX to run.
So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
You’re running the pi and drives in a plastic take away container off usb power for that price.
At the very least you want the case and psu. At which point the question is which cpu+motherboard+ram combo do you want in that case. The rpi is one of many such options and is actually quite expensive for the amount of cpu+ram you get for the price.
A “server” doesn’t need to mean a pizza box with 15k rpm jet engine fans.
My server is repurposed desktop hardware in a desktop tower case and is nearly silent except for the subtle hard drive noises. The hardware cost next to nothing and is far faster and more capable than any pi (except the pio of course which wouldn’t be used anyway).
An ITX isn’t the competitor for a Pi. I’d suggest a USFF prebuilt. I use an HP Elitedesk and Dell and Lenovo each have similar tiny PCs. They’re nearly silent or completely silent, and half the size of a Mac Mini. Cost is about $150 for hardware that is more than enough for me, plus they can have 1-2 SSDs and a hard drive inside the case.
Clarification: They're about half the height of the OLD Mac Mini. Better comparison: They're the size of a typical hardcover book if you chopped it to be square.
I'm uncertain of why $40 vs $300 is even a point of debate on HN. The latter is a one-time investment and you likely can expand it a bit i.e. add a 2.5" or M.2 drive later.
What's the gain of running 12 RPi, exactly? Do you do research work requiring distributed low-cost computing?
They are if the GPU can be attached. I avoid virtual machines in favor of container workloads from containerd for this reason. It’s easier to attach Mali GPU and do my work than it is to find cash in this economy for a dozen RTX’s.
Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one.
The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology.
Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity.
Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.
I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.
For truly important files (photos), I’ll take the slight added expense of ECC for a little more peace of mind that old photos aren’t being gradually degraded with every resilver or scrub.
The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM.
In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?
This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption.
Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.
So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their customers' appetite for alternatives.
The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?)
Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available.
This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own.
For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.
I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I didn’t want to tinker with the backup system for my family’s data. And when I read about the drive requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really screwed up.
Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a trend toward less openness, toward greed (including removing capabilities from units they've already sold) and toward a decline of their business as a result of tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking for in a NAS.
That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot. There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The default external ports are usually 1g and most others have moved to at least 2.5g.
I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.
I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run as a server.
I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.
I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be.
You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing.
If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid.
Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR.
Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS.
Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market.
Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured solutions with no need for a computer science degree.
1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality
2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy.
I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer.
My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? “Why Lamborghini when Honda” is equally as silly yet I’ve seen them race head to head. Honda won.
I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't think it's silly.
But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z.
They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions.
For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
There's nothing silly about building your own. What's silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person with a lot of free time to build their own.
If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
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.
Yes, but it's not support wagging the dog,
If they sell a NAS, the customer adds drives to it and already runs into issues requiring support, it creates cost which becomes part of a product problem.
In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)
> 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."
“We only support Synology-branded drives” would have gone over a lot better, because we could have used non-symbology drives without support. Instead they actively prevented non-Synology drives from working.
It would have been way better than what they did, I agree. However, it would've been pretty shitty from a user perspective still. I'd be pretty angry as a customer if customer support just refuses to help me with anything unless I buy Synology-branded drives.
2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features
3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
4. Does not work: list of drives.
There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.
Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components. It's not realistic for them to support those components. The standard approach is to support the aspects they can control, and the customer is on their own for problems that involve the third-party component. Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours. It works with ours? OK, our job is done, go talk to the company that made your charger.
There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is actually significantly better for the user than just straight up preventing the use of non matching proprietary drives.
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.
There's a misunderstanding, I don't defend Synology's decision.
I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales.
Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he found the "silver bullet"...
>especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision
As a life long customer support person I disagree.
Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.
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.
It's a little bit trickier though, if you're selling hardware with a one off cost and not a subscription. Because your installed base grows even with flat revenue. The lifetime cost of CS (including the calls from people who need to be turned down) needs to be baked into the sales price, but that's a bet.
My experience is with enterprise software, where most products were born as shrinkwrap and slowly moved to other models, and I agree, it's not an easy problem to solve. Even if you size lifetime costs correctly (and very few people can), it is quite hard to scale a support org; even if one can see the storm coming, one might not be fast enough to be prepared for it for a number of reasons (geography, capital investment, training times, churn, brain drain, etc etc).
That's why some big names have literally declared support bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support (google, amazon...).
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’ve worked in tech support at all levels. At most companies it doesn’t matter what customer service is happy or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given. Customer support as an organization’s opinion isn’t generally valued at most companies.
Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”
That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...
The cost of providing customer support is clear and easy to measure, while the benefit is nebulous. This leads to incentive structures centered around controlling costs. That means rewards for handling more calls, and thus punishment for taking too long on a call regardless of the merits. In such an environment, it is inevitable that the reps will care about their call times instead of the customer. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.
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.
"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.
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.
At the very least, some people who otherwise wouldn't have actively looked for other opportunities might start doing so. This can have consequences several months down the road, even if they don't quit immediately.
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
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.
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.
Based on my experience dealing with SFPs I highly suspect they looked at their bug tracker and concluded that 13% of the sketch-ass mystery drives were causing 50% of their labor expenditure.
And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...
Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't SFP evolve pretty heavily here?
The newest version is from --2022-- 2016. There are also quite high data-rates involved.
SATA and Smart are stable for a long time.
Smart has some special commands depending on manufacturer but the core set of functions always work.
I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems.
"Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."
They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives".
TBH this is quite sad.
I recommended Synology to some people before...
Feels like I have to walk back on my word.
This is 21st century American business. Synology wasn't going to choose their drives for maximum reliability after a long, hard, and most importantly expensive benchmarking period, they were going to stuff the cheapest drives they could buy from suppliers in there and charge more than any other drive. There's a very reasonable chance this would have produced lower quality outcomes and more support calls in the long run than random drives purchased on the open market.
Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.
Your experience with SFPs does not translate to hard drives. Hard drives are very, very, very standardized. SFPs are not. Yes, all SFPs have a standard hardware interface, but the optics coding varies wildly.
Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.
HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.
Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".
I've been using them for 4 years across enterprise level HDDs, personal HDDs, portable HDDs, never seen any issues or differences in experience other than speed.
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.
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?
There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts. I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.
People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or better at business, or have better product ideas. They're generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went to the right prep school and college, they were friends with the right people already in the executive class, they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to retirement.
It 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.
Evidently 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.)
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been at a couple of places where I've had similar experiences and I get to the point where I'll explain it once, and if they're not listening or discard the suggestion without really considering it, then I'll just wait for them to figure it out themselves.
I get paid either way.
I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.
I’ve been there. After a while, I realized that they’re paying for my advice. If they take it, awesome. If they don’t, and I feel like I did a good enough job communicating my reasons, then that’s their option, and their consequences.
I get it. The situational context makes a huge difference, too. Most of the people I advise now are Chief Something or Another. Their jobs are generally to take a whole lot of inputs and make business decisions. Maybe I’ll say “I don’t think we should do that because X”, and they’ll decide to do it anyway because Y is a higher priority. As long as it’s not something truly horrible, like “let’s sell our user list” or “we don’t have time to hash passwords” or something else egregious, eh, fine. They asked for my advice, I gave it, and they’re free to do whatever they want with it.
But sure, even then it’d get super annoying if they always ignored it. At some point it’d be obvious that my business goals don’t align well at all with theirs, so maybe it’s time to find a better fit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.
I use iCloud Photos for my photos, so I don’t have to manage storage on my phone, while always having access to everything. I quite like it.
I also have a Synology NAS for other things.
A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me to also backup my photos to the NAS, because I have no idea how Apple is backing things up. I might be willing to pay for 3 copies for just my photos, but is Apple going to do that for all users of iCloud without advertising it? Probably not.
I’m not sure the best way to go about doing an initial backup to the NAS, or the ongoing changes. I think it also gets a bit messy with Live Photos… which is another reason why iCloud Photos is so appealing, if it can be fully trusted.
Apple uses a mix of Google Cloud and AWS, as well as their own data centers. As for Google and AWS, they are using multi geographic redundancy, and I can only assume they do that for their own data centers as well. The data in the 3rd party data centers is encrypted.
That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data center, but in multiple data centers, so that if one data center completely vanishes, your data will still be available.
That being said, it's always good to make a local backup. I use a tool called Parachute Backup (https://parachuteapps.com) on my Mac to automatically export photos from Apple Photos to my NAS. It also works on "iCloud optimized storage", so it won't just backup size optimized photos.
I've tested it against Photosync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home) as well as a manual export of unmodified originals, and in a library consisting of 180k photos and videos, I had 300 compare errors, most of which were Live Photos, that are not exported identically.
Both Parachute and Photosync offers the ability to export unmodified originals along with AAE files, so that if you need to rebuild your Apple Photos library, everything including undo history is preserved (AAE files contains edits).
Tools like Synology Photos and Immich (and more) only exports the "latest" version, whatever that may be, meaning if you have edited the photo on your phone, that edited version is exported, and if you later restore from your NAS backup, there is no undo history. In other words, they apply the edits in a destructive way.
For backing up from the NAS to another location I use Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com), which also supports backing up iCloud Drive files that are cloud only.
Parachute Backup looks very promising, thanks. I’ll have to spend a little more time later checking it out and seeing if that’s the direction I’ll go.
I do have my NAS backed up to Synology’s cloud backup service. I don’t love it, and it seems expensive, but it was easy to setup at the time and gave me some peace of mind for that data. The big issue I see is that I feel like I’d be stuck buying another Synology to restore of my current one fails.
The nightmare scenario is that Apple locks you out of your Apple ID for some reason.
Luckily, Apple also provides a pretty easy backup path that lets you have a local copy, if you have a Mac and a NAS:
- setup your Mac’s photos app and iCloud to download everything locally
- setup Time Machine backups from your Mac to a NAS
That’s it. You get 3-2-1 (your Mac, iCloud, and your NAS) and can get a copy of your data even if your Apple ID gets locked out.
Standard disclaimer, only the Time Machine copy is a true backup (ex if you delete a file by mistake, only Time Machine can help you restore it; iCloud is a sync, not a backup). That said, for me personally, this scheme (local copy + cloud copy + NAS backup via Time Machine) takes basically 0 work to maintain once setup and gives me peace of mind.
I thought about going this route, but I have 73GB of photos currently, which will only continue to grow over time.
While not the biggest library, it’s approaching the point where I’d need to start buying upgraded storage on any new Mac I buy, or use external storage for my Photos library. One of the things I like about iCloud Photos is my computer doesn’t need much local storage, Photos will manage it, downloading full res images on demand and purging them as needed.
I’d want a backup solution that is optimized for this, to allow for backups of the originals, without having to have them all downloaded all the time.
> 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.
I'm more or less in the same situation.
I no longer use a NAS for my "daily driver", and as such it made sense to skip Synology and instead go for the cheaper option, which in my case was the UNAS Pro (only model available at the time).
Next to it sits an "old" Mac Mini M1, which hosts my Plex server, with storage provided by the UNAS over 10Gbps ethernet.
Everything else i might at some point in time have used the Synology for, has instead been delegated to iCloud. Documents, photos, and everything in between is stored there, and each laptop makes a backup with Arq backup to the NAS as well as another cloud provider.
My NAS today is literally just an advanced USB drive attached to a server, and that was also part of my considerations at the time, just getting a DAS and plugging that into the Mac Mini M1, but ultimately the UNAS Pro (with 10Gbps networking) was cheaper than a Thunderbolt DAS, and i already had a switch capable of 10Gbps.
I made a similar "journey" some years back, where i removed pretty much everything cabled from the network, and instead moved everything to WiFi, and instead doubling down on providing "the best" wifi experience i could, which today means WiFi 7 with 2.5Gbps uplinks, hence the 10Gbps switch.
My network is 100% private. I don't expose ports to the internet, meaning maintenance is no longer a "must do" task. The only access is via Wireguard, which can be done with an always on profile that routes traffic for that specific subnet, but more realistically is mostly never used. The most remote streaming is done via a site to site VPN from my summerhouse to my house, where i can stream Plex over.
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.
Too little, too late... My current Synology box will likely be my last, I might get another 5-bay expansion, but even that is really iffy. I just don't like the decisions like this that they've continued to make... more lock in, more restrictive features, etc.
For that matter, in the 4-6 drive SOHO range, there are a LOT of NAS products with decent consumer upgrade options and alternative OS support with okay compute power. Not to mention the prosumer options for software that support these devices as well as DIY options are pretty good as well, less than the premium that Synology charges for their hardware.
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.
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.
In particular: “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. While Synology recommends using drives from the compatibility list for optimal performance and reliability, users retain the flexibility to install other drives at their own discretion.”
I can confirm that if I change my Accept-Language headers in my browser from "en" to "en-US" I get the other version of that page. Actually, for everything else I tried other than "en-US" I get the evil version.
Synology press team Achievement unlocked: Confuse all global IT press outside of the United States.
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.
As German IT news media has retracted the "Synology reverses" story based on the content they are reading in the press release link, I suspect there is some Geo-stuff involved here (I tested this from multiple German IPs now and always get "the other version").
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.
Your Toyota analogy doesn't hold up. If a customer puts SMR into their NAS, they are absolutely going to call Synology and complain. And they are going to have to re-explain this over and over because most people don't understand nascent HDD writing modes the way they do a vehicle tire. Even then, and appropriate analogy would be a tire that is cheap and new but refuses to spin above 25mph vehicle speed.
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.
I'm not a customer of Synology. I don't agree with justifying forced purchase of a relabeled product.
They deserve the result of their decision and not understanding their customers - they could just start a separate enterprise line if they didn't have one already for whatever they wanted to force.
Enterprise brands like HP, etc, to my last experience, do sell white-labelled drives, but don't bar you from using those same drives yourself.
My lack of trust remains with the parts that will fail the most - hard drives.
Hard Drive manufacturers don't have the best history, whether it was Western Digital lying to their customers about CMR when it was actually SMR. That would be my reason for never accepting a forced labelling of a drive.
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.
I bought an inexpensive used Mac Mini and attached a standard HDD USB3 enclosure to it with multiple drives. Works great for streaming to any network appliance I want to use.
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.
Hi there, I was looking to get a NAS that I can just install and not have to worry about maintenance too much and senility was at the top of the list. If not synology what would you suggest?
Synology's fine - even ideal - for that use case. If you want to run Docker containers, run apps for video conversion like Plex, etc, then you'd likely want to consider something with a beefier CPU. For an appliance NAS, Synology's really pretty great.
In my case, Synology has worked fine. Reliability is a big deal for non-backup RAID (not the same as "backup," but does the trick, 90% of the time).
It's entirely possible that their newer units are crappier than the old workhorses I have.
I don't use any of the fancier features that might require a beefier CPU. One of the units runs a surveillance station, and your choices for generic surveillance DVRs is fairly limited. Synology isn't perfect, but it works quite well, and isn't expensive. I have half a dozen types of cameras (I used to write ONVIF stuff). The Surveillance Station runs them all.
I was just mentioning personal experience. It wasn't even an opinion.
I would love to know what a "good deal" is. Seriously. It's about time for me to consider replacing them. Suggestions for a generic surveillance DVR would also be appreciated.
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.
Simplification is the key. My setup went from: Custom NAS hardware running vendor-provided OS and heavyweight media serving software -> Custom NAS hardware running TrueNAS + heavyweight media server -> Custom NAS hardware running Linux + NFS -> Old Junker Dell running Linux + NFS. You keep finding bells and whistles you just don't need and all they do is add complexity to your life.
