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Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

652 pointsposted 7 days ago

413 Comments

Renaud

4 days ago

Synology isn't about the NAS hardware and OS. Once setup, it doesn't really matter as long as your config is reliable and fast, so there are many competitive options to move to.

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.

sersi

4 days ago

On the other had, they have also slowly destroyed their app ecosystem. The photo solution is much worse than it used to be both in terms of features and the now removed support for media codecs. Video station has pretty much been dead for years.

At this point, I'm not that convinced that there's anything that synology offers that isn't handled much better by an app running on docker. This wasn't true 10 years ago.

nolok

4 days ago

The photo apps is great because their photo backup app on android is great, and the only thing that works as well as google photo to ensure all your photo and videos are saved, untouched, no duplicate, no missed media.

That's it. For the actual viewing / sorting / album you need something like immich or photoprism, the photos app actually sucks.

Video station has been removed in the latest minor update, not even a major update, they just took it out no warning no replacement. But then again it was not that good, jellyfin is the way to go for me.

Their crown jewels are active backup, hyper backup and synology office. That's where they own their space.

qsi

4 days ago

This is sad... I've been using Synology for a very long time (over 15 years?) and have been pretty happy with my experience. The one time I needed their tech support also left me with a good impression...

This however is a deal breaker for me as I'd hate to be locked in to their drives for all the reasons in TFA but also as a matter of principle.

I hope Synology will reconsider!

InsideOutSanta

4 days ago

Yeah, same. I have had three Synology boxes over the last 20 or so years, and they have been super reliable, easy to use, and easy to update. The last one is important to me because I would, over time, add more disks and, when the drive bays were all full, replace smaller disks with larger ones.

The first one I bought is still in service at my parents' place, silently and reliably backing up their cloud files and laptops.

I was fully expecting to buy more in the future, but this is a dealbreaker. If a disk goes bad, I want to go to the local store, pick one up, and have the problem fixed half an hour later. I do not want to figure out where I can get approved disks, what sizes are available, how long it will take to ship them, etc.

I've recently installed Unraid on an old PC, and the experience has been surprisingly good. It's not as nice as a Synology, but it's not difficult, either. It's just a bit more work. I've also heard that HexOS plans to support heterogeneous disks, and I plan to check it out once that is available.

So that's the direction I'll be going in instead.

timcobb

4 days ago

> I have had three Synology boxes over the last 20 or so years

Sounds like this is the problem with Synology... How are they going to make money when their products are so good!

horsawlarway

4 days ago

Honestly, seems like they got roughly one hardware sale to him every 6 years or so.

Which is along the same trend line I'm seeing for my purchases.

That's pretty solid for hardware sales.

My guess is that they've over invested in things like their "drive" office software suite, and don't know how to monetize it or recoup costs.

I like Synology, but locking me to their drives is a hard "no thanks" from me.

Next NAS won't be from them if that's their play...

timcobb

4 days ago

Every six years is enough for apple and other companies who have other sources of revenue and have staked out this high quality niche. But androids, as an example, are more of an average 3 year lifespan if I'm not mistaken, which is closer to what Synology would probably want to achieve but cannot.

close04

4 days ago

The comparison to phones is shaky here. Phones bring substantial performance and feature improvements over 6 years, HW and SW. Synology on the other hand still uses a 5-6 year old CPU and 1Gbps connectivity in their home "plus" line. The OS development is mostly security updates with substantial feature releases few and far between. I expect this from a NAS but it's not at all comparable to a phone.

Forcing their drives is a tax on top of an already existing tax. Synology already charges a premium for lower end specs than the competition. If that's not enough to compensate for the longer upgrade cycles, and they want a hand in every cookie jar it's just going to be a hard pass for me.

I upgraded my Synology box every few years and this is exactly the time I was looking to go to the next model. And I'd pull the trigger and buy a current model before they implement the policy but the problem is now I don't trust that they won't retroactively issue an update that cripples existing models somehow. QNAP or the many alternative HW manufacturers that support an arbitrary OS are starting to be that much more attractive.

horsawlarway

4 days ago

I don't think mobile is the right comparison. Those ecosystems are explicitly operating on the assumption that they will profit through the software ecosystem (app store revenue).

Synology seems to have gone entirely the other direction here. Most of their software is given away for free, but the hardware is being monetized.

Additionally - the hardware has different operating constraints. I think the big deal for Synology is that they probably assumed that storage need growth would equate to sales growth.

EX - Synology may have assumed that if I need to store 1TB in 2010, and 5TB in 2015, that would equate to me buying additional NAS hardware.

But often, HDD size increases mean that I can keep the same number of bays and just bump drive size.

Which... is great for me as a user, but bad for Synology (this almost single handedly explains this move, as an aside - I just think it's a bad play).

---

I'd rather they just charged for the software products they're blowing all their money on, or directly tie upgrades to the software products to upgrading hardware.

apetrovic

4 days ago

What are "competitive options"? It's a genuine question. Before Synology, I had some DIY server in a Fractal Design case, and noise and, to be honest, bulk were a problem. Also, maintenance of the server wasn't funny.

I switched to Synology about six years ago (918+). The box is small, quiet, and easy to put in the rack together with the network gear. I started with 4TB drives, gradually switched to 8TB over time (drive by drive). I don't use much of their apps (mostly download station, backup, and their version of Docker to run Syncthing, plus Tailscale). But the box acts like an appliance - I basically don't need to maintain it at all; it just works.

I don't like all this stuff with vendor lock-in, so when the time comes for replacing the box, what are alternatives on par with the experience and quality I currently have with Synology?

sersi

4 days ago

The problem is that a lot of competitors don't necessarily have great software. For example QNAP on the hardware side is supposed to be good, you have more bang for the bucks in term of performance but they had several major CVEs that really call into question their security practices. I have a friend who is running Unraid on QNAP and is happy though.

tiew9Vii

4 days ago

The new Chinese NAS's due to hit the market look extremely promising.

- Minisforum N5 Pro NAS

- AOOSTAR WTR MAX

Good compute power as they know users will be running Docker and other services on them, using the NAS as a mini server.

OS agnostic allowing users to install TrueNas, Unraid, favourite Linus distro of choice.

The Minisforum and AOOSTAR look to be adding all the features power users and enthusiasts are asking for.

If you just want a NAS as a NAS and nothing else, the new Ubiquiti NAS looks great value as well.

adam_th

4 days ago

Unraid is brilliant if you're interested in BYO hardware. It can be setup with mix and match drives, supports docker and virtual machines. Realistically it's a bit more work than Synology to get up and running, but once it is, the only thing you really need to do is update the software from time to time

j45

4 days ago

I also got burned by Western Digital's scandal of selling WD Red drives that really weren't that got them caught in a class action lawsuit. Can't see myself buying them again.

kxrm

4 days ago

I’ve been running a couple of Synology DS cages for over five years, with no issues.

shantara

4 days ago

I’m running two Synology NAS devices, and I wouldn’t consider their app ecosystem to be their strong point. I started by trying to take advantage of the built-in Synology apps when I first got my NAS, but quickly realized how limited they are. Their bi-directional synchronization solution is so slow and archaic compared Syncthing! And the same is true for most of their software offerings. At this point, I’m happy with having Docker support, and don’t particularly care about the rest of their apps.

I still appreciate how easy and maintenance-free was their implementation of the core NAS functionality. I do have a Linux desktop for experiments and playing around with, but I prefer to have all of my actually important data to be on a separate rock solid device. Previously, Synology fulfilled this role and was worth paying for, but if this policy goes live, I wouldn’t consider them fro my next NAS.

InsideOutSanta

4 days ago

I would count supported third-party apps like SyncThing as part of the app ecosystem. You can add the SynoCommunity repository to your Synology and install SyncThing directly, which is pretty nice.

It's a bit more convenient than how other solutions, like Unraid, handle this, where you manually configure a Docker container.

shantara

4 days ago

That’s true, but it’s only relevant for the initial setup. I wouldn’t think twice about giving up something so minor compared with the sheer anticompetitive nature of Synology locking down the devices.

op00to

4 days ago

The issue is QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level compared to Synology (also with Apps).

The number of times I’ve broken things on QNAP systems doing what should be normal functionality, only to find out it’s because of some dumb implementation detail is over a dozen. Synology, maybe 1-2.

