by motiejus on 4/19/25, 6:48 AM with 403 comments
by Renaud on 4/22/25, 5:52 AM
The killer feature for me is the app ecosystem. I have a very old 8-bay Synology NAS and have it setup in just a few clicks to backup my dropbox, my MS365 accounts, my Google business accounts, do redundant backup to external drive, backup important folders to cloud, and it was also doing automated torrent downloads of TV series.
These apps, and more (like family photos, video server, etc), make the NAS a true hub for everything data-related, not just for storing local files.
I can understand Synology going this way, it puts more money in their pocket, and as a customer in professional environment, I'm ok to pay a premium for their approved drives if it gives me an additional level of warranty and (perceived) safety.
But enforcing this accross models used by home or soho users is dumb and will affect the good will of so many like me, who both used to buy Synology for home and were also recommending/purchasing the brand at work.
This is a tech product, don't destroy your tech fanbase.
I would rather Synology kept a list of drives to avoid based on user experience, and offer their Synology-specific drives with a generous warranty for pro environments. Hel, I would be ok with sharing stats about drive performance so they could build a useful database for all.
They way they reduce the performance of their system to penalise non-synology rebranded drives is bascially a slap in the face of their customers. Make it a setting and let the user choose to use the NAS their bought to its full capabilities.
by dostick on 4/19/25, 9:52 AM
Most modern, especially software companies, choose not to fix relatively small but critical problems, yet they actively employ sometimes hundreds of customer support yes-people whose job seems to be defusing customer complaints. Nothing is ever fixed anymore.
by jjcob on 4/22/25, 7:57 AM
So lots of customers thought they were buying a drive that's perfect for NAS, only to discover that the drives were completely unsuitable and took days to restore, or failed alltogether. Synology had to release updates to their software to deal with the fake NAS drives, and their support was probably not happy to deal with all the angry customers who thought the problem was with Synology, and not Western Digital for selling fake NAS drives.
If you buy a drive from Synology, you know it will work, and won't secretly be a cheaper drive that's sold as NAS compatible even though it is absolutely unsuitable for NAS.
by PeterStuer on 4/19/25, 9:58 AM
by kotaKat on 4/19/25, 11:39 AM
It was simple, it just worked, and I didn't have to think about it.
* TB SDDS - a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three 'types' of SDDS I and a colleague discovered - "Type A" power management IC failures, "Type B" unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and "Type C" failed batteries. Type B units' SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.
by TabTwo on 4/22/25, 8:26 AM
I don't think this will work the way Synology imagines it.
by npunt on 4/22/25, 8:06 AM
Basically, Synology drives are not only more expensive, they're also statistically speaking less reliable when building a RAID with them, negating the very purpose of the product. What a dumb move.
by Shank on 4/22/25, 11:07 AM
Synology’s whole business model (arguably QNAP’s too) depends on you wanting more drive bays than 2 and wanting to host apps and similar services. The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier.
But the fundamental suggestion I make is to consider a NAS a storage-only product. If you push it to be an app and VM server too, you’re dependent on these relatively closed ecosystems and subject to the whims of the ecosystem owner. Synology choosing to lock out drives is just one example. Their poor encryption support (arbitrary limitations on file filenames or strange full-disk encryption choices) is another. If you dive into any system like Synology long enough, you’ll find warts that ultimately you wouldn’t face if you just used more specialized software than what the NAS world provides.
by jbverschoor on 4/22/25, 11:31 AM
Investors want bigger returns. They know they will not get away at this point by selling a monthly license. A large percentage would not buy anymore.
What other options do you have for recurring revenue? Cloud storage, but I don't think that's a great success.
And then... yes, harddisks. They are consumable devices with a limited lifespan. Label them as your own and charge a hefty fee.
The disks in a (larger) NAS setup are more than what the NAS costs. They want a piece of that pie by limitting your options.
No more syno for me in the future
by mgsouth on 4/19/25, 5:46 PM
However...
Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.
