Synology Reverses Ban on Third-Party Hard Drives
Hilbert Hagedoorn (via Hacker News):
Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives. The policy, introduced earlier this year, made third-party HDDs from brands like Seagate and WD practically unusable in newer models such as the DS925+, DS1825+, and DS425+. That change didn’t go over well. Users immediately criticised Synology for trying to lock them into buying its much more expensive drives. Many simply refused to upgrade, and reviewers called out the move as greedy and shortsighted. According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced.
Now, with the release of DSM 7.3, Synology has quietly walked the policy back. Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs can once again be used without triggering warning messages or reduced functionality. Drives from Seagate, WD, and others will work exactly as they did before—complete with full monitoring, alerts, and storage features.
The change of direction was revealed in a Synology press release announcing DiskStation Manager 7.3, the OS that runs the company’s Plus line of NAS hardware.
This is great news for Mac users who felt betrayed by Synology’s previous announcement. However, as Linder also points out it does not change the fact that the same “Plus” series of 2025 NAS hardware does not include hardware-accelerated transcoding of H.264 and HEVC video, which previous models supported.
I’m happy that sanity prevailed, although not in time to prevent me from getting a second (non-Synology) NAS–which I suspect is what many serious customers went out and did, if only to test the waters.
This was an amazingly bad own goal, especially it being absurdly obvious that their target audience would be knowledgeable enough to see through a lock-in strategy[…]
Previously:
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The phrasing in the release notes is ominous:
"Synology is currently collaborating closely with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate the testing and verification of additional storage drives, and will announce more updates as soon as possible. In the meantime, 25 model year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J series running DSM 7.3 will support the installation and storage pool creation of non-validated third-party drives."
It sounds like they are enabling support for non-validated third-party drives only until more third-party drives are officially verified.
I followed the link to Brad Linder's article and I think it's worth saying explicitly: the lack of transcoding is also a software choice! I thought it would be a hardware limitation, but no: they removed the kernel graphics driver for that.
The press release is corpo-speak garbage:
- No apology.
- No announcement that the managers behind the initial decision were fired.
- No phrasing that it's a complete policy reversal.
No admission of fault. No act of contrition. No reversal. They're still dead.
TrueNAS all the things.
This ban was a gift to competitors like Ubiquiti, who are introducing new "any drive" NASs. That potential loss of revenue is what’s driving this.
This was a complete screw-the-customer move from Synology and I hope users don’t go back to them.
Anything they're foolish enough to implement once, they'll implement again down the road. This is good news, but not because anyone should be investing in a Synology NAS ever again.