Roughly the same number of systems/time in use too.

transpute

4 days ago

> QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level

Some QNAP devices can be coaxed into running Debian.

https://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Debian_Installation_On_QNAP

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/QNAP

m000

4 days ago

Mind that these are ancient models that are dog slow for anything more than serving files. Not that they are fast in serving files...

I did the procedure on my (now 15yo) TS-410, mostly because the vendored Samba is not compatible with Windows 11 (I had turned-off all secondary services years ago). It took a few days to backup around 8TB of data to external drives. And AROUND 2 WEEKS to restore them (USB2 CPU overhead + RAID5 writes == SLOOOOOW).

Even to get the time down to 2 weeks, I really had to experiment with different modes of copying. My final setup was HDD <-USB3-> RPi4 <-GbE-> TS-410. This relieved TS-410 CPU from the overhead of running the USB stack. I also had to use rsync daemon on TS-410 to avoid the overhead of running rsync over SSH.

4 days ago

Rare more means a unique combination of common hardware products, where other manufacturers don't put all of the features into one piece of hardware like qnap or others might, to keep people buying more devices to get what they want, or buy a device that is way too overkill for their needs.

Scene_Cast2

4 days ago

"Rare" in this case is referring to a unique offering, not to the availability of that particular part.

As I understand, migrating to other hardware wouldn't be an issue if availability becomes an issue.

lazide

4 days ago

I ended up doing that with a larger QNAP I had. It did have some odd bugs that I needed to track down, but otherwise was a good (albeit overly expensive) NAS. I used zfs.

j45

4 days ago

Storage should be an appliance, or you're the appliance repair man always on call.

nehal3m

4 days ago

Sure, but don't you lose the app ecosystem then?

transpute

4 days ago

Hacker flexibility or consumer take-it-or-leave-it, pick one.

Debian offers flexibility and control, at the cost of time and effort. PhotoSync mobile apps will reliably sync mobile devices with NAS over standard protocols, including SSH/SFTP. A few mobile apps do work with self-hosted WebDAV and CalDAV. XPenology attempts to support Synology apps on standard Linux, without excluding standard Debian packages.

tankenmate

4 days ago

Debian's software repo is about 500 times bigger than Synology's.

Tepix

4 days ago

FWIW, i haven't had any real issues with QNAP since 10 years or so, but i'm pretty much only using basic features.

Once i added a 4th drive to a RAID 5 set and i was impressed that it performed the operation on-line. Neat.

Oh, there was one issue: A while ago my Timemachine backups were unreliable, but i haven't had that issue since three years or so.

j45

4 days ago

It's news to me, maybe I haven't touched mine much out of leaving it absolutely stock.

Were you installing things manually or just using the app store?

freeAgent

4 days ago

As far as lists of drives to avoid, Synology could certainly do that, but we also already have Backblaze’s reports on their own failure rates. Synology also uses multiple vendors to produce “Synology” branded drives, so as the article states this may also lead to confusion about which Synology branded drives are “good” vs. “bad” in the future, even with seemingly identical specs.

op00to

4 days ago

The idea is not so much about which drives fail or whatever. It’s more that certain consumer drives have firmwares that don’t work well with NAS workloads. Long timeouts could be treated as a failed drive rather than a transient error by a desktop drive, for example.

4 days ago

How would it be a great way to get sued?

Backblaze publishes a great report.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...

msh

4 days ago

qnap seems to have a similar app ecosystem, or is there a quality difference? I have only used QNAP NAS devices so I dont know.

j45

4 days ago

QNAP's ecosystem is decent. There is a third party store by a former QNAP employee that has a lot more selection in it.

Getting a lower powered intel celeron QNAP nas basically lets you run anything you want software or app wise, including docker that just works instead of hunting for ARM64 binaries for anything that is not available off the shelf.

doanchu

4 days ago

TrueNAS can do all those stuff for you.

j1elo

7 days ago

5% of my 500 GB is 25 GB, which is already a lot of space but understandable. Not many things would fit in there nowadays.

But 5% of a 5 TB volume is 250 GB, that's the size of my whole system disk! Probably not so understandable by the lay person.

kbolino

7 days ago

This is partly why SSDs just lie nowadays and tell you they only have 75-90% of the capacity that is actually built into them. You can't directly access that excess capacity but the drive controller can when it needs to (primarily to extend the life of the drive).

Some filesystems do stake out a reservation but I don't think any claim one as large as 5% (not counting the effect of fixed-size reservations on very small volumes). Maybe they ought to, as a way of managing expectations better.

For people who used computers when the disks were a lot smaller, or who primarily deal in files much much smaller than the volumes they're stored on, the absolute size of a percentage reservation can seem quite large. And, in certain cases, for certain workloads, the absolute size may actually be more important than the relative size.

But most file systems are designed for general use and, across a variety of different workloads, spare capacity and the impact of (not) keeping it open is more about relative than absolute sizes. Besides fragmentation, there's also bookkeeping issues, like adding one more file to a directory cascading into a complete rearrangement of the internal data structures.

fc417fc802

4 days ago

> sare capacity and the impact of (not) keeping it open is more about relative than absolute sizes

I don't think this is correct. At least btrfs works with slabs in the 1 GB range IIRC.

One of my current filesystmes is upwards of 20 TB. Reserving 5% of that would mean reserving 1 TB. I'll likely double it in the near future, at which point it would mean reserving 2 TB. At least for my use case those numbers are completely absurd.

kbolino

4 days ago

We're not talking about optical discs or backup tapes which usually get written in full in a single session. Hard drive storage in general use is constantly changing.

As such, fragmentation is always there; absolute disk sizes don't change the propensity for typical workloads to produce fragmentation. A modern file system is not merely a bucket of files, it is a database that manages directories, metadata, files, and free space. If you mix small and large directories, small and large files, creation and deletion of files, appending to or truncating from existing files, etc., you will get fragmentation. When you get close to full, everything gets slower. Files written early in the volume's life and which haven't been altered may remain fast to access, but creating new files will be slower, and reading those files afterward will be slower too. Large directories follow the same rules as larger files, they can easily get fragmented (or, if they must be kept compact, then there will be time spent on defragmentation). If your free space is spread across the volume in small chunks, and at 95% full it almost certainly will be, then the fact that the sum of it is 1 TB confers no benefit by dint of absolute size.

Even if you had SSDs accessed with NVMe, fragmentation would still be an issue, since the file system must still store lists or trees of all the fragments, and accessing those data structures still takes more time as they grow. But most NAS setups are still using conventional spinning-platter hard drives, where the effects of fragmentation are massively amplified. A 7200 RPM drive takes 8.33 ms to complete one rotation. No improvements in technology have any effect on this number (though there used to be faster-spinning drives on the market). The denser storage of modern drives improves throughput when reading sequential data, but not random seek times. Fragmentation increases the frequency of random seeks relative to sequential access. Capacity issues tend to manifest as performance cliffs, whereby operations which used to take e.g. 5 ms suddenly take 500 or 5000. Everything can seem fine one day and then not the next, or fine on some operations but terrible on others.

Of course, you should be free to (ab)use the things you own as much as you wish. But make no mistake, 5% free is deep into abuse territory.

Also, as a bit of an aside, a 20 TB volume split into 1 GB slabs means there's 20,000 slabs. That's about the same as the number of 512-byte sectors in a 10 MB hard drive, which was the size of the first commercially available consumer hard drive for the IBM PC in the late 1980s. That's just a coincidence of course, but I find it funny that the numbers are so close.

Now, I assume the slabs are allocated from the start of the volume forward, which means external slab fragmentation is nonexistent (unless slabs can also be freed). But unless you plan to create no more than 20,000 files, each exactly 1 GB in size, in the root directory only, and never change anything on the volume ever again, then internal slab fragmentation will occur all the same.

fc417fc802

3 days ago

Yes thank you I am aware of what fragmentation is.

There are two sorts of fragmentation that can occur with btrfs. Free space and file data. File data is significantly more difficult to deal with but it "only" degrades read performance. It's honestly a pretty big weakness of btrfs. You can't realistically defragment file data if you have a lot of deduplication going on because (at least last I checked) the tooling breaks the deduplication.

> If your free space is spread across the volume in small chunks, and at 95% full it almost certainly will be

Only if you failed to perform basic maintenance. Free space fragmentation is a non-issue as long as you run the relevant tooling when necessary. Chunks get compacted when you rebalance.

