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Synology could bring “certified drive” requirements to more NAS devices

arstechnica.com

Synology could bring “certified drive” requirements to more NAS devices

Synology's telegraphed moves toward a contained ecosystem and seemingly vertical integration are certain to rankle some of its biggest fans, who likely enjoy doing their own system building, shopping, and assembly for the perfect amount of storage. "Pro-sumers," homelab enthusiasts, and those with just a lot of stuff to store at home, or in a small business, previously had a good reason to buy one Synology device every so many years, then stick into them whatever drives they happened to have or acquired at their desired prices. Synology's stated needs for efficient support of drive arrays may be more defensible at the enterprise level, but as it gets closer to the home level, it suggests a different kind of optimization.

124 comments

  • Such a silly move. Like shooting yourself in the foot to sell more bullets

  • Yeah I expected that this would happen. They already did this with RAM. They just rebrand RAM, sell it for a way higher price and add a check. When they brought their own branded HDDs, I knew they will pull of the same scam.

    Building an own server isn't that more expensive and you don't have to deal with the whole lockout with Synology. For example I had quite the issue to access hardware. I wasn't able to get Home Assistant running on my NAS. The issue was my Zigbee USB Stick. I got it running to the point where I was able to send commands (e.g. turn on or off lights) but the status didn't came back. I threw it on my Pi3 (now Pi5) and zero issues.

    The next NAS is self build. Probably Proxmox as base, with truenas or so as main server and the rest depends on what I might need.

  • I was looking at simple 2 bay home NAS and Synology was - quite logically - one of the contenders. Now I'm glad I ordered differently. Went with Asustor AS5402, which might be not as polished package as a Synology option, but they're very open about it and say it's just regular PC so you can instal e.g. TrueNAS if you want. This openness convinced me.

  • I had been considering upgrading, my current 4 bay Synology is physically full and running out of storage space. Moving that to a larger Synology box and adding drives would be easiest, basically plug and play.

    But now instead I'll probably just switch to a more traditional NAS instead. Run TrueNAS, or maybe give HexOS a look. If I'm going to have to convert from my current proprietary Synology filesystem anyway I might as well rebuild from scratch. As it is I've shifted all the services off the Synology and Docker to a dedicated Proxmox box.

  • Are we overreacting? Hasn't Synology always had a list of "certified" drives for their NAS', which end up being the same HDDs we would tend to use anyway?

    I can understand that they don't want people using any garbage storage drives, which could increase failure and make Synology NAS' look unreliable.

    Unless something has changed, this is how they've always done it, just like how every laptop manufacturer will say which RAM and storage works best (for reliability and performance) on their machines.

    • They're disabling features

      Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.

      What you might lose from using non-Synology-approved hard drives could include pool creation and support for any issues. De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives, Synology's press release suggests.

      • Yes, but is this them being assholes, or them wanting to make sure that users aren't making their system unreliable? I think there would be a huge distinction there.

        For example, say a user wanted to create a cache drive using an SSD. But because the user doesn't know better, they buy the cheapest crap they can find, install it, and set up caching. But because they're using cheap shit, the drive is slow and the user reports poor performance, system hangups, and other instability.

        Wouldn't it be in Synology's best interest to say "here's a list of drives we know will give you the best experience."?

        Now, Synology has already done that, but users are ignoring it and continue to use poor storage drives expecting to use pretty sophisticated features. What now? Well, Synology disables those features.

        For example:

        De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives

        Um, yeah. That makes sense. If a shitty hard drive can't reliably get firmware updates through the NAS, why on earth would they want to keep that option enabled? Same with lifespan analysis. If a crappy drive isn't using modern standards and protocols for measuring and logging errors and performance data, Synology really can't "enable" this to work, can they?

        That's what I think is happening. Although, this could be just greed, too. I don't think there's any real problem for most users, unless they say that we can't use fairly common, high-quality NAS drives from Seagate or WD and must use their own branded drives. I'd have a huge problem with that.

124 comments