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
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.
You are correct that the software should perform better, but I don't think the average buyer understands this - they buy a new (and sometimes quite expensive) device, yet it feels sluggish for them, so they feel like they bought a bad product.
Another factor related to speed is that, they didn’t allow using NVMe slots for storage pool until recently for new models (in 920+ still you can’t do that; even if they allowed it, the limited PCI lanes of that CPU would limit the throughput). So a container’s database has to be stored in mechanical HDDs.
Again other companies moved on, and I remember there were a lot of community dissatisfaction and hacks, until they improved the situation.
Their hardware is limited already, and they also artificially limit it further by software.
They changed course now, and allow using any HDD. Will DSM display all relevant SMART attributes? We will see!
That depends on the CPU… Some are optimised for power consumption not performance, and on top of that will end up thermally throttled as they are often in small boxes with only passive cooling.
A cheap or intentionally low-power Arm SoC from back then is not going to perform nearly as well as a good or more performance oriented Arm SoC (or equivalent x86/a64 chip) from back then. They might not cope well with 2.5Gb networking unless the NICs support offloading, and if they are cheaping out on CPUs they might not have high-spec network controller chips either. And that is before considering that some are talking to the NAS via a VPN endpoint running on the NAS so there is the CPU load of that on top.
For sort-of-relevant anecdata: my home router ran on a Pi400 for a couple of years (the old device developed issues, the Pi400 was sat waiting for a task so got given a USB NIC and given that task), but got replaced when I upgraded to full-fibre connection because its CPU was a bottleneck at those speeds just for basic routing tasks (IIRC the limit was somewhere around 250Mbit/s). Some of the bottleneck I experienced would be the CPU load of servicing the USB NIC, not just the routing, of course.
> far more than enough even, to power an NAS device.
People are using these for much more than just network attached storage, and they are sold as being capable of the extra so it isn't like people are being entirely unreasonable in their expectations. PiHole, VPN servers, full media servers (doing much more work than just serving the stored data), etc.
> There must be more than that, another explanation
Most likely this too. Small memory. Slow memory. Old SoC (or individual controllers) with slow interconnect between processing cores and IO controllers. There could be a collection of bottlenecks to run into as soon as you try to do more than just serve plain files at ~1Gbit speeds.
On 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.
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.
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.
ASUSTOR 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.
I 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.
That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?
The problem is not getting TrueNAS on a disk. You can do it externally, but you need to disable the on board flash storage and change the boot order from the BIOS.
That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot without a GPU.
Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.
Do all the models support ECC ram? If not, does the website say clearly which do?
I've been looking on and off for a smallish NAS for some use, but I'd really like it to have ECC. As it stands, I'm considering more and more compromising on the size aspect and getting some ASRock + AMD combo.
I bought a small ASUSTOR NAS at work to check it out and I like it, it's definitely faster than comparable Synology units, however the camera system is quite underdeveloped compared to Synology. Synology's surveillance station rocks and ASUSTOR has a long way to go in that niche.
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.
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.
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.
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
I 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so.
Well clearly enough of Synologys customers decided they did have the time to buy commodity HDDs and slap them into a competitors product, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
As GP said, Synology may want to believe they’re in the business of selling premium priced HDDs, with a side salad of NASs. But it turns out that isn’t a very sustainable business, otherwise there would be no reason for them change their policies.
Correct. I never said that it was the right choice, I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make. Lots of companies substantially raise prices and still come up winning.
Netflix doubled their subscription cost since 2008, but market cap did 100x and subscribers are 30x. They even offer fewer good movies than they used to. You may still hate them, but their wallets don't care about your feelings.
> 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.
Companies should create value, and capture a fraction of that value.
What Synology did was trying to significantly increase the fraction of value they captured, at the cost of their customers, who would have to pay that, and without providing extra value for their customers.
This is not only a a bad deal for customers, it also triggers our sense of injustice.
The best companies create value, and capture only a part of it, and leave other parts of the value for both customers and partners/suppliers.
I don’t think that’s true. They apparently thought that was their business, but it’s not what their customers think it is. And having that much of a mismatch between what you think you’re selling and what everyone else thinks you’re selling often ends very badly.
For example, Kodak thought they were in the business of selling film. Their customers thought they were a company that sold ways to take photos. Kodak ignored what their customers wanted, the ability to take photos easily, in favor of their desire to sell more film. That cost them dearly when digital cameras took over.
Their business is selling NASes. They don't make special hard drives that no one else makes. Anyone can sell hard drives. Their value in their business is the NAS, not the drives. If they can't survive on their NAS without scamming their customers with marked up hard drives, then they're not really a viable business.
Six years ago my box shit the fan. Synology could have recovered it for me, but they insisted I "upgraded" to their newest box. That was when I realized that I would never buy from them again. Thank goodness their hybrid raid is at least MDRAID.
Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at idle with no power save mode).
I don't understand. Recovered how? As far as I know, like many electronics companies, they don't do repairs period. If an enclosure fails under warranty, they replace it. They don't repair it.
So if your NAS motherboard died out of warranty and they no longer sold that model, it's not surprising they recommended you buy the current version of that model.
So I don't know what you were expecting? Hardware dies. What did you want them to do?
Thank god they reversed course. I’m coming up on needing another NAS and I was not looking forward to digging through alternatives.
I’ve run raw Linux servers, I’ve run UnRaid, and now I have Synology and it’s been the best “set it and forget it” solution yet. Yes, the hardware is overpriced but it works and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.
I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.)
If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to ship this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as Network Attached Storage, after all.)
"successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.
And it feels like for most of these companies it's a whack-a-mole of cycling from which happened to burn you last rather than any actually being fundamentally "better". Pretty every alternative mentioned in this thread have released some real bad products.
> "successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.
I wouldn't want a company to be "rewarded" for reversing an anti-customer decision, but instead they should be made to realise that their customers goodwill can disappear and be very difficult indeed to be won back.
However, most consumers aren't aware of these kinds of issues/boycotts, so most companies don't get to reap the full impact of shitty decisions.
At this point I'm not suggesting a boycott at all, I'm placing a vote of no confidence in Synology. There is no reason to believe they've had a "change of heart" on their mentality, they're not stopping due to backlash, they're stopping because their greedy scheme failed. If they can figure out one that works, is there any reason to believe they won't take it?
Go to the Synology website and browse to a NAS. Here's Synology's closest product to the new UniFi UNAS offering, the DS1825+.
And it just links to a marketing video announcing Synology drives... Does it explain why you should use Synology drives? ... No. It is literally 100% marketing puffery. They do not mention or acknowledge any of the dumb software lock-in tricks they were playing. Coupled with no formal announcement, they are apparently willing to do the absolute bare minimum to win back customers who left over this. Apparently for some people, this is good enough, even though unlike many markets there are actually plenty of competent NAS products. And we wonder why enshittication is so prevalent? We're paying for it. Its a positive signal that they can't get away with anything, only almost anything. Feel free to experiment with user trust! There's no consequences anyways!
And honestly, while Synology DSM is a pretty decent experience, though to be clear I have personal misgivings with it all over the place, I really struggle to see how it can justify the price tag. The UniFi UNAS Pro is a new and weird product, but by any account it does have solid fundamentals for the job of network attached storage. Comparing the specs... The DS1825+ comes with 2x2.5GbE... versus the UNAS Pro's 10GbE. It comes with 8 bays over the UNAS Pro's 7. It comes with a Ryzen V1500B over the UNAS Pro's Cortex-A57, both with 8 GiB of RAM. One thing the Synology NAS has is the ability to expand to 18 bays with additional enclosures, which is certainly worth something, but what I'm trying to say is, the specs are not actually leagues different especially considering that this is what you get without paying extra. For Synology you will pay $1,149 over the $499 of the UNAS.
Don't get me wrong. UniFi UNAS is brand new. I don't think it has support for running third party applications or Docker workloads, and there are definitely less storage pool options than with Synology DSM. But, it really seems like for the core NAS functionality, the UniFi option is just going to be better. Given that neither of these devices are actually all that powerful, I reckon you'd probably be best off actually just treating them like pure storage devices anyhow, and taking advantage of fast networking to run applications on another device. Especially with 10 GbE!
You could literally buy two UniFi UNAS Pro units and a Raspberry Pi 5 and still come up a little short on the price of the DS1825+. Not that you should do that, but it says a lot that you could.
So sure, buy whatever you want, but Synology already played their hand, so don't be surprised when they do what they've already shown they are more than happy to do. I'm not buying it.
And P.S.: Yes, there are plenty of mediocre or crap products on the NAS market, but you literally don't just have to buy on brand names alone. There are plenty of reputable reviewers that will go into as much detail as you want about many aspects of the devices, and then you can use brand reputation to fill in any gaps if you want. It feels silly to hinge entirely on brand reputation when you have this much information available...
I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.
Agree! Though to be clear I’m not saying it’s necessarily amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem to like it!
I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog. Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone actually used and liked it. It worked alright but the client apps were/are a giant leap behind alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.
But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
Weirdly, Audio Station is the best app I've found for streaming podcasts from my Synology (given the quirks of podcast hoarding in practice). Admittedly, I haven't looked in a few years... maybe I should get on that.
That's correct AFAIK, but software like Plex and Jellyfin work just fine if you store your media on a separate machine. For the price gap between the Synology NAS and the UniFi UNAS you could buy a cheap machine to run some workloads on over the network. Even better since the UNAS has very good connectivity out of the box (10GbE) that I figure it will basically always be bottlenecked on the HDD speeds anyways. Maybe a Raspberry Pi or small form factor computer could be sitting above the NAS. Many of us already run Home Assistant OS anyways, and if you don't... It's never too late to start :)
I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good stride and just released some pretty solid good value products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without it, it is challenging to ignore how much better of a deal you're getting for the core functionality for sure.
I of course hope people do some level of research before buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people. I do acknowledge Synology DSM has a lot of stuff built in, but frankly most of it just isn't that great.
I don’t disagree with any of this. But I have a few non-tech savvy friends (and particularly older folks) who just want a clever box they can plug in and it will do stuff - even if it’s a bit clunky. I wonder how much of the Synology market people like that represent.
After I heard from someone who worked there about how incredibly bad their code and software development practices are I wouldn’t trust them with my data. And that was for their enterprise products.
Having dug into Synology DSM to try to debug issues, I would bet my left kidney the code quality in DSM would give any of Ubiquiti's own crappy code a run for its money. These vendors don't make sales on code quality, for better or worse.
I've always opted for building my own and running linux every time it has come down to replacing, but I might split out NAS and compute this time and take a chance on a UGREEN one (maybe DH4300?), the reviews look solid for a new product segment from them.
I'm likely not buying a Synology at this point.
If anyone has one of their (UGREEN) models (or other brands) I'd be interested in hearing perspectives.
Edit: A lot more mentions of their models in the thread elsewhere at this point.
I bought a Terramaster DAS as I already had a NUC, just connected with USB, supports 10Gbit but my NUC only does 5.
Looked a lot at NAS alternatives and ugreen, asustor, aoostar all seem pretty good, as you can just run truenas or a linux distro. Can also do DIY chassi with mini itx board.
Good luck when it doesn't work though. I decided to take the hit and pay their exorbitant HDD prices on the basis that they came with a warranty etc and one of the drives failed within 3 months.
It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the drive at my own expense from the UK to Germany and they didn't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their warehouse. I had to buy another drive to repair my RAID cluster while waiting. Absolutely outrageous customer support.
You need to have pretty tight supply chains if you’re going to support warranty claims on something as consumable as disks. I don’t know who supplies their HDD and SSDs, but you’d want the relationship and traceability to be pretty robust.
Syno have always been a software company first, a hardware company second, and a storage media company last. It makes sense to try and control the full vertical, but they just don’t have enough clout to compete against the big enterprise companies.
I honestly believe the disk whitelisting thing was part of an attempt to overvalue the company in preparation for a sale.
That was the absolute deal killer for me. Even if the white labeled drives were the same price, which they decidedly weren’t, if I have a Seagate that dies, I know a local shop where I can buy a replacement an hour later. All Central Computers has in stock from Synology is a 12TB drive for $300 (LOL no). Amazon Prime’s largest drive is an 18TB unit for $800 (WTF are you kidding me?).
I don’t have time to wait around for them to ship a drive. I certainly don’t have the budget to stock up on spares at their exorbitant prices.
That's a shame IMO. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go down the right path. I built a NAS 5 years ago in a Fractal Design Node 804 and put TrueNAS Core on it (back then it was called FreeNAS). It's been totally "set and forget" for me. The only thing I've done in 5 years is upgrade TrueNAS, which has always worked flawlessly.
I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly corrupt the data.
You should still look at alternatives. A NAS company that is willing to consider a move like this even once is not a trustworthy company.
It shows you that their management is probably not making the right decisions in other areas as well.
I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots and other maintenance.
On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.
Would not recommend, given my UDMs logs are full of random errors and issues all the time, which seems "normal" for them. Not to mention pretty ui but weird bugs and strange behaviours - plus ui looks great but feature wise it sucks.
Next time I upgrade I'm just buying mikrotik again...
Fair enough, but I've used thousands of Unifi devices at work and at home and I don't recall ever having to look at the logs. Obviously YMMV, but their NVR storage has been rock solid.
Yeah 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
It’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).
For me, it's too late. I've already set up TrueNAS, and I found it a lot more user-friendly than I expected. Particularly now that ZFS AnyRaid is making good progress, I don't see myself going back to Synology.
> According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced.
What did NAS customers purchase instead?
I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.
I think they were hoping they had enough "appliance operators" in their userbase that they wouldn't be able to go elsewhere or improvise with gear on hand. Which, given the people most likely to buy a prosumer NAS device is silly
Yeah, I was waiting for the DS1525+, but after it was announced and the HD restrictions were confirmed, I eventually decided to buy the DS1522+ instead.
Printers don't take standardized cartridges. I think that was their mistake. They should have started with model specific HDD cartridges. Or just expanded models with USB enclosures.
The 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.
I don’t think it’s a cartel per se; that would require collusion to keep ink prices high.
What seems to have happened with the 2D printer market is a race to the bottom to provide customers with the cheapest printers possible while hiding the high [recouped] costs of the ink. Many consumers are duped into buying a cheap printer and not realizing the high cost of printing that comes with it.
This is why brands like Brother have been able to succeed, especially pushing their laser printers: higher upfront hardware cost and cheaper ink.
You can do things like ink tank modifications and so on (I think there's even a few you can buy off the shelf with that option now), they're just rarely worthwhile unless you're doing quite a lot of printing.
The 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)
> The 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 understand the point, but HP's approach was not really based on cartel, while it might seem so.
In the beginning, HP had great printers, and they used specific kind of ink. Back in that time, ink wasn't so complicated, so other manufactures started to sell it as well. So there was a moment, when you could get the ink from many different manufactures.
But what changed, was that HP started to make their printers accept only very specific kind ink, which was controlled by the printers and HP, not by the ink manufacturers (compare to HDDs).
They added one sort of digital signatures for the ink, so that printer reads signatures and does not otherwise accept it. So it does not matter whether these was cartel or not; it was just DRM lock-in. As long as the core product was desirable enough. I don't think this is a cartel in a traditional sense, because manufacturing of the ink cartridges wasn't that difficult otherwise, and it wasn't forbidden or highly regulated area.