Where it gets dicey is that the btrfs tooling is pretty bad at handling the situation where you have a small absolute number of chunks available. Even if you theoretically have enough chunks to play musical chairs and perform a rebalance the tooling will happily back itself into a corner through a series of utterly idiotic decisions. I've been bitten by this before but in my experience it doesn't happen until you're somewhere under 100 GB of remaining space regardless of the total filesystem size.

kbolino

3 days ago

If compaction (= defragmentation) runs continuously or near-continuously, it results in write amplification of 2x or more. For a home/small-office NAS (the topic at hand) that's also lightly used with a read-heavy workload, it should be fine to rely on compaction to keep things running smoothly, since you won't need it to run that often and you have cycles and IOPS to spare.

If, under those conditions, 100 GB has proven to be enough for a lot of users, then it might make sense to add more flexible alarms. However, this workload is not universal, and setting such a low limit (0.5% of 20 TB) in general will not reflect the diverse demands that different people put on their storage.

kimixa

4 days ago

Also Synology use btrfs, a copy-on-write filesystem - that means there are operations that you might not expect that require allocation of new blocks - like any write, even if overwriting an existing file's data.

And "unexpected" failure paths like that are often poorly tested in apps.

leptons

4 days ago

No matter how many TB of online HD storage I have, hard disks are just a temporary buffer for my tape drives.

buserror

4 days ago

At home I have a 48xLTO5 changer with 4 drives (I picked for a song a while back! I actually don't need it but heck, it has a ROBOT ARM), and at work I'm currently provisioning a 96 LTO 9 tape drive dual-rack. With 640 tapes available :-)

I'm a STRONG believer in tapes!

Even LTO 5 gives you a very cheap 1.5TB of clean, pretty much bulletproof storage.. You can pick a drive (with a SAS HBA card) for less than $200, there is zero driver issue (SCSI, baby); the linux tape changer code is stable since 1997 (with a port to VMS!).

Tape FTW :-)

leptons

3 days ago

I don't have one but I'd definitely take a tape changer if it weren't too expensive. It would be amazing to have 72TB of storage just waiting to be filled, without needing to go out into my garage to load a tape up.

4 days ago

Logical Block Addressing (LBA) by its very nature provides no hard guarantees about where the blocks are located. However, the convention that both sides (file systems and drive controllers) recognize is that runs of consecutive LBAs generally refer to physically contiguous regions of the underlying storage (and this is true for both conventional spinning-platter HDDs as well as most flash-based SSDs). The protocols that bridge the two sides (like ATA, SCSI, and NVMe) use LBA runs as the basic unit of accessing storage.

So while block remapping can occur, and the physical storage has limits on its contiguity (you'll eventually reach the end of a track on a platter or an erasable page in a flash chip), the optimal way to use the storage is to put related things together in a run of consecutive LBAs as much as possible.

4 days ago

It makes more sense but it's not true for the modern CoW filesystems that I'm familiar with. Those allocate free space in slabs that they write to sequentially.

kbolino

4 days ago

Also, CoW isn't some kind of magic. There are two meanings I can think of here:

A) When you modify a file, everything including the parts you didn't change is copied to a new location. I don't think this is how btrfs works.

B) Allocated storage is never overwritten, but modifying parts of a file won't copy the unchanged parts. A file's content is composed of a sequence (list or tree) of extents (contiguous, variable-length runs of 1 or more blocks) and if you change part of the file, you first create a new disconnected extent somewhere and write to that. Then, when you're done writing, the file's existing extent limits are resized so that the portion you changed is carved out, and finally the sequence of extents is set to {old part before your change}, {your change}, {old part after your change}. This leaves behind an orphaned extent, containing the old content of the part you changed, which is now free. From what evidence I can quickly gather, this is how btrfs works.

Compared to an ordinary file system, where changes that don't increase the size of a file are written directly to the original blocks, it should be fairly obvious that strategy (B) results in more fragmentation, since both appending to and simply modifying a file causes a new allocation, and the latter leaves a new hole behind.

While strategy (A) with contiguous allocation could eliminate internal (file) fragmentation, it would also be much more sensitive to external (free space) fragmentation, requiring lots of spare capacity and/or frequent defrag.

Either way, the use of CoW means you need more spare capacity, not less. It's designed to allow more work to be done in parallel, as fits modern hardware and software better, under the assumption that there's also ample amounts of extra space to work with. Denying it that extra space is going to make it suffer worse than a non-CoW file system would.

fc417fc802

3 days ago

Which is exactly why you periodically do maintenance to compact the free space. Thus it isn't an issue in practice unless you have a very specific workload in which case you should probably be using a specialized solution. (Although I've read that apparently you can even get a workload like postgres working reasonably well on zfs which surprises me.)

If things get to the point where there's over 1 TB of fragmented free space on a filesystem that is entirely the fault of the operator.

kbolino

3 days ago

What argument are you driving at here? The smaller the free space, the harder it is to run compaction. The larger the free space, the easier it is. There are some confounding forces in certain workloads, but the general principle stands.

"Your free space shouldn't be very fragmented when you have such large amounts free!" is exactly why you should keep large amounts free.

4 days ago

Yup. After having dealt with that, I err on the side of caution and don't even let it merge small files into inodes for space savings. I still love btrfs for the CoW, snapshots, and compression, but you really gotta give that metadata a wide berth.

magicalhippo

4 days ago

ZFS has a similar limitation.

It tries to mitigate this by reserving some space for metadata, to be used in emergencies, but apparently it's possible to exhaust it and get your filesystem into a read-only state.

There was some talk about increasing the reservations to prevent this but can't recall if changes were made.

jjcob

4 days ago

There is one argument for Synology doing this: There have been cases where hard drive companies mislead their customers. I personally fell victim to this when Western Digital started selling SMR drives as WD Red, without labelling them as SMR drives.

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.

franga2000

4 days ago

That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them

spease

4 days ago

> That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them

The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery.

Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tech friend to keep it within their budget.

Synology is seen as the premium choice in the consumer NAS argument, so vertically integrating and charging a premium to guarantee “it just works” is not unprecedented.

There are definitely other NAS options as well, if someone is willing to take on more responsibility for understanding the tech.

yurishimo

4 days ago

I don’t think anyone would care if Synology gave priority to their own drives. A checkbox during setup that says “Yes, I know I’m using these drives that have not been validated blah blah blah” would be plenty. That’s not what Synology did however and that’s the main reason everyone is pissed.

netruk44

4 days ago

Funny you mention that…

I have a DS1515+ which has an SSD cache function that uses a whitelisted set of known good drives that function well.

If you plug in a non whitelisted ssd and try to use it as a cache, it pops up a stern warning about potential data loss due to unsupported drives with a checkbox to acknowledge that you’re okay with the risk.

So…there’s really no excuse why they couldn’t have done this for regular drives.

spease

4 days ago

That assumes that the person setting up the NAS is the same person using it, which is not going to be the case for non-tech-savvy users.

Everyone will understand it costing more, fewer people will understand why the NAS ate their data without the warning it was supposed to provide, because cheap drives that didn’t support certain metrics were used.

If Synology wants to have there be only one way that the device behaves, they have to put constraints on the hardware.

brookst

4 days ago

But those people would call support when the array couldn’t rebuild. And many of them would blame Synology, and demand warranty replacement of the “defective” device, and generally cost money and stress.

As long as Synology is up front in the requirement and has a return policy for users who buy one and are surprised, I think they’re well within their rights to decide they’re tired of dealing with support costs from misbehaving drives.

As long as they don’t retroactively enforce this policy on older devices I don’t understand the emotionality here. Haven’t you ever found yourself stuck supporting software / systems / etc that customers were trying to cheap out on, making their problems yours?

kstrauser

4 days ago

It’s not that I don't understand. It’s that as an end user I don't give a shit.

Toyota might have great reasons for opening a chain of premium quality gas stations, but the second they required me to use them, I'd never buy another Toyota for as long as I lived.

I want to bring my own drives, just as I have since I bought my first DS-412+ 13 years ago.

numpad0

4 days ago

People are going to ignore that and leave bad reviews online, which will have compounding effects. SMR drives works in RAID until CMR buffer regions are depleted, and then RAID starts falling apart. This will undoubtedly create wrong impressions that Synology products, not the drives, are not trustworthy.

Melatonic

4 days ago

What if the device had a minimum benchmark feature that would test any new drive ? And fail the worst ones ?

numpad0

3 days ago

SMR drives work like SSD: writes are buffered to CMR zone, consolidated into an SMR track data, copied into onboard cache RAM and written to SMR zone. SMR tracks has sizes of 128MB or so, and can be written or erased in track-at-once manners by the head half-overwriting data like moving a broad whiteboard marker slowly outward on a pottery wheel, rather than giving each rings of data enough separation. This works because the heads has higher resolution in radial direction in reads than writes; the marker tip is broader than what the disk's eyes can see.