[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)
by miek on 4/22/25, 12:11 PM
It starts with "Synology's storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model." As a long-time user, all of this collectively moves Synology from "highly recommended" to "avoid."
by crazygringo on 4/22/25, 12:57 PM
It sounds like only certain features will be unavailable for non-Synology drives:
> Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled.
It sounds like you can still use non-Synology drives just fine, but not do certain advanced things with them?
So why is this being called "locking"? I use Synology at home just as very basic RAID. Am I correct that this wouldn't affect me at all?
And are there any reasons why this is justifiable (e.g. hard drive manufacturers lying about health information) or is it just a cash grab?
by trumpeta on 4/22/25, 6:49 AM
I'm wondering if anybody has any better recommendations given the requirement of being able to add storage capacity without having to completely recreate the FS.
by bob1029 on 4/19/25, 8:09 AM
I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.
Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.
by romanhn on 4/22/25, 5:13 AM
by m4r1k on 4/22/25, 8:57 AM
by valunord on 4/22/25, 8:28 AM
Some of us are using that with great success to eliminate the locking situation.
by emmelaich on 4/22/25, 5:59 AM
They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.
by niuzeta on 4/22/25, 6:55 AM
The problem is - I've formatted my drives with SHR(Synology Hybrid RAID - essentially another exclusive lock-in) and this would mean a rather painful transition to the new drive, since this now involves getting a whole new drives to format and move data to, rather than a simple lift-and-drop.
Ugh.
by codecraze on 4/19/25, 3:06 PM
Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.
by nichos on 4/19/25, 3:20 PM
All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.
by yupyupyups on 4/22/25, 1:14 PM
They could've even sold their own branded drives on the side and explained why they are objectively better, but still let customers choose.
by asdswe on 4/22/25, 9:27 AM
by bhouston on 4/22/25, 11:57 AM
by system2 on 4/22/25, 6:58 AM
That’s why I’m hoping Synology rethinks its position. Swapping out trusted, validated drives for unknowns introduces risk we’d rather avoid, especially since most of our client setups now run on SSDs. If compatibility starts breaking, that’s a serious operational concern.
by NKosmatos on 4/22/25, 1:11 PM
I hope someone high ranking from Synology reads all the comments from this post (and many others from https://mariushosting.com ) and takes the correct decisions. Please don’t let Synology become like the other greedy companies out there.
by sylens on 4/22/25, 4:28 PM
Sometimes I brush up against its limitations and its annoying to me; other times I like the convenience it provides (Cloud Sync, Hyper Backup). Even before this announcement, I think that when this thing bites the dust, I would likely build something myself and run Unraid or TrueNAS.
IMO what they really needed to do was improve the QuickConnect service to function similar to Cloudflare Zero Access/Tunnels, or integrate better with that. That's really the missing link in turning your NAS into a true self hosted service that can compete with big tech cloud services, in that you won't expose your home IP and won't need to fiddle around with a reverse proxy yourself.
by bitwize on 4/22/25, 4:13 PM
Any asshole thing a company does, provided they remain solvent enough to stick to their guns for enough time, becomes an accepted industry practice. BonziBuddy generated outrage back in the day because it was spyware. Now Microsoft builds BonziBuddy tech right into Windows, and people -- professional devs, even -- are like "Yeah, I don't understand why anyone would want the hassle of desktop Linux when there's WSL2."
by kyrofa on 4/22/25, 5:01 AM
In a way this is a valid point, but it also feels a bit silly. Do people really make use of devices like this and then try to overnight a drive when something fails? You're building an array-- you're designing for failure-- but then you don't plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.
by ziml77 on 4/19/25, 4:56 PM
by dmoy on 4/22/25, 5:01 AM
For the same hardware cost I got a random mATX box that can hold 2.5x more hard drives, a much much beefier CPU, 10x the RAM, and an nvme. And yea it took an hour to set up trueNAS in a docker image, but w/e.