In Synology's case, this was just that they added similar checks for NAS. It does not matter if other manufacturers don't comply with, if core product is good enough. Synology thought that their product was good enough to play this, but apparently not.
Companies like that will always tried once they believe they are captured enough market shares. If I can influence that kind of decision, I will certainly advocate not to renew Synology gear parcs...
Glad they reversed but they could have saved themselves those losses if they had an understanding of what their customers wanted. Anyone putting together a NAS will want full control over the drive selection.
Too little, too late. The second they made that decision, I struck Synology as a partner for both my homelab (gotta replace the DS1019+ at some point) and in my purchasing capacity at work. That was some NetApp-grade BS and I wasn’t going to tolerate it.
I’m just glad the NAS scene saw the opening left by Synology’s boneheaded decision-making and capitalized on it. Unraid and TrueNAS have stormed the battlefield and shown Synology’s typical plus-line customers that they can get more for less with a bit of DIY, and NUC vendors have capitalized on this misstep with NAS hardware platforms that just require your preferred software/OS to operate.
This singular decision is going to take a decade of good will to undo. Astonishing that they footgunned themselves so bad, so willingly.
Too bad. I switched to UGREEN (DXP6800 Pro) will likely stick with them now. It was easy to install an alternate OS (Fedora 42 in my case) on it, and the hardware appears to be very nicely built.
Also switched to a UGREEN, in this case the DXP4800 Plus. Truenas runs pretty nicely on it!
One critique I'd have of this setup is it's a lot noisier than my older Synology setup, but I think that's more to do with the HDDs than the case.
My 918+ was a huge step up from my homebrew homelab server. People who advocate for a duct tape solution for systems that contain their entire lives on their disks are doing most people a disfavor. Having a well baked disk and backup storage system is critical.
I switched a year ago to Ugreen UNAS just given the generational leap of their hardware and reasonable per-disk pricing over synology.
I didn’t trust you agree with OS, but that ended up being incredibly easily remedy by just shoving true Nas on the system.
All that sad if I had waited another half-year, I wouldn’t have gone down that path but instead would’ve picked up a UniFi NAS, which is even more optimal from a cost and integration into my ecosystem. Since that really is just network attack storage - I could just let my old Home lap server act like a server on top of a NAS.
The lessons from this are many. First is that hardware is not a moat. Thanks to china that’s no longer a factor. The second is that software isn’t a moat anymore either. Synology leveraged Linux and then walled garden their solution and decided to not innovate. Now open source and in the future AI have made it so software is significantly cheaper to work with.
That means we are back to loyalty and brand awareness. Both are things that synology has squandered with this adventure.
I installed Seagate Ironwolf Pro in my Synology last night.
It complained it wasn't compatible.
If that drive isn't compatible than I don't know what legitimate criteria possibly could be.
(Yes, I get the criteria is "what we prioritized to test" but my point stands,it's the high end of consumer-available NAS drives, not a compute model or a shucked SMR drive:)
Yeah, 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.
HA HA HA HA HA
I really hope the C-suite that decided this gets no bonus and hopefully a salary cut this year. Stupid, anti-consumer measures like this need proper consequences so they stop happening.
Until then, let's keep boycotting companies with anti-consumer practices.
Last summer a friend needed help building a huge home backup system, and though I had no real experience with Synology, it was the only brand I was familiar with and some Googling indicated that no other commercial product seems close. A DIY box — TrueNAS or whatever — is out of the question, this friend isn't technical.
I had heard about the Synology HD policy thing, but had forgotten when I ordered the drives. By the time they arrived, the need was pressing and I had no window to exchange the drives, so I had to just hack the damn system.
Now I have to go out of town to unhack the damn thing so I can be sure nothing I did interferes with future updates.
This is the polar opposite of the experience I was expecting. This foolishness cost me a lot of time and is about to cost more.
I wish the article put actual numbers or evidence of declining sales. I agree that reduction of sales is the most likely cause, but if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it becomes poor journalism.
It'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.
I would say the damage has been done. This policy showed what they were willing to do as a company and not listen to their customer base which is the whole reason the company exists in the first place.
It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry standard expandable memory and storage.
From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.
I used to recommend Synology everywhere, but ever since the hard drive lock issue, I'm now trying to dissuade people from buying it. The policy reversal is a good thing, but trust isn't something you can restore simply by "reversing" it.
I never understood this. The customer type that wants to run an NAS is technically capable. They may choose to run a all-in-one NAS like those from Synology or are ubiquity because of the convenience but if you then make it inconvenient for them by adding these unnecessary hard drive restrictions, they can just as easily go to either another provider or run their own.
Hope the CEO realized when this was instigated that it's not as simple as reversing the decision, every Youtube video about it, every review that mentions it, every tweet that mentions it, every reddit post saying "Don't buy Synology" because of it and every LLM trained on that data will be there and showing up in searches and harming sales for at least a decade.
One week too late for me. Didn't feel like scratch building a new machine and finding a low TDP mobo with a bunch of SATA ports. Wanted to go Synology but dragged my feet for months watching this play out.
In the meantime, I became enamored with the Jonbo cases and started seeing white label N100 ITX mobos pop up with a bunch of SATA ports. Eventually figured out they were Topton when Brian Moses included them (and a Jonbo case!) in this year's NAS build.
So my parts are arriving in a few days and Synology has lost one potential new customer.
After all the complaints and upheaval created after their silly management/leadership decision, they finally understood something.
As an owner and administrator of many Synology NASes I agree that Synology offerings are a bit underpowered compared to what is available in the market (from H/W point of view), but the ease of use and peace of mind within the Synology ecosystem (DSM software, apps) outweighs whatever drawbacks they have.
If Synology management takes the decision to refresh their H/W with new CPUs, NICs and more RAM, I'm sure they'll stay on the market ;-)
While we are on this subject, has anyone found good DIY solutions for similar hardware? I haven't looked recently, but I have always struggled to be able to put together anything that would be remotely similar in size to a small 4-bay NAS.
My "NAS" is a 4U short network racked unit. Pretty large by comparison, but its also mostly empty space.
It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes).
But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again.
I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.
UGREEN isn't really build your own. The hardware is similar to Synology (but I think slightly better made, and definitely with much higher specs). But unlike Synology it's easy to install your own OS. I used Fedora, but a lot of people are using TrueNAS which is almost as turn-key as the Synology software.
For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in future as long as they don't do anything stupid.
>I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable
Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box that is mostly just an SMB share
I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.
Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
As a QNAP user, I'm not affected. However, even if I've been unhappy with QNAP in the past sometimes (overall they're OK for me), I would never switch to Synology because of this shortsightedness on their part.
It's not a 1:1 comparison, but anyone have experience running Garage[0] as a locally hosted geo-distributable open source S3 clone in place of a traditional NAS? Garage seems to have simpler hardware requirements, native support for geo-replication, and for lots of applications S3 compatibility is actually what you want.
Whenever I hear about a company making a decision like this I no longer trust said company. It says the company no longer is thinking about their product or consumers at all. Anyone who cared about either even a little bit would never even consider such an idea.
I wonder if that's related to UniFi pushing into that market for consumers (https://www.ui.com/integrations/network-storage) recently. It's still not there yet as there's no way to run containers etc. on the appliance itself but this surely will come within the next 1-2 years.
Yeah that’s a really interesting gap in the feature set. Ubiquiti’s new offerings seem like pretty good network storage appliances, but not home servers.
I’ve gone through a couple iterations of home server. First I upcycled an obsolete Dell Power edge. Then a N100 mini PC. Neither was as reliable as I wanted.
Now I’m running persistent apps on Railway and compute hungry stuff on my MacStudio. Pretty good so far.
Is this in response to plummeting sales or is this in response to SMR phaseout? IIRC, this began from WD sneaking in DM-SMR drives into WD Red Pro products used for NAS and RAID use cases that can't possibly work with SMRs. I was looking through HDDs and noticed that there aren't many SMR drives at mainstream price zone(which is great).
So who's the one holding the towel? Is it Synology, or could it be WD/Seagate?
A ridiculously bad idea, coupled to the fact they are trying to sell you Intel Celeron CPUs with 2GB of RAM and SATA only interfaces in 2025, for a lot more than the same product cost ten years ago.
What is a good alternative that allows me out of the box with no extra hardware to install a plex server, connect to Mullvad VPN and start / monitor downloads directly from the NAS device web interface or mobile App?
QNAP's QTS/QuTS Hero are generally as "batteries included" as Synology's DSM in that respect. I threw 32GB of RAM in my TS-464 and run ~15 containers (as well as Plex, not in a container) on it with no problem.
The article says they reversed the ban, but the release notes seem to indicate a temporary change while more certified drives are brought into the market.
Too late. The company is permanently on my personal shitlist and I will make sure that the company is excluded from any future hardware acquisitions at the workplace based on vendor lock-in risk.
When something like this happens, you fire the CEO. I don't care how the decision process works internally, and how much they thought it would "help" the customers and were all in good faith. The company fucked up, the company has to acknowledge that, and the way to show it is to fire the CEO.
To change a company culture, you change the CEO. My view of Synology today is that they will pull the rug for their own benefit, at my expense. There is no way I trust this Synology ever again. Now I'm on TrueNAS, so I'm already lost to them, but I also tell everybody not to trust Synology. And that won't change if they don't show me that the company has changed.
Many 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.
Sans “we care about your privacy” lie and multiple clicks to object to “legitimate interests” in staking you around the Internet: https://archive.is/0qhXB
Is there a decent (budget) NAS with 2.5" HDD support? I have like ~30 1TB 2.5" HDD sitting on my shelf and would love to put together at least one NAS with them but a Synology slim is like... 500€? Not even all the disks worth that much
Every time I've looked at Synology, I've been shocked at how anemic the hardware is for the cost. I've always self-built my own NAS. I've sometimes felt regret when I have run into an issue that required more babysitting than I wanted to do, but when considering alternatives, I've always realized doing it myself was the right choice. I wasn't aware they'd even done this, but the fact they did is just more reason to always build your own NAS.
It's easy to build the hardware, not easy to build the software. Most people aren't aware how feature rich the Synology OS is.
You can get something similar if you download and set up 50 Docker images, but that's not easy. Just look up how you do HDD image backups of your computers to your Synology and to your TrueNAS for example, it's way more complicated.
I mean, I've never come across Synology branded HDDs. I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.
And part of the magic of a NAS is not necessarily having to have matching hardware. In addition to other design basics like using drives from different batches to minimise the likelihood of multiple failures within data-fatally small time frames.
Monoculture is inherently more fragile; it's antithetical to good storage design.
> I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.
Correct. They were, and they did. The goal was profit - the rebranded drives cost more. Just like printer ink.
There needs to be more of a name and shame culture if companies want to actually win consumers back. Synology as a company did the right thing by reversing this decision, but I still can't trust them unless I know the executives and product managers that introduced this idea and executed it are fired. If they are still lurking around the company, these money over consumers psychopaths are just going to introduce another horrible thing once sales start to tick back up.
Yet again another company hit by the consequences of being out of touch with their customers and fuelled by greed. Thankfully good alternatives exist, otherwise it would have sent a signal to the industry that this is OK.
I was literally reaching out to friends yesterday to ask about NAS options and Synology wasn't even discussed, where it would have been before this mess.
Even now, after the reversal, it's really not an option. I mean, I have no assurance it won't get reversed again, and I don't want to invest into something that won't necessarily work long term.
Basically, I want to be sure I can access my data and get updates, and right now, Synology is not that from what I see. I'm just looking at this as a home user, but unless there is some guarantee, Synology just seems to be waiting to pull the rug out from you regarding your data.
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.
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..
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.
>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.
The people that made and supported this decision need to get fired. When companies pull this bs, and then reverse course, they don't get a pass, or else they will continue to the pull this bs until no one fights anymore.
Time to move on from Synology. They already showed their sociopathic middle finger to everyone. Now that they are walking it back they will just do the same thing they all do now. They will slowly reintroduce this restriction by removing a few compatible drive models at a time until its too inconvenient not to buy their drives.
I hope they go out of business even though I used to like their product.
Awesome. That's how it's done. They offer people some bullshit take-it-or-leave-it deal, and people leave. I really wish this would happen more often. Normalize this.
Too Late. Synology and Unity are learning a very hard lesson. When you screw over your customers, then reverse course, it often causes long term damage because people got a chance to see your true behavior and feelings towards your customers.
And if you did it to us once, you're capable of doing it again. To me personally, the "Synology" brand is permanently tarnished. For them to do what they did signals serious moral problems with their decision makers, and the entire move sounded desperate for profit. Just type "alternative to synology nas" and you'll get a whole bunch of options.
I was looking into a self-contained NAS to keep my local archive of almost 20 years of photos, Synology was always the most recommended solution but this policy was definitely the reason I did not purchase one.
Unfortunately for Synology I will wait to see if it's a policy they stick to or if they might change it again in the future, I have all my backups synchronised to off-site storage (Backblaze and Glacier), so the local NAS was just a nice to have convenience instead of shuffling through different local disks...
This is actually not that rare. Enterprise server vendors always carried exorbitantly priced third party HDDs in plastic shells effectively as brand merches. But servers are contractor managed and/or severely discounted, so no perceivable harm is usually done.
The differences here are that they actually implemented software checks, for devices bought at MSRP. And so harm is felt.
No, 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.
I wonder what will they try next. I guess they are really jealous of cloud service providers - that get recurring income - instead of just one time hardware purchase.
"You have connected additional HDD. Please select which bay you want to use or try our 'Synology Super Subscription' to use both drives at the same time".
However, now we know the direction their leadership would like to take, I can't see much of the tech savvy crowd returning to them, given we know they'll find another revenue screw to turn.
I'm not convinced of the existence of executives who wouldn't do this. It's just like ads. Someone is bound to notice that money is being left on the table. Once it becomes known, they'll either do it or they'll be replaced by someone who will.
We have to start making open source hardware that we can fully control. It's the only way to be free. Corporations cannot be trusted. Any goodwill they build up eventually becomes a resource for them to capitalize on.
Too late. Sold my Synology NAS a few weeks ago and moved on to TrueNAS. - I absolutely despise when companies get greedy and try to get the maximum out of their customers. Adobe does this. Apple does this. And some other companies.
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.
Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?
> 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.
Indeed. I believe that if you're a shareholder employee owner, you are likely incentivized to not kill the golden goose versus folks at the top making decisions unilaterally, but you also need some ability to say no to bad decisions. Like Costco, employee and customer happiness first, profits after.
(big fan of employee ownership and control contributors, aligning incentives and outcomes and all that jazz)
> Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?
The only peers at the company who were enthusiastic about the decision were the ones who were buying more company stock and wanted it to go up. They thought that anything that increased the bottom line would increase the stock price, and therefore they were on board.
So, no, I don't think increased employee ownership solves anything.
Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.
> "Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?"
Employee control doesn't reduce investor pressure for increased profitability. Employee ownership just means that the employees are now the ones exerting the investor pressure and if anyone thinks employees will be willing to take less total compensation (why? "Loyalty to the company"? "Solidarity"?) instead of hopping to a new job, well, good luck with that.
> a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, .... their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave
Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in.
You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are planning on turning customer hostile.
A good habit to practice is to see how far you can go reconciling apparent contradictions with charitable interpretation. I think in this case, I can see "brand loyalty" on a continuum ranging from "feels good about product" to "so completely loyal that lock-in would be redundant". The furthest extreme would produce an effective contradiction, but anything short of that can make sense of the term while leaving space to understand lock in as a rational, or at-least non-contradictory action.