This copy operation is done either while the disk is idling, or forced by stop responding to read and write operations if CMR buffer zone is depleted and data has to be moved off. RAID softwares cannot handle the latter scenarios, and consider the disk faulty.

You can probably corner a disk into this depleted state to expose a drive being SMR based, but I don't know if that works reliably or if it's the right solution. This is roughly all I know on technical side of this problem anyway.

littlestymaar

4 days ago

> The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected

I see this kind of arguments “X had to do Y otherwise customers would complain” a lot every time a company does something shady and some contrarian wants to defend them, but it really isn't as smart as you think it is: the company doesn't care if people complain, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this kind of move either, because it raises a lot more complaints. Company only care if it affects their bottom line, that is if they can be liable in court, or if the problem is big enough to drive customers away. There's no way this issue would do any of those (at least not as much as what they are doing right now, by a very large margin).

It's just yet another case of an executive doing a shady move for short terms profits, there's no grand reasoning behind it.

brookst

4 days ago

Your absolute conviction is misplaced. Support is expensive to provide, especially on hardware that’s expensive to ship around.

This may be a bad move, and you’re certainly right that Synology expects to make more profit with this policy than without it, but it’s a more complex system than you understand. Irate customers calling support and review-bombing for their own mistakes are a real cost.

I don’t blame Synology for wanting to sell fewer units at higher prices to more professional customers. Hobbyists are man attractive market but, well, waves hands at the comments in this thread.

devilbunny

2 days ago

Synology is in that "prosumer" space, though, where maybe you don't really want to sell to hobbyists - but the bulk of your hobbyists in this space are tech-savvy and will recommend your products at work if you don't alienate them.

freeAgent

4 days ago

The thing is, that more professional market would never make the mistake of putting SMR drives in a RAID array anyway and they are also (I hope) good enough at doing their own research to filter out reviews from uneducated retail consumers. So, again, we’re left with trying to find a justification for this move other than Synology’s profits.

And when this issue happened with WD drives, I don’t remember a backlash against Synology at all. WD, on the other hand, deserved and received plenty of blame.

user

4 days ago

[deleted]

Melatonic

4 days ago

I see your argument here and this could also be solved by some type of somewhat difficult flag that Synology could implement.

Meaning that by default it could require a Synology drive that is at minimum going to work decently.

Want to mess around more and are more technical ? Make it a CLI command or something the average joe is going to be wary about. With a big warning message.

Personally I only like to buy very reliable enterprise class drives (probably much better than whatever Synology will officially sell) and this is my main concern.

moooo99

4 days ago

> The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery.

Is it though? Most (consumer) NAS systems are probably sold without the drives which are bough separately. When there is an issue with the drive and it breaks, I’m pretty sure most people technical enough to consider the need for a NAS would attribute that failure to the manufacturer of the drives, not to the manufacturer of the computer they put their drives into

brookst

4 days ago

I know a photographer who needs tech support for really anything, and who has bought drives and upgraded is NAS himself. I don’t think that’s unusual, but of course n=1.

user

4 days ago

[deleted]

freeAgent

4 days ago

Nobody blamed Synology when that WD SMR issue happened. Come on, let’s get real here. Locking the devices down so they only work with drives bearing Synology branding is about Synology’s profits.

formerly_proven

4 days ago

For a BYOD product it would be fine to add a blacklist of DM-SMR drives imho. Or have a big red banner and a taint flag.

But that's not what Synology did.

Also, if the image on the Synology page is accurate, they are relabeled Toshiba drives. Which doesn't really seem a good choice for SMB/SOHO NAS devices, because the Toshiba "Machine Gun" MGxx drives are the loudest drives on the market.

sersi

4 days ago

I had some 12TB WD ultrastar that I happily replaced with some Toshiba MG09ACA18TE. To my ears at least the toshiba sound signficantly more bearable than the ultrastar were (lower pitch so less disturbing). Due to living in a small apartment my NAS is in my living room so noise matters.

That said, I've since added an ssd and moved almost everything to the ssd (docker, the database and all apps) and it's much nicer in term of noise.

m000

4 days ago

TBF, the picture in TFA only shows rack-mounted Synology devices, where noise is not really a concern.

Synologoy SMB/SOHO NAS devices should not be affected by the drive lockdown (for now).

sokoloff

4 days ago

Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units.

I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement).

Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR).

I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.

Melatonic

4 days ago

So basically buy one of the older models now ?

Will new firmware updates to everything before this require the Synology branded drives ?

sokoloff

3 days ago

Seemingly not, at least not for the moment, based on the experiences of people migrating arrays [successfully] from older units and the massive backlash that would result if they trashed currently working arrays.

If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.

Heliosmaster

This was a huge controversy. But apparently selling SMR drives is profitable, so WD claims the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives, and all is well. They are still selling SMR drives in their WD Red line.

Edit: Here's a link to one of the many forum threads where people discovered the switch: https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228

fc417fc802

4 days ago

> the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives

That's half of it ... maybe? Last time I looked drives that offer host managed SMR still weren't available to regular consumers. In theory that plus a compatible filesystem would work flawlessly. In practice you can't even buy the relevant hardware.

toast0

4 days ago

> This was a huge controversy. But apparently selling SMR drives is profitable, so WD claims the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives, and all is well. They are still selling SMR drives in their WD Red line.

Well, SMR lets you store more stuff on the same platter (more or less); fewer platters reduces costs, etc.

WD's claims about it being a software problem would be more reasonable if they were providing guidance about what the software needs to do to perform well with these drives, and probably that would involve having information about the drive available to the OS/filesystem rather than hidden.

MortyWaves

4 days ago

For future reference which WD drives are actually suitable for NAS? I remember someone saying you need to look for a specific more expensive type.

m000

4 days ago

WD Red Plus -> CMR technnology, suitable for NAS

WD Red -> SMR technology, slightly cheaper, not suitable for NAS

kstrauser

4 days ago

…but still marketed for NAS users, alas.

m000

4 days ago

I should have been more specific: not suitable for RAID NAS

RAID and NAS used to go together when drive capacities were lower. E.g. I had a 9TB NAS with RAID5 at times when 8TB drives were >$500 a pop. These days, NAS does not necessarily imply having a RAID setup. I see a new "build your SFF/RPi NAS" article every week, and it rarely involves RAID.

This is because a NAS setup with a single high-capacity drive and an online backup subscription (e.g. Backblaze) is more cost-effective and perfectly adequate for a lot of users, who have no interest in playing the sysadmin. In such a setup, you just need a drive that can withstand continuous operation, and SMR should work fine.

kstrauser

4 days ago

That's an interesting point I hadn't considered. To me, NAS implies RAID. You might be right that this is no longer true.

kstrauser

4 days ago

Frankly, I haven’t bought a single WD since. I no longer trust them as a brand, and trust is critical for this class of things.

DHolzer

4 days ago

buying HDDs these days currently feels a little like navigating the dark web.

izacus

4 days ago

I heard its about EU CYA directive, which requires IoT companies to deploy security patches in firmware within X months of those patches being released.

wiether

3 days ago

Locking non-approved drives does absolutely nothing for your case though.

They can sell "guaranteed to work" drives for people like you who don't want to go through all the picking process, while letting other people the choice to put any drive they want.

kmacdough

4 days ago

This is an argument in favor of all anti-competitive walled garden moves. But we've seen time and again the degrading service and price gouging that ultimately comes. People have a right to use the things they own as they please. Companies don't have a right to protect their image that supersedes this basic human right of independence.

PeterStuer

7 days ago

I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.

joshstrange

7 days ago

Do you have a plan on what you’re going to move to?

I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays.

I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I could install whatever I wanted on. I’m just not interested in having to halfway deconstruct a tower to get at 1 hard drive. Hotswap bays are all I want to deal with now.

disambiguation

6 days ago

Not OP but TrueNAS is a good alternative - both the software and their all in one NAS builds.

I have an unraid on a usb stick somewhere in my rack, but overtime it started feeling limited, and when they began changing their license structure I decided it was time to switch, though I run it on a Dell r720xd instead of one of their builds (my only complaint is the fan noise - i think 730 and up are better in this regard)

Proxmox was also on my short list for hypervisors if you dont want TrueNAS.

chme

4 days ago

I also have a TrueNAS, but because of its limitations (read-only root file system), I came to the conclusion that, if I ever need to reinstall it, I would switch to Proxmox and install TrueNAS as one virtual client, next the other clients for my home lab.

