Synology’s telegraphed moves toward a contained ecosystem and seemingly vertical integration are certain to rankle some of its biggest fans, who likely enjoy doing their own system building, shopping, and assembly for the perfect amount of storage. “Pro-sumers,” homelab enthusiasts, and those with just a lot of stuff to store at home, or in a small business, previously had a good reason to buy one Synology device every so many years, then stick into them whatever drives they happened to have or acquired at their desired prices. Synology’s stated needs for efficient support of drive arrays may be more defensible at the enterprise level, but as it gets closer to the home level, it suggests a different kind of optimization.
Why would anyone even use Synology?
Just buy a pc with big hard drives
My personal reasons for buying a synology were ease of use, reliability and power usage.
I had previously played around with TrueNAS in a VM using an external USB HDD Enclosure for storage and I just wanted something reliable. With TrueNAS I often ran into issues with user permissions one way or another and the Synology software is incredibly easy to use and foolproof.
Are we overreacting? Hasn’t Synology always had a list of “certified” drives for their NAS’, which end up being the same HDDs we would tend to use anyway?
I can understand that they don’t want people using any garbage storage drives, which could increase failure and make Synology NAS’ look unreliable.
Unless something has changed, this is how they’ve always done it, just like how every laptop manufacturer will say which RAM and storage works best (for reliability and performance) on their machines.
They’re disabling features
Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.
What you might lose from using non-Synology-approved hard drives could include pool creation and support for any issues. De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives, Synology’s press release suggests.
Yes, but is this them being assholes, or them wanting to make sure that users aren’t making their system unreliable? I think there would be a huge distinction there.
For example, say a user wanted to create a cache drive using an SSD. But because the user doesn’t know better, they buy the cheapest crap they can find, install it, and set up caching. But because they’re using cheap shit, the drive is slow and the user reports poor performance, system hangups, and other instability.
Wouldn’t it be in Synology’s best interest to say “here’s a list of drives we know will give you the best experience.”?
Now, Synology has already done that, but users are ignoring it and continue to use poor storage drives expecting to use pretty sophisticated features. What now? Well, Synology disables those features.
For example:
De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives
Um, yeah. That makes sense. If a shitty hard drive can’t reliably get firmware updates through the NAS, why on earth would they want to keep that option enabled? Same with lifespan analysis. If a crappy drive isn’t using modern standards and protocols for measuring and logging errors and performance data, Synology really can’t “enable” this to work, can they?
That’s what I think is happening. Although, this could be just greed, too. I don’t think there’s any real problem for most users, unless they say that we can’t use fairly common, high-quality NAS drives from Seagate or WD and must use their own branded drives. I’d have a huge problem with that.
I think it’s a mix of the two. There are legitimate reasons, and commercial reasons
Synology does not manufacture its own hard drives but instead certifies and rebrands drives from Toshiba and Seagate, leaving out only Western Digital among the world’s largest manufacturers.
Synology is made for the tech literate tech idiot.
They solve one problem and create a dozen more. That problem not only doesn’t need a physical solution, it doesn’t need to be a standalone device. It doesn’t need its own shitty proprietary operating system.
Anyways. Fuck them.
Would love to hear why the problem doesn’t need a physical solution, if you want total control
Synology runs a proprietary OS OOTB that’s had multiple sloppy vulns exposing full remote access to users’ files. Putting your data in the hands of fuckups who have and will continue to leak it is the opposite of total control.
It’s completely trivial to store any data you want to in a cloud provider 100% securely just by piping it through openssl before uploading.
People who buy overpriced “solutions” instead of taking the time to configure a PC seem like exactly the crowd to enjoy a closed ecosystem (see apple)
The reason why Synology is great is their bulletproof reliability.
Sure you might be able to make a PC perform the same spec for spec but will it actually? And even with these devices, they are so far from Apple it isn’t funny, you have to set up a fair bit still to make the most of them. Also why use a 500w psu VS low power consumption of a NAS device.
Honestly HDDs/SDDs are a disposable part of the backup ecosystem, I get that they want some extra money but there are already scripts to overcome some of the existing compability checkers in these systems.
Not everyone has time, skill, or desire to spend their nights learning how to build and configure a nas.
People have other hobbies than IT, so if a photographer wants to have a local storage for his portfolio without faff, I guess they can get fucked?
Really with your gatekeeping
This is why I chose an ASUS nuc + external bay-storage for my home networking needs, felt like synology NAS would be a limiting factor.
So you built your own NAS, then. NAS is just an acronym, “Network Attached Storage”. Not a singular line of products.
That said - I also feel the same way about Synology and the other “all-in-one NAS” brands. Expensive for what they are, which is essentially an incredibly cheap PC with a built in toaster. I built my NAS out of a 2014 Mac Mini (running OMV) and a Sabrent USB-C 4-bay drive dock, and even full of WD Reds, that entire rig is literally half the price of a DS920+. And more powerful.