I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is staged, and profits flow (for better or worse).
The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes, which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines. They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping on.
> Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in.
In this case, the customers were loyal to Synology for the NAS but not the hard drives.
By locking them in further, they thought they could capture their customers' hard drive purchasing, too. They thought the brand loyalty would allow it.
> Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.
Sounds very much like "doing a Ratner": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
Or a Zuck.
Complacency about customers requires a monopoly, which Synology does not have.
Sonos?
> “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.
Apple is only company that is allowed to get away with that.
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.
I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project".
DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
As another anecdote, I've had a cheap Synology NAS for 6yrs now and I only really touch it once a year to make sure everything is up to date.
Yeah, the GP comment doesn't seem to be their target market. You nailed the appeal though.
Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel? I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.
As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
I'd be far more weary of the application level services provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context, as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the applications get far less scrutiny.
What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
I find that Linux NAS and router project require essentially no babysitting. You do have to do some initial setup work, but once it's done, there's no maintenance (other than replacing failed hardware) for years and years.
It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM. It really is something special. It's worth a small premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the concerns as everyone else here and will be considering other options.
> It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM.
A friend has a Synology NAS and I have a QNAP NAS. In my experience, QNAP's QTS (QuTS Hero if you want ZFS) is directly comparable.
QNAP has more or less caught up with Synology, but for a very long time Synology had a substantial edge.
My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement.
It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.
You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS.
I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.
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As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.
It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.
For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.
It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A common problem apparently.
Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of missing out on a webgui or installing something like FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days.
I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages.
RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that?
I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well.
Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology.
[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html
Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to provide a solution to users who are more interested in the verbs than the nouns.
They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives.
Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.
they’re pretty clearly referring to _their_ use case and not everyone’s. i think people are mostly talking past each other about this. there isn’t one feature set that matters for everyone, so of course a synology is perfect for some and for others it can be replaced with “junk”.
Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure.
In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
... and "it only takes an hour?"
LOL, clearly an amateur. That's longer than it took me to build Dropbox. /s
Can you run a standard Linux distro on them? Is their OS custom or based on OpenWRT or something else?
Why would you want to? That’s not what they’re for.
The kind of person who wants to do that is squarely outside their market. And you’d be paying a real premium for nothing.
You cannot run a standard distro (easily) - their software (DSM) is linux based and they expose most of the stock services like Docker and libvirt
Yeah, just put together a TrueNAS system. Mine has been running for 10 years. Drive replacements and upgrades are so easy with ZFS.
> 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.
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.
This is why I don't use NAS from them. I don't understand why I would want to be limited in these strange ways. I have multiple NAS that I have created myself for myself, my family and my friends. If I want to have h264, h265, AV1, or whatever I just install it.
I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.
You have to pay for the licenses if you intend to ship those, they have decided they'd rather not.
AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet, either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct their course.
They probably concluded at this point it wouldn't mean much and they are somewhat right. Every day they fail to address the situation that apology needs to be a lot bigger and it can only get so big.
>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical
As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make
I 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 are the alternatives that you are considering?
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.
Oh, so they are the Apple of NAS products. /s
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…
Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure there are people who do it and create content about it (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for actually running a high availability system that just works with minimal fussing.
There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.
For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd.
For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't.
But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box...
And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
Exactly the route I took. I had an aging tower machine full of spinning disks running on an old LSI adapter that was doing hardware raid. They were out of space and I began to get nervous the LSI adapter could die and I would trouble replacing it. Decided JBOD for the future.
External drives were on sale, I bought several and setup with a RPI. Lots of headaches. It took effort to iron out all the USB and external disk issues. Had to work out alternative boot. Had power adapters fail for the RPI. Had to enhance cooling. etc. Kept running into popular Docker containers still not having aarch64 variants.
I finally replaced the RPI with a used Dell SFF. Kept the USB drives and it's been solid with similar power draw and just easier to deal with all around.
Though I am considering going back to a tower, shucking the drives (they're out of warranty) and going back to SATA.
I think most LSI adapters you can get a battery backup for. I've got one on mine, plus a spare battery sitting on a shelf somewhere. I admit when I put the system together for the first time I was a little hesitant to go with hardware RAID but it's worked out fine so far.
I reckon the issue is more in replacement than transient data loss: what are you going to do when you can't find a replacement controller card, or it only available at ludicrous prices?
With a proprietary on-disk format you can't exactly hook them up to any random controller and expect it to work: either you find a new one from the same controller family, or your data is gone.
Replacing your RAID controller is already major maintenance, so there's going to be downtime. I wouldn't be opposed to just wiping the drives and restoring from the latest backup. I routinely do this anyway, just to have assurance that my backups are working.
And a risk! I've had this on a premium machine put together specifically for that purpose and when the raid controller died something got upset to the point that even with a new raid controller we could not recover the array. No big deal, it was one of several backups, but still, I did not expect that to happen.
> But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box...
You say that like it’s a mystery why people by then but NUCs are fantastic little PCs.
The power adapter is just hidden under the desk whereas the NUC is sat on the desk (or behind the monitor/TV).
It’s the same as with Mac Minis and Apple TV. And other devices of that ilk.
Both the Mac Mini and the Apple TV use internal power supplies.
I've had mixed experiences with my NUC. It has what I think is a firmware bug that causes display output to fail if you connect a monitor after boot. Very annoying if it ever drops off the network for some reason.
There seems to be a Windows-only update tool available that might fix it, but that's rather inconvenient when it's used as a server running Linux! No update available as a standalone boot disk or via LVFS. So I haven't gotten it fixed yet because doing so involves getting a second SSD, taking my server offline to install Windows on it, just to run a firmware update.
If you use a couple of magnetic disks, the pi is fast enough. The disks will be the bottleneck. There are sata cards that allow up to four magnetic disks, and where you power that card which in turn powers the pi. It's very doable.
It's of course more work to set up than synology, and if you want a neat box, you have to figure that out yourself
You'd be surprised. A single spinning rust drive can hit 200MBps for sequential access, so that's plenty to saturate its 1Gbps NIC.
However, in my experience with a Pi 4, the issue is encryption. The CPU simply isn't fast enough for 1Gbps of AES! Want to use HTTPS or SSH? You're capped at ~50Mbps by default, and can get it up to a few hundred Mbps by forcing the use of chacha20-poly1305. Want to add full-disk encryption to that? Forget it.
The Pi 5 is supposed to have hardware AES acceleration so it should be better, but I'm still finding forum posts of people seeing absolutely horrible performance. Probably fine to store the occasional holiday photo, but falls apart when you intend to regularly copy tens of gigabytes to/from it at once.
So long as the storage system is capable of serving a video stream without stuttering, that covers the 99% performance case for me. Anything beyond that is bulk transfers which are not time sensitive.
My point is there are alternatives, like you said.
The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.
Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.
I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after.
Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
> I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after.
They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche. The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux system really doesn't have a competitor at its price point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python program to log the data from the sensors to a spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and it really sparked her interest.
I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning. Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet, and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.
Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in very different directions, hence this dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder.
Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.
And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".
Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.
So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.
On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write directly to frame buffers. I don’t need Linux. I don’t really need a kernel…
Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box):
Coffee table Digital Touch map.
Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo battery.
ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.
Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.
Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.
Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.
Wearables.
Playing with high density distributed computing. (More than 5 machines)
Where the mini pc really shines is:
Storage. (NAS included)
Media PC (TV sold separately)
Gaming Console
Personal Cloud (docker + nfs + caddy + <insert personalized preferences>)
General Autopilot (sensors that need GPU support).
You have left over old PCs and don’t want to open your wallet…
Pretty cool, thank you. Those things have been not on my mind for a while, thanks for the reminder.
I was commenting in the context of why people choose them for servers but I recognize that I did not make that clear.
For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less.
For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured.
For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course).
For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it.
For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware.
And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly).
And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
Userspace-accessible GPIOs, I2C, SPI, PCM, and UART on a system that runs Linux. My employer uses them for a bunch of our hardware-in-the-loop test automation, with the GPIOs used for CAN, relays for switching various signals, vibration table control, etc. The USB gets used for SCPI device control (power supply, multimeter, etc.) and DuT connection. It's a lot cheaper to use a Pi for this than it is to use a small form factor x86 machine with a bunch of USB-<protocol> dongles.
Power consumption is a major draw (pun intended) to keep Pis and other SBCs of that kind of form factor employed.
Valid, thanks. But to what degree? The light bulb that runs 18h a day in the kitchen likely draws the same power that my mini form factor Optiplex 3060 does.
To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless.
I am much more concerned about data center power usages, especially in the age of LLMs.
Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept preaching we should stop using electric kettles because it's bad for the planet. While the 3 plants in her hometown amounted to ~83% of all power usage and ~92% or all pollution. Boy, was she unhappy when I did that research and pointed it out to her.
Pi-s / SBCs are I suppose very good for computing out there in the meatspace, where you might need a battery because sometimes power stops for 6 hours? Could be that.
If you don’t have use for GPIO or some ISC^2 sensors and want to use it as a server then yes you should get something else.
Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed.
For $300 I could get an ITX to run.
So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
You’re running the pi and drives in a plastic take away container off usb power for that price.
At the very least you want the case and psu. At which point the question is which cpu+motherboard+ram combo do you want in that case. The rpi is one of many such options and is actually quite expensive for the amount of cpu+ram you get for the price.
A “server” doesn’t need to mean a pizza box with 15k rpm jet engine fans.
My server is repurposed desktop hardware in a desktop tower case and is nearly silent except for the subtle hard drive noises. The hardware cost next to nothing and is far faster and more capable than any pi (except the pio of course which wouldn’t be used anyway).
An ITX isn’t the competitor for a Pi. I’d suggest a USFF prebuilt. I use an HP Elitedesk and Dell and Lenovo each have similar tiny PCs. They’re nearly silent or completely silent, and half the size of a Mac Mini. Cost is about $150 for hardware that is more than enough for me, plus they can have 1-2 SSDs and a hard drive inside the case.
Clarification: They're about half the height of the OLD Mac Mini. Better comparison: They're the size of a typical hardcover book if you chopped it to be square.
I'm uncertain of why $40 vs $300 is even a point of debate on HN. The latter is a one-time investment and you likely can expand it a bit i.e. add a 2.5" or M.2 drive later.
What's the gain of running 12 RPi, exactly? Do you do research work requiring distributed low-cost computing?
I do distributed computing, and doing it at home for low costs without cloud spend helps…
Are virtual machines not an option for your use case? From the outside looking in they appear like they would be easier to manage and far less costly.
They are if the GPU can be attached. I avoid virtual machines in favor of container workloads from containerd for this reason. It’s easier to attach Mali GPU and do my work than it is to find cash in this economy for a dozen RTX’s.
Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one.
The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology.
Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat.
It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity.
Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe.
I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.
I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
Do you need it to?
Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.
ECC is very helpful.
Having used both, I can't help but notice how NAS' routinely run just fine without it.
>NAS' routinely run just fine without it.
How do you verify your data to confirm that?
Use a RAID5 and hope the write hole doesn't eat it all =(
ZFS helps, and many people are okay with the risk of a cosmic ray causing a bit flip while data is in flight once in a blue moon.
I currently manage four NASes (two primary, two backup replicas). Only one has ECC RAM. And I'm okay with my setup.
ECC is great to have, but it is oversold by some as being absolutely required for all storage devices, IMO.
For truly important files (photos), I’ll take the slight added expense of ECC for a little more peace of mind that old photos aren’t being gradually degraded with every resilver or scrub.
Good point about ZFS. Having more than one copy helps too. ECC is great when possible.
Multiple backups.
How many files have you personally seen gone corrupt on non-ecc?
ECC originated first out of server grade servers. Self-hosting rarely hits that level of demand.
My first thought is the same way everyone's laptops and desktops and cellphones without ECC data do?
I'll share any more that come to mind.
The RPI CM5…
The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...
[1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
The chip is the memory controller…
Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be.
Broadcom BCM2712
In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?
RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.
https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption.
Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.
So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their customers' appetite for alternatives.
The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?)
Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available.
This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own.
For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.
I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I didn’t want to tinker with the backup system for my family’s data. And when I read about the drive requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really screwed up.
Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a trend toward less openness, toward greed (including removing capabilities from units they've already sold) and toward a decline of their business as a result of tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking for in a NAS.
That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot. There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The default external ports are usually 1g and most others have moved to at least 2.5g.
I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.
I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run as a server.
Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to maintain and manage.
The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.
I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.
I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be.
You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing.
If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid.
Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR.
Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS.
Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market.
Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured solutions with no need for a computer science degree.
you dont even Pi and sata shields, just buy a SOC that has direct M2 ports...
This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync" and equally silly.
It really isn't, though.
1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality
2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy.
I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer.
My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? “Why Lamborghini when Honda” is equally as silly yet I’ve seen them race head to head. Honda won.
I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't think it's silly.
But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z.
They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions.
For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
There's nothing silly about building your own. What's silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person with a lot of free time to build their own.
If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
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.
Yes, but it's not support wagging the dog, If they sell a NAS, the customer adds drives to it and already runs into issues requiring support, it creates cost which becomes part of a product problem.
In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)
Agreed. Most of the time, customer support finds out about things product did from customers.
"Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"
> "Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"
Because you wouldn't read it anyway.
</OT>
> 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."
At that point, you have essentially made it a policy already that you only support Synology-branded drives.
“We only support Synology-branded drives” would have gone over a lot better, because we could have used non-symbology drives without support. Instead they actively prevented non-Synology drives from working.
It would have been way better than what they did, I agree. However, it would've been pretty shitty from a user perspective still. I'd be pretty angry as a customer if customer support just refuses to help me with anything unless I buy Synology-branded drives.
I mean, it gets really messy in hardware support.
Typically you'd want to tier it out
1. Fully supported drives: Synology branded
2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features
3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
4. Does not work: list of drives.
There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.
Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components. It's not realistic for them to support those components. The standard approach is to support the aspects they can control, and the customer is on their own for problems that involve the third-party component. Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours. It works with ours? OK, our job is done, go talk to the company that made your charger.
There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is actually significantly better for the user than just straight up preventing the use of non matching proprietary drives.
Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being crazily overpriced.
That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the latter without doing the former. Synology actively and painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives.
Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.
There's a misunderstanding, I don't defend Synology's decision.
I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales.
Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he found the "silver bullet"...
>especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision
As a life long customer support person I disagree.
Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.
Customer feedback is feedback from Sales.
Post sales, the feedback comes from customers.
Pre-sales, it might be heard from sales.
R&D and Product might not get real world input or feedback as directly as the actual paying customers.
Maybe it's just me.
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.
> It would represent no change to their burden to continue
But it actually is: because sales must keep growing, so the support burden typically increases linearly - while hiring does not, more often than not.
I've seen this at a few companies now:
* CS teams get built, delivers great support
* sales increase (partially thanks to that support, but there is no way to show it with metrics)
* hiring in CS does not keep pace (because it's largely seen as a cost centre)
* CS teams get overwhelmed and look for ways to downscale per-customer effort.
It's a little bit trickier though, if you're selling hardware with a one off cost and not a subscription. Because your installed base grows even with flat revenue. The lifetime cost of CS (including the calls from people who need to be turned down) needs to be baked into the sales price, but that's a bet.