I have found workarounds for the read-only root file system. But they aren't great. I have installed Gentoo with a prefix inside the home directory, which provides me with a working compiler and I can install and update packages. This sort of works.

For running services, I installed jailmaker, which starts a lxc debian, with docker-compose. But I am not so happy about that, because I would rather have an atomic system there. I couldn't figure out how to install Fedora CoreOS inside a lxc container, and if that is even possible. Maybe NixOS would be a another option.

But, as I said, for those services I would rather just run them in Proxmox and only use the TrueNAS for the NAS/ZFS management. That provides more flexibility and better system utilization.

GeertJohan

4 days ago

I use TrueNAS Scale as root OS and have it run a Linux VM, which is easily done via their 'Virtualization' feature. No need for Proxmox. Afaik it works a lot better to give zfs direct access to underlying hdds. TrueNAS also has an 'Apps' feature, which are basically glorified helm chart installs on k3s that TrueNAS installs for you. But I prefer more control so I have k8s on the Linux VM. Whats also great is that the k8s on the Linux VM can use the TrueNAS storage via democratic-csi.

https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi

chme

4 days ago

I was using Truecharts before k8s was deprecated.

4 days ago

I've been mostly happy with a Terrmaster DAS attached to a mini PC running UnRaid. The bays are hotswappable and overall it's been solid.

I say "mostly" happy because I almost returned it. The USB connection between mini PC and Terramaster would be fine for a few days and then during intense operations like parity checks would disconnect and look like parity error/disk failure, except the disks were fine. Eventually realised the DAS uses power from the USB port as well as the adapter plug and the mini PC wasn't supplying enough power. Since attaching a powered USB hub it's been perfect.

Explanation of symptoms and solution, in case anyone is considering one or has the same problem: https://forum.terra-master.com/en/viewtopic.php?t=5830

webstrand

4 days ago

I had the same issue, same solution worked for me too.

It works well, but USB connection could be faster, and it bogs down when doing writes with soft-raid. I've been thinking about going for a DAS solution connected directly via SAS, instead. Still musing about what enclosure to use, though.

asteroidburger

4 days ago

I haven't used them personally so I can't vouch for them, but UGREEN's NAS line is the same form factor as a Synology unit, but it lets you run any OS. I'd probably put straight Debian on mine and handle it all manually as I do now. I wouldn't be surprised if you could put Unraid on it.

donatzsky

4 days ago

Pretty sure Asustor also allows installing any other Linux you want.

Marsymars

4 days ago

I use a qnap TL-D800S for 8 bays connected to my home server. You could use as many as you have available PCIe ports.

PeterStuer

6 days ago

No plans yet. My current NAS setup should be fine for another 2 years.

If it were now, I'd probably look deeper into Asus, QNap or a DIY TrueNAS.

freddie_mercury

4 days ago

There are a lot of NAS cases you can buy. I have a Jonsbo that I've been pretty happy with for a year or so.

rpdillon

7 days ago

I'm in a similar position. I'm on my second NAS in the last 12 years. I've been very satisfied with their performance, but this kind of behavior is just completely unacceptable. I guess I'll need to look into QNAP or some other brand. Also, I think my four disc setup is in a RAID 5, but it might be Synology's proprietary version, so I'll need to figure out how to migrate off of that. I don't think I'll be able to just insert the drives in a different NAS and have it work.

kalleboo

6 days ago

4 days ago

I still love the example some here may recall, where HN itself was hit by this with two disks within a RAID array AND THE BACKUP SERVER all failed within hours of one another:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148>

Resulting in, FWIW, my top-rated-ever HN comment, I think:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048149>

Shank

4 days ago

I personally think that in 2025, you should treat the NAS as a purely storage product and buy your hardware from that perspective. TrueNAS or UniFi’s new NAS product fulfill that goal. From there, supplement your NAS with a Mac Mini or other mini-PC for storage-adjacent tasks.

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.

beaviskhan

4 days ago

> 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.

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

crazygringo

4 days ago

I'm confused.

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?

kstrauser

4 days ago

Not automatically applying firmware updates to 3rd-party drives is reasonable.

Disabling filesystem features when using them is insane.

Whats next — no encryption if you're using a Seagate?

crazygringo

4 days ago

It sounds like deduplication is already a pretty advanced feature requiring Synology SSD's:

https://kb.synology.com/en-me/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/vo...

It might be more about performance, that they'll require their own drives with custom firmware that works better?

That's what I'm trying to understand here. Is Synology really removing important basic necessary features, or is this more about high-end consistency and performance?

kstrauser

4 days ago

The former. They say it’s the latter but almost no one else in the space makes those goofy claims. If I buy an SSD that's too slow, that's on me. And if I deliberately buy a slower one because the cost:performance ratio is better for my needs, then that's my choice. There’s no technical reason why their rebranded devices should capable of doing things the competition can't, other than low-level things like installing firmware updates.

miek

4 days ago

Synology provided more info to the owner of YouTube channel NASCompares, who then posted it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1k53gk0/official_...

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."

mgsouth

7 days ago

I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers.

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)

thomasjudge

4 days ago

For an entertaining/terrifying perspective on firmware, obligatory Bryan Cantrill talk "Zebras All the Way Down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE

gh02t

4 days ago

Synology is consumer and SMB focused, though. High end storage that level of integration makes sense, but for Synology it's just not something *most of their customers care about or want.

cm2187

4 days ago

That being said, there aren't many major HDD manufacturers anymore, nor do they have many models. Synology is using vanilla linux features like md and lvm. You don't think those manufacturers have tested their drives against vanilla linux?

trumpeta

4 days ago

The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR "filesystem", where you can continue adding heterogeneously sized disks after constructing the FS and it will make the most use possible out of the extra capacity in the new disks. When I researched it ZFS did not yet have the resizing feature merged, now it does, though I think it is still not able to use this extra space.

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.

mgiampapa

4 days ago

BTRFS doesn't care how big the disks are and you can just tell it to keep x number of copies of each data / metadata / system block and it will do the work of keeping your copies on different devices across the file system. Much like SHR, performance isn't linear with different sized devices, but it's super simple to setup and in tree where ZFS has a lot more complexity and is not baked into the kernel.

Snapshots are available, but a little more work to deal with since you have to learn about subvolumes. It's not that hard.

Edit: TIL, SHR is just mdadm + btrfs.

dur-randir

4 days ago

Any Linux with LVM. You don't need fancy proprietary OS for that.

iam-TJ

4 days ago

To expand on this with an example. Adding a new device we'll call sdz to an existing Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Volume Group (VG) called "NAS" such that all the space on sdz is instantly available for adding to any Logical Volume (LV):

  pvcreate /dev/sdz
  vgextend NAS /dev/sdz

Now we want to add additional space to an existing LV "backup":

  lvextend --size +128G --resizefs NAS/backup

*note: --resizefs only works for file-systems supported by 'fsadmn' - its man-page says:

"fsadm utility checks or resizes the filesystem on a device (can be also dm-crypt encrypted device). It tries to use the same API for ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS and XFS filesystem."

If using BTRFS inside the LV, and the LV "backup" is mounted at /srv/backup, tell it to use the additional space using:

  btrfs filesystem resize max /srv/backup

fc417fc802

4 days ago

How are redundancy and drive failure handled? The only capacity mix-and-match scheme I have familiarity with is btrfs.

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.

xyzzy123

7 days ago

S3 or glacier? Glacier is cost competitive with local disk but not very practical for the sorts of things people usually need lots of local disk for (media & disk images). Interested in how you use this!

20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay for any data transfers.

fodkodrasz

7 days ago

Did you factor in the resilience and redundancy S3 gives you and you cannot opt out from? I have my NAS, and it is cheaper than S3 if I ignore these, but having to run 2 offsite backups would make it much less compelling.

Dylan16807

4 days ago

They probably factored RAID1 into that price, which you can skip if you're setting up three copies. (At least I hope they did, their hardware prices must be dire if $2000 only gets you a tiny NAS and two 10TB drives.) If I do napkin math based on US prices, a mini PC and a 20TB external drive are a bit under $500 total, and a 2 bay NAS and a 20TB internal drive are a bit over $500 total, so that's about $1500 for the triple-NAS option and $3000/year for the S3 infrequent access option. Still extremely compelling.

xyzzy123

6 days ago

Agree, they are not the same thing. Yes, S3 provides much better durability. I just can't afford it.