Same exact hard drives working perfectly fine in fedora. If it weren't for hard drive locking I'd have stuck with the Synology box out of laziness.
by benoau on 4/19/25, 6:59 AM
The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I've previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I'll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardware options that exist for NAS.
by GuestFAUniverse on 4/22/25, 7:23 AM
by zigmig on 4/22/25, 7:51 AM
AdGuard Home (DNS filtering)
Scrypted (bridging CCTV to Apple Home)
Jellyfin (media streaming)
Immich (photos)
WireGuard (secure VPN)
The 2TB SSD is handling everything pretty well, but I’ve got a 2.5" SSD slot left unused. Thinking about adding a second SSD for either storage or backups, or maybe caching for media.
Any cool apps or tools people would recommend for setups like this? Also, curious about how others are using that extra SSD space in a home lab/NAS setup.
by poulpy123 on 4/22/25, 11:24 AM
by aborsy on 4/19/25, 2:04 PM
If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system.
I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.
by Gazwad on 4/23/25, 8:03 PM
Read about this BS and thought it's bound to end with Synology branded drives costing much more than other brands as people won't have the choice. QNAP took my order instead.
by hkchad on 4/22/25, 7:23 PM
by aucisson_masque on 4/22/25, 7:44 AM
People aren't stupid, they know that yet they do it.
I believe Amazon became so popular because it treated its customer fairly well until recently, now that they are in extremely dominant position.
But Synology is far from it.
by 7bit on 4/22/25, 6:34 AM
by donatj on 4/22/25, 1:12 PM
I use my server for everything you'd use NAS Apps for. I have an aging Seagate NAS and had been eyeing Synology but this gives me pause.
by HackerThemAll on 4/22/25, 4:53 PM
by palmeida on 4/22/25, 10:07 AM
by nodesocket on 4/19/25, 7:20 AM
by _spduchamp on 4/22/25, 12:54 PM
Seems like a good setup.
by darkwater on 4/22/25, 8:39 AM
by bayindirh on 4/22/25, 7:33 AM
by ksec on 4/19/25, 2:16 PM
by AndrewDucker on 4/19/25, 12:23 PM
Assuming I want 4 drives and something that can transcode multiple files in real time.
by j45 on 4/22/25, 5:58 AM
I’d add that mandatory drives when they aren’t the experts in it making drives a bad move.
Maybe other manufacturers are the way.
by jwr on 4/22/25, 7:30 AM
The locking-down is disappointing and unnecesary. Sure, give me the option of using "certified" drives, but don't take away the option of using any drive I have.
by 404NotBoring on 4/22/25, 7:32 AM
by PrimalNaCl on 4/25/25, 9:19 PM
I hope they implode and some even more evil and incompetent predatory corp consumes them and guts what's left of their brand name. The only time I'd wish the Broadcom treatment on a company. Synology deserve it.
by jorvi on 4/22/25, 10:31 AM
Their answer to your drives no longer mounting is "connect them to a PC, pull the files and reformat". Where you are supposed to intermediate 20TB of data is left up to the customer to deal with.
Fuck Synology.
by badmonster on 4/22/25, 7:12 AM
by rufugee on 4/22/25, 1:05 PM
Both pools have been very reliable so far. But if they continue down this path, I'll seek a different solution.
by senectus1 on 4/22/25, 5:40 AM
I'm likely to go down the BYO NAS path going forward. Just a stupid customer punishing policy. A real slap in the face.
I bought a N100 based device from AliExpress that supports two drives for my backup server. its a cracker and runs debian wonderfully. Very smooth and responsive. runs quietly and transfers data fairly quickly.
by itsanaccount on 4/22/25, 11:59 AM
I don't know what sect of leadership (MBAs?) sees continual enshittification as the strategy but I'll fight this economic warfare forever.
by doanchu on 4/22/25, 7:50 AM
by locusm on 4/22/25, 6:41 AM
by rpcope1 on 4/22/25, 4:50 AM
by atoav on 4/22/25, 8:40 AM
It is very hard to get of that list and I will warn everybody wbo asks me about tech advice (so literally everybody in my vicinity) about vendors on that list. Good luck Synology.
by fennecfoxy on 4/23/25, 3:40 PM
It's all profits, at the end of the day. Good for the shareholders!