My experience is with enterprise software, where most products were born as shrinkwrap and slowly moved to other models, and I agree, it's not an easy problem to solve. Even if you size lifetime costs correctly (and very few people can), it is quite hard to scale a support org; even if one can see the storm coming, one might not be fast enough to be prepared for it for a number of reasons (geography, capital investment, training times, churn, brain drain, etc etc).
That's why some big names have literally declared support bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support (google, amazon...).
This was greenlit as a cash grab first, justify support later.
They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.
If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.
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’ve worked in tech support at all levels. At most companies it doesn’t matter what customer service is happy or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given. Customer support as an organization’s opinion isn’t generally valued at most companies.
Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”
That's also my experience.
That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...
The cost of providing customer support is clear and easy to measure, while the benefit is nebulous. This leads to incentive structures centered around controlling costs. That means rewards for handling more calls, and thus punishment for taking too long on a call regardless of the merits. In such an environment, it is inevitable that the reps will care about their call times instead of the customer. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.
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.
"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.
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.
At the very least, some people who otherwise wouldn't have actively looked for other opportunities might start doing so. This can have consequences several months down the road, even if they don't quit immediately.
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
Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn’t happen.
https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/
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.
Based on my experience dealing with SFPs I highly suspect they looked at their bug tracker and concluded that 13% of the sketch-ass mystery drives were causing 50% of their labor expenditure.
And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...
Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't SFP evolve pretty heavily here? The newest version is from --2022-- 2016. There are also quite high data-rates involved. SATA and Smart are stable for a long time. Smart has some special commands depending on manufacturer but the core set of functions always work.
I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems. "Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."
They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives". TBH this is quite sad. I recommended Synology to some people before... Feels like I have to walk back on my word.
This is 21st century American business. Synology wasn't going to choose their drives for maximum reliability after a long, hard, and most importantly expensive benchmarking period, they were going to stuff the cheapest drives they could buy from suppliers in there and charge more than any other drive. There's a very reasonable chance this would have produced lower quality outcomes and more support calls in the long run than random drives purchased on the open market.
Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.
21st century Taiwanese business.
Your experience with SFPs does not translate to hard drives. Hard drives are very, very, very standardized. SFPs are not. Yes, all SFPs have a standard hardware interface, but the optics coding varies wildly.
Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.
HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.
Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".
Everyone claiming it was support driven is 100% making stuff up.
Show this was anything other than a money grab so the Synology was the sole supplier for drives.
Open source alternatives such as OpenMediaVault are able to support virtually any hardware. That's no excuse for a company like Synology
It helps that they can tell people to debug the problem themselves.
I've been using them for 4 years across enterprise level HDDs, personal HDDs, portable HDDs, never seen any issues or differences in experience other than speed.
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.
No, the person you're responding to isn't saying that at all.
Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?
My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.
And by guessing, we mean grasping wildly at nonsense.
There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts. I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.
Why are people booing you, you're right.
People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or better at business, or have better product ideas. They're generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went to the right prep school and college, they were friends with the right people already in the executive class, they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to retirement.
A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.
It 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.
Evidently 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.)
Doesn'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
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.
You may enjoy this classic Raymond Chen post:
Blow the dust out of the connector
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...
> I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.
That's how we all benefit. But if a company wants to benefit more than you, they can. That's how enshittification works.
Because trying to explain stupid decisions is annoying and listening to endless complaints is demoralizing.
Source: worked AppleCare
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
Yes and choosing a NAS brand is not something you change your mind like switching an android phone brand after 2-3years. This will stick quite a bit.
Yep. I’d already started moving things out of Docker on my DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology’s police shoved me toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device. It’s going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell.
In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.
A bad reputation never goes away either. Trust once lost is not something that returns easily. Some customers might forgive a company but many wont and any business willing to be this scummy will almost certainly do something else (or the same thing again in a few years).
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.
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.
We shouldn't normalize referring to managers as leaders. Leadership didn't make this decision, management did.
High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.
It's an interesting lesson.
I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:
* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.
* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.
So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.
If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.
But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.
The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers.
See the problem there...?
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.
I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.
At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.
People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.
Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
They're a fun bunch.
Sounds like you don't argue hard enough
Having seen this story happen: sometimes a "leader" would rather their entire team quit than admit a mistake.
Hey, in my case I've been kicked out a couple times already... it doesn't always pay
That seems to be a rather short-of-support conclusion based on the evidence available.
Bosses often fire people who ‘argue hard enough’.
It's not his position to argue hard. That's what the product owner or manager is paid for.
Eh. I'm out of fucks to give.
I've been at a couple of places where I've had similar experiences and I get to the point where I'll explain it once, and if they're not listening or discard the suggestion without really considering it, then I'll just wait for them to figure it out themselves.
I get paid either way.
I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.
I’ve been there. After a while, I realized that they’re paying for my advice. If they take it, awesome. If they don’t, and I feel like I did a good enough job communicating my reasons, then that’s their option, and their consequences.
It’s annoying, but either way I get paid.
I find I get stuck with the inevitable clean-up work, having voiced an opinion earlier. Learning that not many of these battles are worth choosing.
There's no advancement, just bigger piles of bullshit. The goal is to get paid for shoveling the least.
I get it. The situational context makes a huge difference, too. Most of the people I advise now are Chief Something or Another. Their jobs are generally to take a whole lot of inputs and make business decisions. Maybe I’ll say “I don’t think we should do that because X”, and they’ll decide to do it anyway because Y is a higher priority. As long as it’s not something truly horrible, like “let’s sell our user list” or “we don’t have time to hash passwords” or something else egregious, eh, fine. They asked for my advice, I gave it, and they’re free to do whatever they want with it.
But sure, even then it’d get super annoying if they always ignored it. At some point it’d be obvious that my business goals don’t align well at all with theirs, so maybe it’s time to find a better fit.
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.
The ship has sailed. I'm eyeing the Unifi UNAS 8 which ships this month.
Would you say the same thing about Apple?
The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice.
Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it.
The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).
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 also severely impacts internal morale.
I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
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.
> 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.
What should be noted, a cost effective M365 backup solution "Synology Active Backup for Microsoft 365" has an external server requirement for OAUTH: https://kb.synology.com/en-af/DSM/help/ActiveBackup-Office36... That seems to have created possibility for quite serious exploit: https://modzero.com/en/blog/when-backups-open-backdoors-syno...
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.
> I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.
I use iCloud Photos for my photos, so I don’t have to manage storage on my phone, while always having access to everything. I quite like it.
I also have a Synology NAS for other things.
A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me to also backup my photos to the NAS, because I have no idea how Apple is backing things up. I might be willing to pay for 3 copies for just my photos, but is Apple going to do that for all users of iCloud without advertising it? Probably not.
I’m not sure the best way to go about doing an initial backup to the NAS, or the ongoing changes. I think it also gets a bit messy with Live Photos… which is another reason why iCloud Photos is so appealing, if it can be fully trusted.
Apple uses a mix of Google Cloud and AWS, as well as their own data centers. As for Google and AWS, they are using multi geographic redundancy, and I can only assume they do that for their own data centers as well. The data in the 3rd party data centers is encrypted.
That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data center, but in multiple data centers, so that if one data center completely vanishes, your data will still be available.
That being said, it's always good to make a local backup. I use a tool called Parachute Backup (https://parachuteapps.com) on my Mac to automatically export photos from Apple Photos to my NAS. It also works on "iCloud optimized storage", so it won't just backup size optimized photos.
I've tested it against Photosync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home) as well as a manual export of unmodified originals, and in a library consisting of 180k photos and videos, I had 300 compare errors, most of which were Live Photos, that are not exported identically.
Both Parachute and Photosync offers the ability to export unmodified originals along with AAE files, so that if you need to rebuild your Apple Photos library, everything including undo history is preserved (AAE files contains edits).
Tools like Synology Photos and Immich (and more) only exports the "latest" version, whatever that may be, meaning if you have edited the photo on your phone, that edited version is exported, and if you later restore from your NAS backup, there is no undo history. In other words, they apply the edits in a destructive way.
For backing up from the NAS to another location I use Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com), which also supports backing up iCloud Drive files that are cloud only.
Parachute Backup looks very promising, thanks. I’ll have to spend a little more time later checking it out and seeing if that’s the direction I’ll go.
I do have my NAS backed up to Synology’s cloud backup service. I don’t love it, and it seems expensive, but it was easy to setup at the time and gave me some peace of mind for that data. The big issue I see is that I feel like I’d be stuck buying another Synology to restore of my current one fails.
The nightmare scenario is that Apple locks you out of your Apple ID for some reason.
Luckily, Apple also provides a pretty easy backup path that lets you have a local copy, if you have a Mac and a NAS:
- setup your Mac’s photos app and iCloud to download everything locally
- setup Time Machine backups from your Mac to a NAS
That’s it. You get 3-2-1 (your Mac, iCloud, and your NAS) and can get a copy of your data even if your Apple ID gets locked out.
Standard disclaimer, only the Time Machine copy is a true backup (ex if you delete a file by mistake, only Time Machine can help you restore it; iCloud is a sync, not a backup). That said, for me personally, this scheme (local copy + cloud copy + NAS backup via Time Machine) takes basically 0 work to maintain once setup and gives me peace of mind.
I thought about going this route, but I have 73GB of photos currently, which will only continue to grow over time.
While not the biggest library, it’s approaching the point where I’d need to start buying upgraded storage on any new Mac I buy, or use external storage for my Photos library. One of the things I like about iCloud Photos is my computer doesn’t need much local storage, Photos will manage it, downloading full res images on demand and purging them as needed.
I’d want a backup solution that is optimized for this, to allow for backups of the originals, without having to have them all downloaded all the time.
They did have a bug that corrupted images on import I think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45274277
So maybe don't fully trust it.
You’re talking about completely different aspects of the product though?
The second top level comment also suggests that this the cameras manual suggests the camera itself might be corrupting things.
Sure, it's a different part of the product, but still worrying that it may have happened at all.
Looking at it further though, you're right, this probably wasn't apple's fault.
> 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.
I'm more or less in the same situation.
I no longer use a NAS for my "daily driver", and as such it made sense to skip Synology and instead go for the cheaper option, which in my case was the UNAS Pro (only model available at the time).
Next to it sits an "old" Mac Mini M1, which hosts my Plex server, with storage provided by the UNAS over 10Gbps ethernet.
Everything else i might at some point in time have used the Synology for, has instead been delegated to iCloud. Documents, photos, and everything in between is stored there, and each laptop makes a backup with Arq backup to the NAS as well as another cloud provider.
My NAS today is literally just an advanced USB drive attached to a server, and that was also part of my considerations at the time, just getting a DAS and plugging that into the Mac Mini M1, but ultimately the UNAS Pro (with 10Gbps networking) was cheaper than a Thunderbolt DAS, and i already had a switch capable of 10Gbps.
I made a similar "journey" some years back, where i removed pretty much everything cabled from the network, and instead moved everything to WiFi, and instead doubling down on providing "the best" wifi experience i could, which today means WiFi 7 with 2.5Gbps uplinks, hence the 10Gbps switch.
My network is 100% private. I don't expose ports to the internet, meaning maintenance is no longer a "must do" task. The only access is via Wireguard, which can be done with an always on profile that routes traffic for that specific subnet, but more realistically is mostly never used. The most remote streaming is done via a site to site VPN from my summerhouse to my house, where i can stream Plex over.
Exactly that. Their hardware and software hardly improved over a decade, instead they dropped features. The whole HDD ordeal and researching alternatives also made me realize that I’d rather have ZFS (even at the price of less flexibility with mixing drive sizes). Synology reversing course on the proprietary HDDs therefore won’t win me back.
Their btrfs is using a very old branches with tons of change, which is probably a strong reason why they're locked on that old kernel.
They need to do something about it urgently.
They're too busy using an EOL Docker engine that hasn't seen a security update in 16 months.
Oh nice, thanks for mentioning UGREEN. I had a quick look at the website and it looks fairly cheap. I wouldn't trust their software but the base system comes on an MMC, does it mean I can flash it with TrueNAS or Unraid?
Yes, their units come with a HDMI out, and you can connect them up to install onto them like any other server - but if you ever want the (admittedly very, very good) factory software back on them I'd recommend imaging the internal storage first as I couldn't find a way to get their OS installed back afterwards.
While I'm using UGOS happily, yes you can install other OSes. For better or worse they have a very active Discord server with a ton of great information.
The base software is modified Debian Bookworm and it's been stable and pleasant to use.
Yes, see here: https://nascompares.com/guide/truenas-on-a-ugreen-nas-instal...
Can you run Unraid on MMC? Its licensing is tied to the GUID of a USB stick.
It is 100% normal x86 mini-PC, just with HDD bays.
" i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part."
Totally. Whenever a company runs out of ideas they pull BS like this to increase profits.
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.
Too little, too late... My current Synology box will likely be my last, I might get another 5-bay expansion, but even that is really iffy. I just don't like the decisions like this that they've continued to make... more lock in, more restrictive features, etc.
For that matter, in the 4-6 drive SOHO range, there are a LOT of NAS products with decent consumer upgrade options and alternative OS support with okay compute power. Not to mention the prosumer options for software that support these devices as well as DIY options are pretty good as well, less than the premium that Synology charges for their hardware.
NOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read:
https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
Last self-reply on this, I promise:
If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:
AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.
So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.
The article is about the changed actual policy deployed with DSM 7.3, that only just started rolling out. Your link hasn’t been updated in over two months, so doesn’t reflect that yet.
Edit: Updated KB article is here: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...
This is not "my" link. That link is part of their press release.
Because I am no longer sure people are all getting shown the same content for that URL, here is what is shown to me (no local caches or proxies):
Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series
Details
FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
Here is the updated KB article (note “en-us” vs. “en-global”): https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...
In particular: “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. While Synology recommends using drives from the compatibility list for optimal performance and reliability, users retain the flexibility to install other drives at their own discretion.”
NASCompares confirms that no warnings are shown: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1o1a32m/testing_s...
I agree that the information is still a bit muddled right now.
Ahahaha.
I can confirm that if I change my Accept-Language headers in my browser from "en" to "en-US" I get the other version of that page. Actually, for everything else I tried other than "en-US" I get the evil version.
Synology press team Achievement unlocked: Confuse all global IT press outside of the United States.
> Last updated:Jul 30, 2025
Appears to be stale documentation.
Incompetency.
Good to get this fact about the Synology organization.
Exec summary for those who think their time is not worth this evil madness:
The only change is that they now allow you to use any 2.5" SATA SSD. Everything else, meaning: 2.5" SATA HDDs (the by far most common thing you would want to use) and NVME SSDs: Still a no-no.
No, there was no lesson learned here by them at all.
The liked article specifically is wrong here:
"Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs"
No, not hard drives. 2.5" SSDs only.
Very sorry to spoil the party, but sadly Synology STILL hasn't learned the lesson. :(
Let's check again after they have lost 95% of their customers...
> DS Plus series (DSM 7.3): > HDD > Not Listed > Supported for: > New installation and storage pool creation
This is the main change. Other series (not Plus) are still locked down.
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.
I 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.
Looks like you are indeed getting an older page. Try https://archive.is/8aUdC
As German IT news media has retracted the "Synology reverses" story based on the content they are reading in the press release link, I suspect there is some Geo-stuff involved here (I tested this from multiple German IPs now and always get "the other version").
Thanks for sharing.
It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.