For my use-case I'm OK with un-hedged risk and dollars staying in my pocket.

ornornor

6 days ago

I backup my nas to rsync.net, it’s very cost effective using borg backup.

remram

3 days ago

$0.01/GB/mo, that does not seem better than Glacier, is it?

ornornor

3 days ago

Except it’s not glacier speeds, there are no bandwidth costs, support is on a completely different level than aws (you can actually reach an actual knowledgeable human), and you can use anything that speaks ssh. They also have an expert price at 0.008$/gb/mo here https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

cm2187

4 days ago

Yes and no. I have been using NAS for a long time, and I use older drives as offline/offsite backups. So the cost is mostly amortized already. Those machines are off except once a week (local)/ once a month (offsite), to do an incremental backup. So this is a good use of some older drives.

bob1029

7 days ago

> S3 or glacier

This is the same product.

> 20TB

I think we might be pushing the 1% case here.

Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

For me, knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes.

Espressosaurus

4 days ago

20 TB isn't that out of reach when you're running your media server and taking high resolution photos or video (modern cameras push a LOT of bits).

I'm the last person I know who buys DVDs, and they're 2/3s of the reason I need more space. The last third is photography. 45.7 megapixels x 20 FPS adds up quick.

S3's cost is extreme when you're talking in the tens of terabytes range. I don't have the upstream to seed the backup, and if I'm going outside of my internal network it's too slow to use as primary storage. Just the NAS on gigabit ethernet is barely adequate to the task.

SteveNuts

4 days ago

> knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes

4 days ago

>This is the same product.

Confusingly "Glacier" is both its own product, which stores data in "vaults", and a family of storage tiers on Amazon S3, which stores data in "buckets". I think Glacier the product is deprecated though, since accessing the Glacier dashboard immediately recommends using Glacier the S3 storage tiers instead.

Dylan16807

4 days ago

> Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

Okay, I'm curious now. When you were talking about "a bunch of local disks", what size disk did you have in mind?

Right now the best price per TB is found on disks in the 14-24TB range.

bambax

4 days ago

I currently store 10 TB on my NAS, and growing. The data is live, I access some of it every day, sometimes remotely. I have 3 rotating "independent" backups in addition to the NAS (by independent I mean they're made with rsync and don't depend on any specific NAS OS feature), stored in an old safe that would probably not be very effective against thieves but should protect the drives in case of fire.

There are no recurring costs to this setup except electricity. I don't think S3 can beat that.

lurking_swe

4 days ago

hardly 1%, i’m sure anyone that works in the film industry or media in general has terabytes of video footage. Maybe even professional photographers who have many clients.

queenkjuul

4 days ago

20TB is a single drive

viraptor

7 days ago

> If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective.

This is not the perspective of actors working on longer timescale. For a number is agencies, preserving some encrypted data is beneficial, because it will be possible to recover in N years, whether any classic improvements, bugs found in key generators, or advances in quantum.

Very few people here will be that interesting, but... worth keeping in mind.

Power consumption is at a completely different level, though. The N100 gives you pretty good performance with very low power draw.

Dylan16807

4 days ago

Ark says 9 lanes of PCIe 3.0?

For a NAS, I don't think I'd need more than 1-2 lanes for any single device. That sounds fine.

freeAgent

4 days ago

Yeah, I assume most home users these days are never pushing a NAS beyond 1Gbe, and 99% of people who have faster networks are still probably just doing 2.5Gbe (still just talking about home use). This wouldn’t make that PCIe bandwidth sweat.

4 days ago

Had to replace my old micro server recently and was hard not to buy an ugreen, hardware looks nice, decent n100 CPU, software seems ok but wanted to run Linux myself.

Ended up buying a terrmaster DAS instead and connected it with usb to my NUC.

Also considered a NAS enclosure with an n110 mini itx board, would allow you to upgrade it in the future.

valunord

4 days ago

Isn't this a simple solution?: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db

Some of us are using that with great success to eliminate the locking situation.

Shank

4 days ago

I personally think if you spend the money on a Synology setup and you depend on this script, you’re playing with fire. If you intend to keep DSM updated, you run the risk of Synology playing a cat-and-mouse game that doesn’t end well. Sure you can do this now, but forever? Who knows how long it will last.

theden

4 days ago

Also https://github.com/007revad/Synology_M2_volume for NVMe M.2 drives (some synology models only allow NVMe drives to be used as read/write caches without this script)

4 days ago

Of course. But my hope is Synology does a little bit of QA before slapping that sticker on.

asmor

4 days ago

Honestly, you should just buy used enterprise drives. That they have hours on them is actually an upside, since most drives die either very early or very late into their expected lifespan. Our NAS is all Exos drives, no problems.

On the other hand, an NVMe drive from Crucial that lied about syncing data caused a write hole in ZFS and the associated pool broke to the point where we could only mount it with lots of flags in read only mode.

cm2187

4 days ago

And SMR sold as NAS drives mostly.

niuzeta

4 days ago

I've been very happy with my Synology NAS that has served me so well, but forcing this sort of vender lock-in is simply unacceptable. I suppose this means I'll have to look for some other solution.

7 days ago

4 days ago

I am very capable of building my own. But the plug and play of it is really nice. I basically popped in some drives and had a share up and running in a couple of hours. The same sort with DIY was do a part picker list build it (1-2 days) and then pop the drives in then figure out how to configure it correctly (another day or so because I do it very rarely). Then at that point yeah for what I use it for they are equivalent. Other than now I get to keep track of the CVE's that syno is doing for me with the occasional patch. Now I could put a stripped linux distro or trunas or something like that and get the same. Possible and ease of use are also a spectrum to weigh against. When you are young you have all the time you need. When you are older you just want to put it together and serve some files and do something else, because I have done this 6 times already.

But there is actually one reason I am going DIY next time. 'uname -a'. They ship with very old kernels. I suspect the other utilities are in the same shape. They have not updated their base system in a long time. I suspect they have basically left all of the amazing changes the kernels have had over the past decade out. They are randomly cherry picking things. Which is fine. But it has to be creating a 'fun' support environment.

jitl

4 days ago

Time is money, I would rather buy a NAS these days even though in the past I ran my own FreeBSD ZFS server NAS. Much cheaper use of my time to pay a 2-3x premium on hardware if it means I spend 4 hours on build and 1 hour on admin per year vs 12 hours build, 6 hours admin per year.

InfinityByTen

4 days ago

Getting a machine and setting it up for local usage as storage accessible over your home network is very different from having to install bunch of duct taped software and hoping it reliably works all the time without fail are two very different things.

I'm a full time dev and even having my home assistant breaking every time I think of upgrading it, is annoyance enough. My home lights and what not are down for two hours and I'm mostly installing HA from scratch and recovering from the backup that I've started to take since the last collapse.

A NAS is a way more critical device and I don't want to lose my data or needing to spend 2 weeks recovering data under an anxiety attack because I hastily did one upgrade.

saltysalt

4 days ago

Thanks for the OS recommendations! I'm a soon to be ex-Synology user looking for a new home (their killing of Video Station also irked me).

michaelt

4 days ago

Honestly they got into the NAS business when cloud offerings were different, and many Internet connections were a lot slower.

Synology’s market is the intersection of:

People who have lots of pirated media, who want generous storage with torrent capabilities.

People who want to store CCTV feeds.

People who find the cloud too expensive, or feel it isn’t private enough.

People with a “two is one, one is none” backup philosophy, for whom the cloud alone is not enough.

Tiny businesses that just need a windows file share.

bhouston

4 days ago

I used to be a Synology fan with owning many of their devices for work and office. But I've moved on to TrueNAS now and haven't looked back. TrueNAS with ZFS is just amazing.

Ylpertnodi

4 days ago

It would be interesting to know the negatives of Synology, and why did you move from them. Gaining nothing from your comment, it could be that your boss was pissed his ex- got a job as security there.

bhouston

4 days ago

My biggest reason is flexibility in machine configuration. I found a lot of flexibility in bringing my own machine to the table. I can set any mix of HDD or SSD or Nvme or ram in my machines. With synology or any other premade box I am stuck in a specific config.

For example my current TrueNAS at home has 128GB of Ram, 32TB of NVMe (live data) and 72TB of HDD (archive data) with significant cpu and gpu (well compared to synology box, I am running a Ryzen 5700G) and 10G networking.

