Synology Hard Drive Locking
Patrick Kennedy (via Hacker News):
According to HardwareLuxx, Synology is on a rough course with generations-old sub-par NAS hardware and now appears to be locking its NAS units to its own branded hard drives in its upcoming 2025 Plus models. This is a shame since a few years ago, Synology had neat hardware.
[…]
Without scale, and a library of patents, it is a very hard market to enter. As a result, Synology must be simply re-branding drives. Labeling drives as a “Dell”, “NetApp”, “HPE”, or other big vendor drive has been going on for years (decades?) on both the hard drive and SSD sides of storage.
[…]
Let us just call this what it is. It is a grab for extra margin dollars. The challenge is that it is bad for Synology’s customers. For example, the Synology Plus series only scales to 16TB currently with the HAT3310-16T. Synology’s enterprise series scales to 20TB. WD Red Pro drives are already pushing 26TB.
[…]
When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US.
[…]
Additionally, there can also be concerns about drive availability in the long-term. If your NAS is vendor-locked to only use Synology drives, then as owner of that NAS you are fully dependent upon Synology’s survival as a company and that they would continue manufacturing drives in the capacity points that you want.
Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its “Plus” tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.
“Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems,” a Synology representative told Ars by email. “Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues.”
[…]
As previously noted by the German press release, Synology Plus models purchased prior to the 2025 series will continue to support third-party drives at their current level.
I’ve been a very happy Synology customer for over 15 years, but this piece of news (which echoes the Western Digital fracas from a couple of years ago) makes me wonder if I will keep recommending them.
I think my appreciation for a product crosses the rubicon into love when it regularly and repeatedly demonstrates one trait: respect for the user.
[…]
I’m not sure if I was more of a fan of Synology or Sonos, but suffice it to say, I was a superfan of both. I just replaced my original Synology last year, and I’m sad to say that the one I just got is likely to be my last.
He kind of walks this back after discussion on Accidental Tech Podcast, where it’s suggested that he should just consider the extra cost per drive as part of the total price. He has no problem paying a bit more for other premium products that he loves, so why should this be different? But I think it is different because:
At minimum, it seems like Synology is trying to hide the price increase rather than being forthright.
It seems like the purported benefits of Synology-branded drives are either very minimal or entirely fake. There are no specifics given, and existing third-party drives are still supported. Is this just FUD?
Money aside, the branded drives may not be available in the same capacities or with the same shipping speed. If you keep a bunch of blank drives on hand for other purposes, or if you want to repurpose an existing drive for use in the Synology, that will no longer be possible.
While I usually enjoy the discussion on the show, it felt a bit dismissive that his concerns were met with the sentiment that these companies have moved on to a different target audience that isn’t him. While that may be true in some instances, the examples he cites (Eero, Sonos, and Synology) aren’t really making big shifts.
[…]
I found Synology’s move away from third-party drive support equally disheartening as this feels like a “fix” for a problem most people never encountered. Even if Synology is going more towards the enterprise market, no one is cross-shopping a 2-bay compact NAS with a massive rack-mount unit. In my time in higher education IT where every dollar matters, I’ve also found that the various DS-21X models were great for one-off installations and we could use any of the extra drives we had on-hand (I ran a personal DS-216+II with a run-of-the-mill Seagate drive I pulled from a dead enclosure for way longer than I probably should’ve, but it was fine). While there might be some instances where having fully-supported equipment makes sense, hard drives are such an established technology that the concerns of compatibility feel a bit manufactured. At the very least, offer an advanced mode to run things in an unsupported manner for enthusiasts.
See also: Mac Power Users.
Previously:
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I recently discovered that my 8 bay (4x10TB, 4x12TB) raid was set up with only one redundancy disk, rather than two, as I remembered from years ago. And for whatever reason, Synology’s Linux raid tool is modified to disable volume shrinking (someone from Reddit found the diff in the GPL tarballs). So I am likely to eventually replace EVERYTHING; I need a new NAS device to host new drives, so I can transfer the old data from the current system to the new. 20TB are still expensive, but we’re coming down in price until recently.
But what alternative is there to Synology? There is Qnap, which I looked many years ago and disliked their over all UI/UX; running my own and servicing it would require a lot of patience I no longer have with computers and Linux, so that’s not realistic. So what other alternatives are there? I think the situation is dire, and Synology is taking advantage of this fact.
I have been using Synology devices for almost as long as the company has existed. I've regularly bought new ones. I could not have been happier with Synology. These are the most reliable tech devices I've ever used. In almost twenty years of constant usage of multiple devices, I've never had one fail or lose data.
I will not buy another one for two reasons:
1. I want a variety of drive vendors in my NAS. I do not want every drive to be the same, because I do not want multiple drives to die at once if they have a manufacturing defect.
2. When a drive dies, I physically walk into a store, buy a replacement, and have the Synology start repairing its array twenty minutes later. I can't do that with proprietary drives.
For me, the solution is simple: I'm going with Unraid.