Nah, not really. They already have a compatibility page of known-good drives and they recommend people stick to it. They could also have an incompatibility list showing known-bad drives, and alerting if you install one of them.
If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don’t blame Toyota. But if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase wouldn’t have that same limitation.
Your Toyota analogy doesn't hold up. If a customer puts SMR into their NAS, they are absolutely going to call Synology and complain. And they are going to have to re-explain this over and over because most people don't understand nascent HDD writing modes the way they do a vehicle tire. Even then, and appropriate analogy would be a tire that is cheap and new but refuses to spin above 25mph vehicle speed.
In no way am I sticking up for Synology. I'm not a customer of Synology.
Customers should have absolute control over what drives they want, it's their choice to put crappy tires on their car or not.
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.
I'm not a customer of Synology. I don't agree with justifying forced purchase of a relabeled product.
They deserve the result of their decision and not understanding their customers - they could just start a separate enterprise line if they didn't have one already for whatever they wanted to force.
Enterprise brands like HP, etc, to my last experience, do sell white-labelled drives, but don't bar you from using those same drives yourself.
My lack of trust remains with the parts that will fail the most - hard drives.
Hard Drive manufacturers don't have the best history, whether it was Western Digital lying to their customers about CMR when it was actually SMR. That would be my reason for never accepting a forced labelling of a drive.
But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it, as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can’t upgrade the component and should buy the whole unit. The construction is plastic.
I have a 920+, and it’s too slow, frequently becomes unresponsive when multiple tasks are run.
They lag, and need to be constantly forced to improve?
Min/Max pricing theory?
Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.
Why?
Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics, office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.
Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.
So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of the above.
But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid running the show.
The economic notion is called marginal profitability. Better sales are a good thing if the marginal profit is positive, ie, each extra unit sold still increases the overall profit, so in your example it's still profitable if the new model brings $1.5 profit per unit, and you stop only when the marginal profit per unit turns negative.
In tech the model is often misleading, since the large investments to improve the product are not just a question of current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.
Shouldn't you be pricing the increased cost of support/sales/marketing into your profit calculations?
I'm guessing you mean for the crappier product, and sure that's a consideration.
I haven't looked at them in years, but there are formulas for all of that. EG to help you work out if it makes sense.
> So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
This will never work in a competitive market like for NAS. The only thing that will get you higher profit margins is a good reputation. If you're coasting by on your reputation, sales and customer experience matter. Less sales one quarter means less people to recommend your product in the next one, which is a downward spiral. A worse customer experience obviously is also a huge problem as it makes people less likely to recommend your product even if they bought it.
They went for a triple-whammy here from which they likely won't recover for years. They now have less customers, less people who are likely to recommend their product, and their reputation/trustworthiness is also stained long-term.
Crappier products at higher margins only works if you're a no-name brand anyways, have no competition, or have a fanatical customer base.
This seems to be the model that Broadcom is going with VMware.
I totally agree with you.
The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.
As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464. The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip, 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.
Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing only good things about their own system AND (except for the smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and flexible with support for the own OS.
As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2 for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.
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.
Surprising to read your take
Transcoding was the reason I moved away from Synology. The rest was fine, not great but ... Okay
But there was no way to improve transcoding performance. If a stream lagged, it would always lag. Hence I jumped ship and just made my own
I gave up on transcoding and just recoded everything into the format the Apple TV with Infuse wants.
But my “NAS” is ex-lease enterprise server.
I often read that take. Yes, the J4125 was fine for a few easy / low effort transcodes, like 1080p to 720p for mobile streaming.
But I'm with you. The rest is fine, not great, but rather working well enough.
I bought an inexpensive used Mac Mini and attached a standard HDD USB3 enclosure to it with multiple drives. Works great for streaming to any network appliance I want to use.
I wish transcoding was available on my 1819+. (It isn't.)
There's some DIY chassis that are pretty small like Jonsbo n2, great since you can upgrade CPU later on. https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/11/diy-nas-2025-edition.ht...
Ugreen, aoostar and terramaster are also good alternatives.
I've had a couple of Synology drives for many years (DS1520+, DS918+). They've always worked fine (still chugging away).
I have had terrible luck with Drobo.
Yep, I had two different models that had been running for about seven years each and had an excellent experience overall until Synology tried to change their drive policy.
I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.
They have way underpowered cpus compared to what you can get for the same money elsewhere. They're just a bad deal.
Hi there, I was looking to get a NAS that I can just install and not have to worry about maintenance too much and senility was at the top of the list. If not synology what would you suggest?
Synology's fine - even ideal - for that use case. If you want to run Docker containers, run apps for video conversion like Plex, etc, then you'd likely want to consider something with a beefier CPU. For an appliance NAS, Synology's really pretty great.
In my case, Synology has worked fine. Reliability is a big deal for non-backup RAID (not the same as "backup," but does the trick, 90% of the time).
It's entirely possible that their newer units are crappier than the old workhorses I have.
I don't use any of the fancier features that might require a beefier CPU. One of the units runs a surveillance station, and your choices for generic surveillance DVRs is fairly limited. Synology isn't perfect, but it works quite well, and isn't expensive. I have half a dozen types of cameras (I used to write ONVIF stuff). The Surveillance Station runs them all.
I was just mentioning personal experience. It wasn't even an opinion.
I would love to know what a "good deal" is. Seriously. It's about time for me to consider replacing them. Suggestions for a generic surveillance DVR would also be appreciated.
Thanks!
What kind of tasks?
I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.
Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).
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.
I used to like synology for that, but now I just want a NAS with NAS things on it that supports the latest technology.
As soon as my Synology dies I'm replacing it with Unifi. I don't want all that extra software with constant CVEs to patch.
Simplification is the key. My setup went from: Custom NAS hardware running vendor-provided OS and heavyweight media serving software -> Custom NAS hardware running TrueNAS + heavyweight media server -> Custom NAS hardware running Linux + NFS -> Old Junker Dell running Linux + NFS. You keep finding bells and whistles you just don't need and all they do is add complexity to your life.
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...
You'll get much stronger CPUs from other brands at the same price.
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
I don't know why you got downvoted, you're right. Many models that are currently on sale as new models have CPUs that are 10 years old.
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.
You are correct that the software should perform better, but I don't think the average buyer understands this - they buy a new (and sometimes quite expensive) device, yet it feels sluggish for them, so they feel like they bought a bad product.
But even in the more business/enterprise segment you're getting screwed over. Let's go to the product selector here: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products?product_line=rs_plus... and look at XS+/XS Series subtitled "High performance storage solutions for businesses, engineered for reliability." Let's pick the second choice, RS3621xs+. According to the Tweakers pricewatch (https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1656552/synology-rackstation...) this thing went on sale the 8th of February 2021 (4 years ago). The specsheet says it has an Intel Xeon D-1541, let's look at what ARC (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/91199/i...) has to say about this CPU:
Marketing Status: Discontinued
Launch Date: Q4'15
Servicing Status: End of Servicing Updates
End of Servicing Updates Date: Saturday, December 31, 2022
I'll let you make your own conclusions if that's an OK purchase these days.
Who's out here getting service updates for their CPU?
Another factor related to speed is that, they didn’t allow using NVMe slots for storage pool until recently for new models (in 920+ still you can’t do that; even if they allowed it, the limited PCI lanes of that CPU would limit the throughput). So a container’s database has to be stored in mechanical HDDs. Again other companies moved on, and I remember there were a lot of community dissatisfaction and hacks, until they improved the situation.
Their hardware is limited already, and they also artificially limit it further by software.
They changed course now, and allow using any HDD. Will DSM display all relevant SMART attributes? We will see!
> Ten year old CPUs were plenty fast already,
That depends on the CPU… Some are optimised for power consumption not performance, and on top of that will end up thermally throttled as they are often in small boxes with only passive cooling.
A cheap or intentionally low-power Arm SoC from back then is not going to perform nearly as well as a good or more performance oriented Arm SoC (or equivalent x86/a64 chip) from back then. They might not cope well with 2.5Gb networking unless the NICs support offloading, and if they are cheaping out on CPUs they might not have high-spec network controller chips either. And that is before considering that some are talking to the NAS via a VPN endpoint running on the NAS so there is the CPU load of that on top.
For sort-of-relevant anecdata: my home router ran on a Pi400 for a couple of years (the old device developed issues, the Pi400 was sat waiting for a task so got given a USB NIC and given that task), but got replaced when I upgraded to full-fibre connection because its CPU was a bottleneck at those speeds just for basic routing tasks (IIRC the limit was somewhere around 250Mbit/s). Some of the bottleneck I experienced would be the CPU load of servicing the USB NIC, not just the routing, of course.
> far more than enough even, to power an NAS device.
People are using these for much more than just network attached storage, and they are sold as being capable of the extra so it isn't like people are being entirely unreasonable in their expectations. PiHole, VPN servers, full media servers (doing much more work than just serving the stored data), etc.
> There must be more than that, another explanation
Most likely this too. Small memory. Slow memory. Old SoC (or individual controllers) with slow interconnect between processing cores and IO controllers. There could be a collection of bottlenecks to run into as soon as you try to do more than just serve plain files at ~1Gbit speeds.
On 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.
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.
That's fine, some of those also have kernels that are EOL for almost 10 years.
I have a 10G NIC in my DS923+.
I agree with the rest, though.
10G. You're cute.
My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.
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.
ASUSTOR 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.
I 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
That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?
The problem is not getting TrueNAS on a disk. You can do it externally, but you need to disable the on board flash storage and change the boot order from the BIOS.
That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot without a GPU.
Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.
Do all the models support ECC ram? If not, does the website say clearly which do?
I've been looking on and off for a smallish NAS for some use, but I'd really like it to have ECC. As it stands, I'm considering more and more compromising on the size aspect and getting some ASRock + AMD combo.
If I understood it correctly, all G3 hardware running AMD processors support ECC RAM. It's clearly labeled though.
The one I'm planning to get is at [0]. It clearly states ECC RAM.
[0]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86
I bought a small ASUSTOR NAS at work to check it out and I like it, it's definitely faster than comparable Synology units, however the camera system is quite underdeveloped compared to Synology. Synology's surveillance station rocks and ASUSTOR has a long way to go in that niche.
Thanks, good to know. I just want my files, and a couple of containers doing my backups, that's all.
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.
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.
They could have a list of supported vendors then.
They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them.
Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.
Meh.. i do kinda forgive them. They tried, they lost, they reveserd their decision and hope to keep their customers (read:sales) happy. There are plenty of companies which would double or triple down their bad decisions and flatly tell the customer is the problem.
Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we could not put in any harddisk we'd wanted, but most of our customers did not really care, so we didn't as well. If you absolutely need superb storage you should stop using NASes anyway and get a far better (but more expensive) solution.
Then again if i myself want some NAS functionality, i'd fire up a Debian with Samba using any hardware i want.
They did that though. They have doubled down and told the users they were wrong & that this was a needed
Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-removes...
I 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.
My guess is that the confusion is very much the point.
"Synology fucks around and finds out, more at 11"
And they might only be backtracking to get a few more sales until re-applying the restrictions, feeling justified because that's how the devices were originally advertised.
The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your device if you catch it in time").
I agree with the first.
For the second, Synology has an option to apply important updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret the new option to mean something like still installing the updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with stories of bricked machines.
Don't get confused here: they didn't decide that their policy change was wrong — they just didn't expect quite as much backlash.
Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
Yes exactly - and they still have aging hardware, only 1Gb Ethernet and have recently nerfed H.265 support.
Companies exist to make profit. Their business is selling hard drives. I bet a large portion of profits come from that.
> 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.
> > 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.
> You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so.
Well clearly enough of Synologys customers decided they did have the time to buy commodity HDDs and slap them into a competitors product, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
As GP said, Synology may want to believe they’re in the business of selling premium priced HDDs, with a side salad of NASs. But it turns out that isn’t a very sustainable business, otherwise there would be no reason for them change their policies.
> it turns out
Correct. I never said that it was the right choice, I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make. Lots of companies substantially raise prices and still come up winning.
Netflix doubled their subscription cost since 2008, but market cap did 100x and subscribers are 30x. They even offer fewer good movies than they used to. You may still hate them, but their wallets don't care about your feelings.
> 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.
Companies should create value, and capture a fraction of that value.
What Synology did was trying to significantly increase the fraction of value they captured, at the cost of their customers, who would have to pay that, and without providing extra value for their customers.
This is not only a a bad deal for customers, it also triggers our sense of injustice.
The best companies create value, and capture only a part of it, and leave other parts of the value for both customers and partners/suppliers.
I don’t think that’s true. They apparently thought that was their business, but it’s not what their customers think it is. And having that much of a mismatch between what you think you’re selling and what everyone else thinks you’re selling often ends very badly.
For example, Kodak thought they were in the business of selling film. Their customers thought they were a company that sold ways to take photos. Kodak ignored what their customers wanted, the ability to take photos easily, in favor of their desire to sell more film. That cost them dearly when digital cameras took over.
Their business is selling NASes. They don't make special hard drives that no one else makes. Anyone can sell hard drives. Their value in their business is the NAS, not the drives. If they can't survive on their NAS without scamming their customers with marked up hard drives, then they're not really a viable business.
> Their business is selling hard drives.
If you want to get technical, their business is dogshit, and I'll be glad to never buy from them.
Six years ago my box shit the fan. Synology could have recovered it for me, but they insisted I "upgraded" to their newest box. That was when I realized that I would never buy from them again. Thank goodness their hybrid raid is at least MDRAID.
https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/d3cmq2/ds1512_tha...
Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at idle with no power save mode).
I don't understand. Recovered how? As far as I know, like many electronics companies, they don't do repairs period. If an enclosure fails under warranty, they replace it. They don't repair it.
So if your NAS motherboard died out of warranty and they no longer sold that model, it's not surprising they recommended you buy the current version of that model.
So I don't know what you were expecting? Hardware dies. What did you want them to do?
Thank god they reversed course. I’m coming up on needing another NAS and I was not looking forward to digging through alternatives.
I’ve run raw Linux servers, I’ve run UnRaid, and now I have Synology and it’s been the best “set it and forget it” solution yet. Yes, the hardware is overpriced but it works and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.
I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.)
If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to ship this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as Network Attached Storage, after all.)
"successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.
And it feels like for most of these companies it's a whack-a-mole of cycling from which happened to burn you last rather than any actually being fundamentally "better". Pretty every alternative mentioned in this thread have released some real bad products.
> "successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.
I wouldn't want a company to be "rewarded" for reversing an anti-customer decision, but instead they should be made to realise that their customers goodwill can disappear and be very difficult indeed to be won back.
However, most consumers aren't aware of these kinds of issues/boycotts, so most companies don't get to reap the full impact of shitty decisions.
At this point I'm not suggesting a boycott at all, I'm placing a vote of no confidence in Synology. There is no reason to believe they've had a "change of heart" on their mentality, they're not stopping due to backlash, they're stopping because their greedy scheme failed. If they can figure out one that works, is there any reason to believe they won't take it?
Go to the Synology website and browse to a NAS. Here's Synology's closest product to the new UniFi UNAS offering, the DS1825+.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1825+
> See why Synology drives are ideal
And it just links to a marketing video announcing Synology drives... Does it explain why you should use Synology drives? ... No. It is literally 100% marketing puffery. They do not mention or acknowledge any of the dumb software lock-in tricks they were playing. Coupled with no formal announcement, they are apparently willing to do the absolute bare minimum to win back customers who left over this. Apparently for some people, this is good enough, even though unlike many markets there are actually plenty of competent NAS products. And we wonder why enshittication is so prevalent? We're paying for it. Its a positive signal that they can't get away with anything, only almost anything. Feel free to experiment with user trust! There's no consequences anyways!