It didn’t start out here but because TrueNAS works with your own hardware I can evolve myself incrementally as hardware costs and needs change.

It is a beast of a machine and it is no work to maintain - TrueNAS makes it an appliance.

I’ve written up previously on my home setup here: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/home-network-lessons

system2

4 days ago

We've deployed Synology across multiple client environments for almost a decade, and it's been an incredibly reliable platform. Barring the usual hard drive failures (which are inevitable over time), we've had zero issues with SSO integration, expanding arrays with expansion units, seamless hardware upgrades, or the application layer. It just works.

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.

NKosmatos

4 days ago

As an owner of two Synology boxes (and maintainer of a couple more), I’m not happy about these news. Synology needs to rethink its user base, upgrade their hardware offerings and avoid be lead by profit hunting board members.

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.

sylens

4 days ago

Bought a Synology in 2020, been using it for backups and Plex since then. Only recently started doing a little more with it (Immich, Kavita, etc.)

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.

bitwize

4 days ago

Realistically, this will be par for the course among NAS vendors in 10 years, and there will be vigorous defenses of it on Hackernews. "If you want an open NAS, build one yourself. I choose a Yoyodyne NAS because it integrates with the apps I use. And the Yoyodyne disk restriction is no big deal since I know I'll be using something supported and compatible."

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."

kyrofa

4 days ago

> 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. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon.

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.

gambiting

4 days ago

>>You should have spare drives on hand.

I've never heard of anyone doing that for a home nas. I have one and I don't keep spare drives purely because it's hard to justify the expense.

itiwaru

4 days ago

The drives I have obtained ahead of failure only after drives have been used past the 8 year mark are for a rebuild. I would hardly call them spares.

I did end up with a spare before at the 3 year mark but the bathtub curve of failure has held true and now that so-called spare is 6 years old, unused, too small of a drive, and so never planned to be used in any way.

The conventional wisdom is that you should not store drives that don't get spun up infrequently, so what does it mean to have spares unless you are spinning them up once a month and expecting them to last any longer once actually used?

topspin

4 days ago

I do. Also, I have an unopened 990 EVO Plus ready to drop into whatever machine needs it.

I'm not made of money. I just don't want to make excuses over some $90 bit of junk. So I have have spare wifi, headset, ATX PSU, input devices, and a low cost "lab" PSU to replace any dead wallwart. That last one was a life saver: the SMPS for my ISPs "business class" router died one day, so I cut and stripped the wires, set the volts+amps and powered it that way for a few days while they shipped a replacement.

Hamuko

4 days ago

I had a hot spare in the form of a backup drive. It was a 12 TB external WD that I'd already burned in and had as a backup target for the NAS. Then when one of the drives in the NAS failed, I broke the HDD out of the enclosure and used it to replace the broken drive. It hadn't been in use for many months and I'd rather sacrifice some backups rather than the array. I also technically had offsite backups for it that I could restore in an emergency.

1oooqooq

4 days ago

always run the previous drive gen space.

i budget 300usd each, for 2 or 3 drivers. that is always the sweet spot since forever. get the largest enterprise model for exactly that price.

that was 2tb 10yrs ago. 10tb 5yrs ago.

so 5yrs ago i rebuilt storage on those 10tb drivers but only using 2tb volumes (coulda be 5, but i was still keeping the last gen size as data haven't grow), now my old drivers are spares/monthly off-machine copies. i used one when getting a warranty for a failed new 10tb one btw.

now i can get 20tb drivers for that price, i will probably still only increase the volumes to 10tb at most and have two spares.

kyrofa

4 days ago

4 days ago

Do you have a link to your script? Mostly I'd love to have a good dashboard for that data.

cm2187

3 days ago

Not the full script but can share some pointers.

Using smartctl to extract smart data as it works so well.

Generally "smartctl -j --all -l devstat -l ssd /dev/sdXXX". You might need to add "-d sat" to capture certain devices on linux (like drive on an expansion unit on synology). By the way, synology ships with an ancient version of smartctl, you can use a xcopy newer version on synology. "-j" export to json format.

Then you need to do a bit of magic to normalise the data. Like some wear level are expressed in health (start = 100) or percent used (start = 0). There are different versions of smart data, the "-l devstat" outputs a much more useful set of stats but older SSDs won't support that.

Host writes are probably the messiest part, because sometimes they are expressed in blocks, or units of 32MB, or something else. My logic is:

  if (nvme_smart_health_information_log != null)
  {
   return nvme_smart_health_information_log.data_units_written * logical_block_size * 1000;
  }
  if (scsi_error_counter_log?.write != null)
  {
   // should be 1000*1000*1000
   return (long)(double.Parse(scsi_error_counter_log.write.gigabytes_processed) * 1024 * 1024 * 1024);
  }
  var devstat = GetAtaDeviceStat("General Statistics", "Logical Sectors Written");
  if (devstat != null)
  {
   return devstat.value * logical_block_size;
  }
  if (ata_smart_attributes?.table != null)
  {
   foreach (var att in ata_smart_attributes.table)
   {
    var name = att.name;
    if (name == "Host_Writes_32MiB")
    {
     return att.raw.value * 32 * 1024 * 1024;
    }
    if (name == "Host_Writes_GiB" || name == "Total_Writes_GB" || name == "Total_Writes_GiB")
    {
     return att.raw.value * 1024 * 1024 * 1024;
    }
    if (name == "Host_Writes_MiB")
    {
     return att.raw.value * 1024 * 1024;
    }
    if (name == "Total Host Writes")
    {
     return att.raw.value;
    }
    if (name == "Total LBAs Written" || name == "Total_LBAs_Written" || name == "Cumulative Host Sectors Written")
    {
     return att.raw.value * logical_block_size;
    }
   }

  }

and even that fails in some cases where the logical block size is 4096.

I think you need to test it against your drives estate. My advice, just store the raw json output from smartctl centrally, and re-parse it as you improve your logic for all these edge cases based on your own drives.

sersi

4 days ago

My synology NAS is for my own use. I do not keep spare drives on hand, I would go to the nearby shop that's 20 minutes away from me to get a new drive. They wouldn't have synology branded drives but they have the toshiba MG series, Western Digital and Seagate.

Within my NAS, I have 2 different pool, 1 is for important data, it's 2 hard disk with SHR1 replicated to an offsite NAS. Another pool is for less important data (movies, etc), it's SHR1 with 5 hard disks, 75TB total capacity, none of the hard disks are the same batch or production date. Not having the data immediately is not a problem. Losing that data would suck but I'd rebuild so I'm fine not having a spare drive on hand.

snowwrestler

4 days ago

Failures should be rare, which means a spare HD might be sitting in a drawer without spinning for years, which HDs don’t like to do.

When you need to replace a drive, it’s better to purchase one new. It was manufactured recently and not sitting for very long.

AlexandrB

4 days ago

> a spare HD might be sitting in a drawer without spinning for years, which HDs don’t like to do.

How so? Does this imply drives "age out" while sitting at distribution warehouses too?

Gazwad

3 days ago

I was just about to replace my 2 Drobo units with 2 of 4 bay Synology, my very early Synology single drive NAS is still working so thought I'd go for familiarity.

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.

ziml77

7 days ago

Hopefully they don't start pushing this change to older products. I don't want to have to replace my NAS, but if I ever do, it certainly won't be with another Synology product, even if they walk this decision back.

dmoy

4 days ago

I bought a Synology last year and then had to return it because it didn't support two of the enterprise drive model revisions I have (but worked with the others, even one that's the same make).

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.

GuestFAUniverse

4 days ago

Good. Will stop collègues from buying that crap. Managing an aging fleet of those is a PITA. Why bother with a crippled Linux, if a full-blown, real OS is available on better hardware anyway.

thelittleone

4 days ago

Full blown OS is a valid option, but installing and maintaining a full blown OS with the equivalent of their ecosystem apps is more complex and time consuming. Some will consider that a PITA and that audience likely isn't bothered by a crippled Linux.

benoau

7 days ago

Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH, this year's upgrades were to like ~2020 tech and some of these models won't be upgraded again until 2030!

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.

joshstrange

7 days ago

Do you have some examples of the superior customer hardware options? I currently use 2x12 bay Synology NAS and one of my favorite parts of it is the hardware, the easy access to the hotswap hard drives.

If I could get that form factor, but with a custom NAS software solution, I’d be very interested.