And honestly, while Synology DSM is a pretty decent experience, though to be clear I have personal misgivings with it all over the place, I really struggle to see how it can justify the price tag. The UniFi UNAS Pro is a new and weird product, but by any account it does have solid fundamentals for the job of network attached storage. Comparing the specs... The DS1825+ comes with 2x2.5GbE... versus the UNAS Pro's 10GbE. It comes with 8 bays over the UNAS Pro's 7. It comes with a Ryzen V1500B over the UNAS Pro's Cortex-A57, both with 8 GiB of RAM. One thing the Synology NAS has is the ability to expand to 18 bays with additional enclosures, which is certainly worth something, but what I'm trying to say is, the specs are not actually leagues different especially considering that this is what you get without paying extra. For Synology you will pay $1,149 over the $499 of the UNAS.
Don't get me wrong. UniFi UNAS is brand new. I don't think it has support for running third party applications or Docker workloads, and there are definitely less storage pool options than with Synology DSM. But, it really seems like for the core NAS functionality, the UniFi option is just going to be better. Given that neither of these devices are actually all that powerful, I reckon you'd probably be best off actually just treating them like pure storage devices anyhow, and taking advantage of fast networking to run applications on another device. Especially with 10 GbE!
You could literally buy two UniFi UNAS Pro units and a Raspberry Pi 5 and still come up a little short on the price of the DS1825+. Not that you should do that, but it says a lot that you could.
So sure, buy whatever you want, but Synology already played their hand, so don't be surprised when they do what they've already shown they are more than happy to do. I'm not buying it.
And P.S.: Yes, there are plenty of mediocre or crap products on the NAS market, but you literally don't just have to buy on brand names alone. There are plenty of reputable reviewers that will go into as much detail as you want about many aspects of the devices, and then you can use brand reputation to fill in any gaps if you want. It feels silly to hinge entirely on brand reputation when you have this much information available...
I agree, two companies that I've dropped recently.
Synology: Switching to Unifi
Sonos: Switching to Wiim.
I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.
Synology photos is garbage... it does do one thing ok which is backup photos.
The software stack of usability is severely missing. So they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of it well.
In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only does storage.
Synology Photos works amazingly for me and significantly better than any alternatives I've tried.
Agree! Though to be clear I’m not saying it’s necessarily amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem to like it!
I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog. Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone actually used and liked it. It worked alright but the client apps were/are a giant leap behind alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.
But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
Weirdly, Audio Station is the best app I've found for streaming podcasts from my Synology (given the quirks of podcast hoarding in practice). Admittedly, I haven't looked in a few years... maybe I should get on that.
Personally that’s all I need/want. I still run UnRaid as my “app” server, I just want dumb storage, hotswap bays, and software raid.
That's correct AFAIK, but software like Plex and Jellyfin work just fine if you store your media on a separate machine. For the price gap between the Synology NAS and the UniFi UNAS you could buy a cheap machine to run some workloads on over the network. Even better since the UNAS has very good connectivity out of the box (10GbE) that I figure it will basically always be bottlenecked on the HDD speeds anyways. Maybe a Raspberry Pi or small form factor computer could be sitting above the NAS. Many of us already run Home Assistant OS anyways, and if you don't... It's never too late to start :)
I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good stride and just released some pretty solid good value products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without it, it is challenging to ignore how much better of a deal you're getting for the core functionality for sure.
I of course hope people do some level of research before buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people. I do acknowledge Synology DSM has a lot of stuff built in, but frankly most of it just isn't that great.
I don’t disagree with any of this. But I have a few non-tech savvy friends (and particularly older folks) who just want a clever box they can plug in and it will do stuff - even if it’s a bit clunky. I wonder how much of the Synology market people like that represent.
After I heard from someone who worked there about how incredibly bad their code and software development practices are I wouldn’t trust them with my data. And that was for their enterprise products.
Having dug into Synology DSM to try to debug issues, I would bet my left kidney the code quality in DSM would give any of Ubiquiti's own crappy code a run for its money. These vendors don't make sales on code quality, for better or worse.
As someone that has a UDM, I will never buy another Unifi product. It had all sorts of issues. It doesn't even have proper QoS lmao.
I've always opted for building my own and running linux every time it has come down to replacing, but I might split out NAS and compute this time and take a chance on a UGREEN one (maybe DH4300?), the reviews look solid for a new product segment from them.
I'm likely not buying a Synology at this point.
If anyone has one of their (UGREEN) models (or other brands) I'd be interested in hearing perspectives.
Edit: A lot more mentions of their models in the thread elsewhere at this point.
I bought a Terramaster DAS as I already had a NUC, just connected with USB, supports 10Gbit but my NUC only does 5.
Looked a lot at NAS alternatives and ugreen, asustor, aoostar all seem pretty good, as you can just run truenas or a linux distro. Can also do DIY chassi with mini itx board.
Good luck when it doesn't work though. I decided to take the hit and pay their exorbitant HDD prices on the basis that they came with a warranty etc and one of the drives failed within 3 months.
It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the drive at my own expense from the UK to Germany and they didn't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their warehouse. I had to buy another drive to repair my RAID cluster while waiting. Absolutely outrageous customer support.
You need to have pretty tight supply chains if you’re going to support warranty claims on something as consumable as disks. I don’t know who supplies their HDD and SSDs, but you’d want the relationship and traceability to be pretty robust.
Syno have always been a software company first, a hardware company second, and a storage media company last. It makes sense to try and control the full vertical, but they just don’t have enough clout to compete against the big enterprise companies.
I honestly believe the disk whitelisting thing was part of an attempt to overvalue the company in preparation for a sale.
That was the absolute deal killer for me. Even if the white labeled drives were the same price, which they decidedly weren’t, if I have a Seagate that dies, I know a local shop where I can buy a replacement an hour later. All Central Computers has in stock from Synology is a 12TB drive for $300 (LOL no). Amazon Prime’s largest drive is an 18TB unit for $800 (WTF are you kidding me?).
I don’t have time to wait around for them to ship a drive. I certainly don’t have the budget to stock up on spares at their exorbitant prices.
Hard pass.
That's a shame IMO. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go down the right path. I built a NAS 5 years ago in a Fractal Design Node 804 and put TrueNAS Core on it (back then it was called FreeNAS). It's been totally "set and forget" for me. The only thing I've done in 5 years is upgrade TrueNAS, which has always worked flawlessly.
I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly corrupt the data.
You should still look at alternatives. A NAS company that is willing to consider a move like this even once is not a trustworthy company.
It shows you that their management is probably not making the right decisions in other areas as well.
I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots and other maintenance.
On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.
If you just want storage and not apps, Ubiquiti's UNAS line is a much better choice, especially if you're in their ecosystem.
Would not recommend, given my UDMs logs are full of random errors and issues all the time, which seems "normal" for them. Not to mention pretty ui but weird bugs and strange behaviours - plus ui looks great but feature wise it sucks.
Next time I upgrade I'm just buying mikrotik again...
Fair enough, but I've used thousands of Unifi devices at work and at home and I don't recall ever having to look at the logs. Obviously YMMV, but their NVR storage has been rock solid.
Yeah 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
It’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).
It 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.
A N100 or other type of cheap hardware will be much better than the synology.
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.
For me, it's too late. I've already set up TrueNAS, and I found it a lot more user-friendly than I expected. Particularly now that ZFS AnyRaid is making good progress, I don't see myself going back to Synology.
> According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced. What did NAS customers purchase instead?
I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.
I think they were hoping they had enough "appliance operators" in their userbase that they wouldn't be able to go elsewhere or improvise with gear on hand. Which, given the people most likely to buy a prosumer NAS device is silly
An older Synology model, in my case. I just bought a DS1522+ for this very reason. Haven't even provisioned it yet.
So, thanks, guys, I guess.
Yeah, I was waiting for the DS1525+, but after it was announced and the HD restrictions were confirmed, I eventually decided to buy the DS1522+ instead.
Change Synology with HP, NAS with printer and HDD with ink cartridge. How does that sound like?
Printers don't take standardized cartridges. I think that was their mistake. They should have started with model specific HDD cartridges. Or just expanded models with USB enclosures.
> They should have started with model specific HDD cartridges.
But that’s exactly what they did. Just in software.
Like a good reason to not by an HP printer.
The 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.
I don’t think it’s a cartel per se; that would require collusion to keep ink prices high.
What seems to have happened with the 2D printer market is a race to the bottom to provide customers with the cheapest printers possible while hiding the high [recouped] costs of the ink. Many consumers are duped into buying a cheap printer and not realizing the high cost of printing that comes with it.
This is why brands like Brother have been able to succeed, especially pushing their laser printers: higher upfront hardware cost and cheaper ink.
You can do things like ink tank modifications and so on (I think there's even a few you can buy off the shelf with that option now), they're just rarely worthwhile unless you're doing quite a lot of printing.
> Desktop NAS market is very different.
This was the first step or attempt to change that.
The 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)
> The 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 understand the point, but HP's approach was not really based on cartel, while it might seem so.
In the beginning, HP had great printers, and they used specific kind of ink. Back in that time, ink wasn't so complicated, so other manufactures started to sell it as well. So there was a moment, when you could get the ink from many different manufactures.
But what changed, was that HP started to make their printers accept only very specific kind ink, which was controlled by the printers and HP, not by the ink manufacturers (compare to HDDs).
They added one sort of digital signatures for the ink, so that printer reads signatures and does not otherwise accept it. So it does not matter whether these was cartel or not; it was just DRM lock-in. As long as the core product was desirable enough. I don't think this is a cartel in a traditional sense, because manufacturing of the ink cartridges wasn't that difficult otherwise, and it wasn't forbidden or highly regulated area.
In Synology's case, this was just that they added similar checks for NAS. It does not matter if other manufacturers don't comply with, if core product is good enough. Synology thought that their product was good enough to play this, but apparently not.
How? You need to restrict the HDD sales and put them into the cartel.
Have you read the whole post...?
Companies like that will always tried once they believe they are captured enough market shares. If I can influence that kind of decision, I will certainly advocate not to renew Synology gear parcs...
Glad they reversed but they could have saved themselves those losses if they had an understanding of what their customers wanted. Anyone putting together a NAS will want full control over the drive selection.
Too little, too late. The second they made that decision, I struck Synology as a partner for both my homelab (gotta replace the DS1019+ at some point) and in my purchasing capacity at work. That was some NetApp-grade BS and I wasn’t going to tolerate it.
I’m just glad the NAS scene saw the opening left by Synology’s boneheaded decision-making and capitalized on it. Unraid and TrueNAS have stormed the battlefield and shown Synology’s typical plus-line customers that they can get more for less with a bit of DIY, and NUC vendors have capitalized on this misstep with NAS hardware platforms that just require your preferred software/OS to operate.
This singular decision is going to take a decade of good will to undo. Astonishing that they footgunned themselves so bad, so willingly.
I don't think this matters much anymore. Synology killed themselves.
Many were already in the boat of "sure I'll pay it, if it works and doesn't give me any BS, otherwise there are many options at better prices"
Too bad. I switched to UGREEN (DXP6800 Pro) will likely stick with them now. It was easy to install an alternate OS (Fedora 42 in my case) on it, and the hardware appears to be very nicely built.
I switched to Ugreen 2800 and very happy so far. Looks promising and n100 gives plenty of room for containers
Also switched to a UGREEN, in this case the DXP4800 Plus. Truenas runs pretty nicely on it! One critique I'd have of this setup is it's a lot noisier than my older Synology setup, but I think that's more to do with the HDDs than the case.
My 918+ was a huge step up from my homebrew homelab server. People who advocate for a duct tape solution for systems that contain their entire lives on their disks are doing most people a disfavor. Having a well baked disk and backup storage system is critical.
I switched a year ago to Ugreen UNAS just given the generational leap of their hardware and reasonable per-disk pricing over synology.
I didn’t trust you agree with OS, but that ended up being incredibly easily remedy by just shoving true Nas on the system.
All that sad if I had waited another half-year, I wouldn’t have gone down that path but instead would’ve picked up a UniFi NAS, which is even more optimal from a cost and integration into my ecosystem. Since that really is just network attack storage - I could just let my old Home lap server act like a server on top of a NAS.
The lessons from this are many. First is that hardware is not a moat. Thanks to china that’s no longer a factor. The second is that software isn’t a moat anymore either. Synology leveraged Linux and then walled garden their solution and decided to not innovate. Now open source and in the future AI have made it so software is significantly cheaper to work with.
That means we are back to loyalty and brand awareness. Both are things that synology has squandered with this adventure.
I installed Seagate Ironwolf Pro in my Synology last night.
It complained it wasn't compatible.
If that drive isn't compatible than I don't know what legitimate criteria possibly could be.
(Yes, I get the criteria is "what we prioritized to test" but my point stands,it's the high end of consumer-available NAS drives, not a compute model or a shucked SMR drive:)
IIRC it was official Synology-branded drives only. And they cost about twice as much as the exact same drives without the Synology brand.
Yeah, 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.
After 17 years I dropped Synology recently. I sold my 2 NAS. Company changed focus. Did not like the walled garden and old linux base.
I moved to a second hand beefed-up laptop and a terramaster disk pack connected vi USB. Same wattage.
It does take some effort, but now it is done. I like to tinker anyway. I pulled up Proxmox with a bunch of containers doing SMB/SNF per share.
Just like with Synology, I just look a regular emails with successful backups. edit: typos
Plus, a built-in UPS!
HA HA HA HA HA I really hope the C-suite that decided this gets no bonus and hopefully a salary cut this year. Stupid, anti-consumer measures like this need proper consequences so they stop happening. Until then, let's keep boycotting companies with anti-consumer practices.
You obviously dont understand capitalism. They'll probably get an increase in bonus with company layoffs occurring.
Last summer a friend needed help building a huge home backup system, and though I had no real experience with Synology, it was the only brand I was familiar with and some Googling indicated that no other commercial product seems close. A DIY box — TrueNAS or whatever — is out of the question, this friend isn't technical.
I had heard about the Synology HD policy thing, but had forgotten when I ordered the drives. By the time they arrived, the need was pressing and I had no window to exchange the drives, so I had to just hack the damn system.
Now I have to go out of town to unhack the damn thing so I can be sure nothing I did interferes with future updates.
This is the polar opposite of the experience I was expecting. This foolishness cost me a lot of time and is about to cost more.
I wish the article put actual numbers or evidence of declining sales. I agree that reduction of sales is the most likely cause, but if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it becomes poor journalism.
Hmm, I couldn't find a source for that elsewhere, just slop rereporting in loops.
If they had insider leaks I would imagine they mentioned that aspect so it's possible that this part is derived from speculation.
I just went ahead and editorialized the title with the insertion of an "allegedly" since the sales drop part is unsubstantiated.
> if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it becomes poor journalism
Proof is a high ask. Evidence would be great. But here yeah, waving the premise of the article away with "some reports say" is hardly journalism.
It'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.
I would say the damage has been done. This policy showed what they were willing to do as a company and not listen to their customer base which is the whole reason the company exists in the first place.
It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry standard expandable memory and storage.
From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.
I used to recommend Synology everywhere, but ever since the hard drive lock issue, I'm now trying to dissuade people from buying it. The policy reversal is a good thing, but trust isn't something you can restore simply by "reversing" it.
I never understood this. The customer type that wants to run an NAS is technically capable. They may choose to run a all-in-one NAS like those from Synology or are ubiquity because of the convenience but if you then make it inconvenient for them by adding these unnecessary hard drive restrictions, they can just as easily go to either another provider or run their own.
Talk about not knowing your customer.
Hope the CEO realized when this was instigated that it's not as simple as reversing the decision, every Youtube video about it, every review that mentions it, every tweet that mentions it, every reddit post saying "Don't buy Synology" because of it and every LLM trained on that data will be there and showing up in searches and harming sales for at least a decade.
One week too late for me. Didn't feel like scratch building a new machine and finding a low TDP mobo with a bunch of SATA ports. Wanted to go Synology but dragged my feet for months watching this play out.
In the meantime, I became enamored with the Jonbo cases and started seeing white label N100 ITX mobos pop up with a bunch of SATA ports. Eventually figured out they were Topton when Brian Moses included them (and a Jonbo case!) in this year's NAS build.
So my parts are arriving in a few days and Synology has lost one potential new customer.
After all the complaints and upheaval created after their silly management/leadership decision, they finally understood something.
As an owner and administrator of many Synology NASes I agree that Synology offerings are a bit underpowered compared to what is available in the market (from H/W point of view), but the ease of use and peace of mind within the Synology ecosystem (DSM software, apps) outweighs whatever drawbacks they have.
If Synology management takes the decision to refresh their H/W with new CPUs, NICs and more RAM, I'm sure they'll stay on the market ;-)
While we are on this subject, has anyone found good DIY solutions for similar hardware? I haven't looked recently, but I have always struggled to be able to put together anything that would be remotely similar in size to a small 4-bay NAS.
My "NAS" is a 4U short network racked unit. Pretty large by comparison, but its also mostly empty space.
https://www.servethehome.com/minisforum-n5-pro-review-an-awe...
I have a ds920 4 bay from synology.
It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes).
But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again.
I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.
UGREEN isn't really build your own. The hardware is similar to Synology (but I think slightly better made, and definitely with much higher specs). But unlike Synology it's easy to install your own OS. I used Fedora, but a lot of people are using TrueNAS which is almost as turn-key as the Synology software.
For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in future as long as they don't do anything stupid.
>I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable
Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box that is mostly just an SMB share
> a box that is mostly just an SMB share
...and supposedly keeps your files, safe - at least that what keeps me from tinkering too much with such a solution.
Sure, having backups still is necessary, yet, a NAS to me is a means to an end..
I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.
Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
> just plugs in and works as a tech guy installing TrueNAS likely isn't a barrier for you, and will almost definitely 'just work' more reliably
there are plenty "barebones" NAS offerings that have the nice formfactor but you bring your own HDDs and OS
What are the specifics of the SSDs you chose? I understand you have to go for specific types/models to make sure they don't melt down too quickly.
TrueNAS has solved that for me, by making my computer into a NAS appliance. It's great.
"build your own" just means buy a desktop PC and install an O/S
It'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.
I think it would be pretty cool if Framework made a TrueNAS targeted NAS box.
As a QNAP user, I'm not affected. However, even if I've been unhappy with QNAP in the past sometimes (overall they're OK for me), I would never switch to Synology because of this shortsightedness on their part.
It's not a 1:1 comparison, but anyone have experience running Garage[0] as a locally hosted geo-distributable open source S3 clone in place of a traditional NAS? Garage seems to have simpler hardware requirements, native support for geo-replication, and for lots of applications S3 compatibility is actually what you want.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004
Whenever I hear about a company making a decision like this I no longer trust said company. It says the company no longer is thinking about their product or consumers at all. Anyone who cared about either even a little bit would never even consider such an idea.
I wonder if that's related to UniFi pushing into that market for consumers (https://www.ui.com/integrations/network-storage) recently. It's still not there yet as there's no way to run containers etc. on the appliance itself but this surely will come within the next 1-2 years.
Yeah that’s a really interesting gap in the feature set. Ubiquiti’s new offerings seem like pretty good network storage appliances, but not home servers.
I’ve gone through a couple iterations of home server. First I upcycled an obsolete Dell Power edge. Then a N100 mini PC. Neither was as reliable as I wanted.
Now I’m running persistent apps on Railway and compute hungry stuff on my MacStudio. Pretty good so far.
Is this in response to plummeting sales or is this in response to SMR phaseout? IIRC, this began from WD sneaking in DM-SMR drives into WD Red Pro products used for NAS and RAID use cases that can't possibly work with SMRs. I was looking through HDDs and noticed that there aren't many SMR drives at mainstream price zone(which is great).
So who's the one holding the towel? Is it Synology, or could it be WD/Seagate?
A ridiculously bad idea, coupled to the fact they are trying to sell you Intel Celeron CPUs with 2GB of RAM and SATA only interfaces in 2025, for a lot more than the same product cost ten years ago.
Too little, too late. You'd have to be nuts to willingly go back into their walled garden now.
What is a good alternative that allows me out of the box with no extra hardware to install a plex server, connect to Mullvad VPN and start / monitor downloads directly from the NAS device web interface or mobile App?
QNAP's QTS/QuTS Hero are generally as "batteries included" as Synology's DSM in that respect. I threw 32GB of RAM in my TS-464 and run ~15 containers (as well as Plex, not in a container) on it with no problem.
ah, thanks for the tip
The article says they reversed the ban, but the release notes seem to indicate a temporary change while more certified drives are brought into the market.
This doesn't seem permanent.
Good, but I lost my trust in them, so my next NAS will be something else.
Too late. The company is permanently on my personal shitlist and I will make sure that the company is excluded from any future hardware acquisitions at the workplace based on vendor lock-in risk.
When something like this happens, you fire the CEO. I don't care how the decision process works internally, and how much they thought it would "help" the customers and were all in good faith. The company fucked up, the company has to acknowledge that, and the way to show it is to fire the CEO.
To change a company culture, you change the CEO. My view of Synology today is that they will pull the rug for their own benefit, at my expense. There is no way I trust this Synology ever again. Now I'm on TrueNAS, so I'm already lost to them, but I also tell everybody not to trust Synology. And that won't change if they don't show me that the company has changed.
Similar to Sonos, I feel.
> According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced.
What did NAS customers purchase instead?
There's quite some competition even in the same form factor, like QNAP, ASUSTOR or even UGREEN which got their product in not too long ago.
Many 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.
Ugreen
+1, I replaced my aging DS1812+ with a DXP4800 Plus and I've been quite happy with it.
Ugreen is king, lately.
Bose first, Synology second. Bad execs need to go.
Is Synology owned by some evil equity fund? A healthy NAS company would have predicted the outcome before attempting to squeeze customers like this.
Vote with your wallet.
Always works.
Unless customers believe that they have no choice - see Windows 11 for details
I'd imagine UGreen - trying to break into this market - probably sent them a thank you gift.
What a wild unforced error...
Damage is already done.
It takes decades to build consumer trust, and one stupid MBA driven idea to ruin it.
As a customer, I sent an email saying that it felt like a cash-grab instead of a genuine attempt to improve customer experience.
Pretty sure that email single-handedly push the needle on their decision. Hah!
Sans “we care about your privacy” lie and multiple clicks to object to “legitimate interests” in staking you around the Internet: https://archive.is/0qhXB
This is the reason then that many YT influencers are making Synology shorts...awful original decision but at least they backtracked which is good!
Is there a decent (budget) NAS with 2.5" HDD support? I have like ~30 1TB 2.5" HDD sitting on my shelf and would love to put together at least one NAS with them but a Synology slim is like... 500€? Not even all the disks worth that much
Buy any NAS and a bunch of 3.5" installation frames for 2.5" disks? They're like a dollar each, or you can even 3D print them.
What is to say they won't add a subscription feature to access your NAS box in future?
Shocking that it took them this long to reverse course on this strongly negatively-received move. The leadership should go.
Damage is done, will take a lot more on their end than just reversing a decision they may implement again in the future.
Maybe open source your code or do something that is the exact opposite to vendor lock in in addition to the decision reversal.
Customers lost tend to stay lost.
Every time I've looked at Synology, I've been shocked at how anemic the hardware is for the cost. I've always self-built my own NAS. I've sometimes felt regret when I have run into an issue that required more babysitting than I wanted to do, but when considering alternatives, I've always realized doing it myself was the right choice. I wasn't aware they'd even done this, but the fact they did is just more reason to always build your own NAS.
Not super different to buying a server from Dell, HP etc. Very different target market however.
Too little, too late. I finished my 48TB Unraid build a couple of weeks ago :)
If Synology want me back as a customer, they also need to get modern CPUs, 2.5Gb or 10Gb Ethernet and reverse course on H.265 too.
It’s so incredibly easy to build a TrueNAS box these days I don’t know why anyone would go the Synology route.
It's easy to build the hardware, not easy to build the software. Most people aren't aware how feature rich the Synology OS is.
You can get something similar if you download and set up 50 Docker images, but that's not easy. Just look up how you do HDD image backups of your computers to your Synology and to your TrueNAS for example, it's way more complicated.
I mean, I've never come across Synology branded HDDs. I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.
And part of the magic of a NAS is not necessarily having to have matching hardware. In addition to other design basics like using drives from different batches to minimise the likelihood of multiple failures within data-fatally small time frames.
Monoculture is inherently more fragile; it's antithetical to good storage design.
> I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.
Correct. They were, and they did. The goal was profit - the rebranded drives cost more. Just like printer ink.
There needs to be more of a name and shame culture if companies want to actually win consumers back. Synology as a company did the right thing by reversing this decision, but I still can't trust them unless I know the executives and product managers that introduced this idea and executed it are fired. If they are still lurking around the company, these money over consumers psychopaths are just going to introduce another horrible thing once sales start to tick back up.
Nobody could have seen this coming. Nobody at all.
Yet again another company hit by the consequences of being out of touch with their customers and fuelled by greed. Thankfully good alternatives exist, otherwise it would have sent a signal to the industry that this is OK.
I was literally reaching out to friends yesterday to ask about NAS options and Synology wasn't even discussed, where it would have been before this mess.
Even now, after the reversal, it's really not an option. I mean, I have no assurance it won't get reversed again, and I don't want to invest into something that won't necessarily work long term.
Basically, I want to be sure I can access my data and get updates, and right now, Synology is not that from what I see. I'm just looking at this as a home user, but unless there is some guarantee, Synology just seems to be waiting to pull the rug out from you regarding your data.
It shouldn’t be enough for companies to just reverse some lousy decision, they’ve got to show some goodwill for it.
Back in August, I specifically chose a UGreen NAS over Synology for exactly this reason.
This smelled like "smart" printer cartridges all over again. No thank you.
So what? It will not restore trust.
I will not spend money on Synology which can make pay me more for nothing any time when their management wants some more money next time from users.
So now they will make less money and not more users.
> 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.
Well, this was a pretty myopic decision.
You can't ever buy a NAS without having complete flexibility in drives, both in the short and long term, because the claims of hard drive manufacturers can't ever be trusted until verified individually, per drive model..
Western Digital lied about their drives having SMR instead of CMR as their RED drives were marketed for NAS usage: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-class-action-lawsuit-sm...
Add to that how one model of a hard drive from a manufacturer will be invincible, while another model next to it will have huge issues.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...
I hear Synology has nice gear, it has always been pretty nice when I interacted with it. I own a different brand just through deciding to have a NAS with more flexibility that I could grow into if I wanted.
>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.
The people that made and supported this decision need to get fired. When companies pull this bs, and then reverse course, they don't get a pass, or else they will continue to the pull this bs until no one fights anymore.
I'm glad that I've graduated from Synology to a proper Debian server with ZFS around 6 years ago. Fuck these people.
Time to move on from Synology. They already showed their sociopathic middle finger to everyone. Now that they are walking it back they will just do the same thing they all do now. They will slowly reintroduce this restriction by removing a few compatible drive models at a time until its too inconvenient not to buy their drives.
I hope they go out of business even though I used to like their product.
How many will still think this is the policy regardless of its reversal? Good job Synology.
How many will never touch Synology because they remember that this company proved to be capable of making incredibly stupid decisions?
Awesome. That's how it's done. They offer people some bullshit take-it-or-leave-it deal, and people leave. I really wish this would happen more often. Normalize this.
It's too late. They can't be trusted. They have fucked themselves.
Too Late. Synology and Unity are learning a very hard lesson. When you screw over your customers, then reverse course, it often causes long term damage because people got a chance to see your true behavior and feelings towards your customers.
And if you did it to us once, you're capable of doing it again. To me personally, the "Synology" brand is permanently tarnished. For them to do what they did signals serious moral problems with their decision makers, and the entire move sounded desperate for profit. Just type "alternative to synology nas" and you'll get a whole bunch of options.
I was looking into a self-contained NAS to keep my local archive of almost 20 years of photos, Synology was always the most recommended solution but this policy was definitely the reason I did not purchase one.
Unfortunately for Synology I will wait to see if it's a policy they stick to or if they might change it again in the future, I have all my backups synchronised to off-site storage (Backblaze and Glacier), so the local NAS was just a nice to have convenience instead of shuffling through different local disks...
I'm pretty sure Synology does not manufacture hard drives.
So you can't buy 3rd party HDDs --- but Synology can?
Looks likes a blatant FU to the customer was returned in kind.
They rebrand drives made by Toshiba and Seagate: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_M2_volume/wiki/S..., https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-hard-drives-and-ssds-...
This is actually not that rare. Enterprise server vendors always carried exorbitantly priced third party HDDs in plastic shells effectively as brand merches. But servers are contractor managed and/or severely discounted, so no perceivable harm is usually done.
The differences here are that they actually implemented software checks, for devices bought at MSRP. And so harm is felt.
What is there to understand? They want to sell you the drives directly. This is extremely common practice, see ink cartridges.
I 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.
I believe they were basically saying a set list of approved hard drives
No, 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.
So you're saying the photo of a Synology branded (rebranded) 4TB HDD from the article is fake?
No 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
Yes! Resist the enshittoscene!
I wonder what will they try next. I guess they are really jealous of cloud service providers - that get recurring income - instead of just one time hardware purchase.
"You have connected additional HDD. Please select which bay you want to use or try our 'Synology Super Subscription' to use both drives at the same time".
It was a bald strategy move, but market was just not ready for the innovation
I don't think anything about this was innovating. I think it was purely a money grab attempt
I think the comment was intentionally ironic
As a person with a DS224+ behind me on my shelf, running my backups, I'm glad to see they at least woke up from their enshittification.
Prodigal son rules on this one.
However, now we know the direction their leadership would like to take, I can't see much of the tech savvy crowd returning to them, given we know they'll find another revenue screw to turn.
I'm not convinced of the existence of executives who wouldn't do this. It's just like ads. Someone is bound to notice that money is being left on the table. Once it becomes known, they'll either do it or they'll be replaced by someone who will.
We have to start making open source hardware that we can fully control. It's the only way to be free. Corporations cannot be trusted. Any goodwill they build up eventually becomes a resource for them to capitalize on.
Bankrupting every company who tries it is also a pretty good strategy.
Too late. Sold my Synology NAS a few weeks ago and moved on to TrueNAS. - I absolutely despise when companies get greedy and try to get the maximum out of their customers. Adobe does this. Apple does this. And some other companies.
FA ... FO