CobaltFire

7 days ago

I run a Sliger 3701 [0] with an ASRock Rack Ryzen motherboard (choose B650D4U or X570D4U to suit) using TrueNAS Scale. This replaced my old FreeNAS Atom C2000 setup that ran for over a decade with zero issues.

4 days ago

Running Ubuntu + Docker + Portainer on a NUC10i5FN (32GB RAM, 1TB HP EX900 M.2 SSD) — I’ve got containers for:

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.

hkchad

4 days ago

7bit

4 days ago

I will never use their plus line, but I care about the company, so this is really sad. They provided security updates over a very long time. Recently they cut automatic updates (not updates at all) for older models to make it inconvenient to run older models. Now this. With that development, I'm not sure that I will buy my next NAS from them.

donatj

4 days ago

Is there a good alternative these days for someone that only really wants network attached storage, e.g. some drives in a box, easy RAID setup and local network access via SMB?

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.

gh02t

joshstrange

7 days ago

At first I was going to balk but then I remembered I paid ~$1.5K for a 12-bay Synology (and again for the 12-bag expansion unit).

This is much larger I think (and it bugs me that it’s not an even number of drives, and the offset of the drives is unpleasant) but it’s rackable so that’s a plus.

The only thing I’d want to know is sound (and I’m sure I can find a YouTube video).

I’ve been looking for an excuse to go all-in on a Ubiquiti setup… Thanks for mention this, I wasn’t aware Ubiquiti had a NAS product.

nodesocket

4 days ago

TBH the only reason anyone talks about transcoding is Synology's absolute dog-shit hardware options make it a problem. Most Intel CPUs and most AMD CPUs and many ARM CPUs and all the discrete GPUs are absolutely fine with munging video and audio codecs. They're just not well-represented in Synology's lineup.

lostlogin

4 days ago

Can you list things you don’t like about the Synology?

I can transcode just fine on a 1821 (though use a separate machine to do it for other reasons). The units seems fine, what am I missing out on?

benoau

4 days ago

Fundamentally I guess it feels like they have ground to a halt or even quietly retired the DSM line.

Let's look at your NAS for an example (it's actually worse for mine cause I always loved the Slims lmao).

DS1821 has no GPU transcoding because it uses the AMD Ryzen 1500B, what you've observed is this processor is just powerful enough to brute force some transcoding but it has no hardware transcoding:

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS1821+#specs

DS1821 successor was recently revealed to be the DS1825. So if your NAS died in a few months, that would be your obvious choice for a replacement. They decided to continue using the AMD Ryzen 1500B, which is now seven years old. TBD if they bother releasing it this year. In a few months they could call it DS1826 instead.

https://nascompares.com/2025/03/13/synology-ds525-ds1525-ds4...

Meanwhile DSM still lacks support for NVMe volumes, in fact there are still no NVMe-only models at all, you can't even install DSM to NVMe, they cut support for USB drives, they cut support for HEVC, and they almost never update docker and some of the other tools.

The hardware's going nowhere and the software's going backwards.

lostlogin

4 days ago

I would like to use ssds for running containers, this is a good point. The elderly cpu is more than adequate for my needs but as you say, an upgrade, ever, would be nice.

I guess I’ve avoided these issues by accepting that solid state storage in a NAS is still too expensive.

My ultimate would be the Synology with an Apple silicon heart. One can dream.

nicolas_t

4 days ago

While it's not officially supported you can use nvmes to run containers. I do this on my own nas and it works great. See https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1gobb14/guide_how...

That said, the person you're replying to is right. Synology has mostly stopped supporting their apps, they've removed features in cost-cutting features (media codecs), hardware is now hopelessly outdated and both kernel and docker are completely out of date.

It feels like any technical leadership completely disappeared and now only bean counters who don't understand the product or their target market are making decisions.

Marsymars

4 days ago

You got different replies from others, but my 2¢ since you were replying me - if you're not doing transcoding, then I agree, Plex on a NAS is fine - it's basically just a wrapper around some shared files in that case. (The post I was replying to did specify that they were doing transcoding.)

int_19h

4 days ago

Even if you do transcoding, it's still fine so long as it has supported hardware for HW-accelerated encoding. Which doesn't require all that much - even fairly basic Synology models can do H.265.

Marsymars

4 days ago

Some do, but the models with HW-accelerated transcoding have been shrinking - it's only the "prosumer" models that have Intel Quick Sync (with no guarantee that refreshed products will maintain it) - the lower end models have ARM processors without HW-accelerated transcoding and higher end models have Ryzen processors without GPUs.

dogleash

7 days ago

The web gui is nice to use, what does Windows/Linux or the Mac offer? I’d prefer a Mac option, but I don’t believe there is a good one.

Marsymars

4 days ago

Upside of Mac is good Thunderbolt support. A ThunderBay 8 (or comparable) gives you 8 SATA bays. The baseline Mac Mini supports up to 18 such Thunderbolt bays via chained Thunderbolt. (Can also get nvme thunderbolt drives.)

queenkjuul

4 days ago

I saw on level1techs, a 4 Bay chassis with an AMD APU plenty capable of transcoding multiple streams. Can't remember who made it, and you'd have to DIY the OS install, but that's pretty ideal to me.

What i do, and will continue to do, is use a USB-C disk box (Level 1 also recently reviewed some they quite liked, despite the usual fears around USB) and whatever PC i have laying around. 5 years strong running ZFS over USB 3 with a 4770K, regularly serving 4 Plex streams at once without complaints and no failures (i mean, usual disks wearing out, but nothing caused by USB).

So if a 4770 can transcode 2x1080 and direct play 2x more, any old anything with hardware transcoding these days should be just fine.

threeseed

4 days ago

I ended up just running Infuse on an AppleTV.

Then there is no need for transcoding at all.

Hikikomori

4 days ago

I use a NUC with a terrmaster DAS connected with usb.

jwr

4 days ago

I am very disappointed to see that. I've been using Synology NASs for the last, oh, 14 years or so, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. Most importantly, their software works and requires nearly zero maintenance in the long term. I care a lot about this: I have too many things in my life that require my attention and impose on me. I am OK with paying more for things that Just Work, and Synology has been in that category.

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.

j45

4 days ago

Spot on.

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.

nicolas_t

4 days ago

They're just white labeling Toshibas

j45

4 days ago

If the drives must identify as a QNAP secured drive, they could be whitelabeled toshibas but a user can only buy their white-labeled toshibas I'm presuming.

404NotBoring

4 days ago

So if I don’t use Synology’s own drives, my NAS gets slower on purpose? That sounds kinda unfair?

jorvi

4 days ago

Apparently no one remembers that a while back Synology already "locked" a whole bunch of people their drives, by ripping out BTRFS support on their NAS budget models. And they pushed this update without warning ahead. Your disks just suddenly up and stopped mounting.

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.

badmonster

4 days ago

How might Synology’s decision to lock its 2025 Plus NAS models to only support its own branded hard drives impact long-term reliability, upgradeability, and customer trust—especially when compared to more open alternatives like QNAP or TrueNAS?

rufugee

4 days ago

As someone who switched about a year ago from FreeNAS to Synology, this is extremely disappointing. Synology has been a great experience up to this point. I have pools, one on supported WD Reds, and the other on a hodge podge of drives I had collecting dust.

Both pools have been very reliable so far. But if they continue down this path, I'll seek a different solution.

senectus1

4 days ago

I have a DS920+ for home lab purposes that I'm very happy with, but this sort of bullshit is going to make me drop that brand from any future recommendations or purchases.

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.

itsanaccount

4 days ago

alt227

4 days ago

The thing is they dont care about you anymore. They have moved firmly into the SME market which is why they are making decisions which dont really affect company purchase policies, but really upset personal users.

atoav

4 days ago

Well it is good then that I did not trust that company.

rpcope1

4 days ago

Honestly given how lots and lots of things just build on Debian, seems easier to me to just use an off the shelf older Supermicro motherboard with an plain IT mode SAS HBA and something like an Enthoo Pro case and just call it a day running stock Debian. Certainly far few surprises and bullshit.

ThomasGlanzmann

4 days ago

I do the same for a few years and use that also for friends with failing NAS. Most of the time two big HDDs or SSDs in RAID 1 is sufficient.

fennecfoxy

3 days ago

Look at all the enshittification!

It's all profits, at the end of the day. Good for the shareholders!

techlatest_net

4 days ago

[dead]

user

4 days ago

[deleted]