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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#101

Post by ffsm8 »

zeroflow wrote: post #72
aborsy wrote: post #7

But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it, as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can’t upgrade the component and should buy the whol…

I totally agree with you. The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is men…

Surprising to read your take

Transcoding was the reason I moved away from Synology. The rest was fine, not great but ... Okay

But there was no way to improve transcoding performance. If a stream lagged, it would always lag. Hence I jumped ship and just made my own

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#102

Post by Sammi »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #99
aborsy wrote: post #7

But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it, as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can’t upgrade the component and should buy the whol…

I've had a couple of Synology drives for many years (DS1520+, DS918+). They've always worked fine (still chugging away). I have had terrible luck with Drobo.

They have way underpowered cpus compared to what you can get for the same money elsewhere. They're just a bad deal.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#103

Post by WmWsjA6B29B4nfk »

rickdeckard wrote: post #85
osivertsson wrote: post #51

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale. Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work…

While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope". I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one st…

Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being crazily overpriced.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#105

Post by bayindirh »

sschueller wrote: post #96
bayindirh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a PCIe slot... You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental…

ASUSTOR looks interesting but none of their desktop units appear have PCIe expansion slots so you can't put a SFP28 card in there. It might be possible via expensive USB4 adapter.

I misremembered that Gen3 hardware had a spare PCIe slot, my bad.

You can either forego NVMe slots (which looks like an add-on card on [0]) and get the slot, or use one of the USB4 interfaces. OTOH, it has 2x10GbE on board, you can just media-convert it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWgc8W-hIWM

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#106

Post by RedShift1 »

bayindirh wrote: post #64
Netcob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same - replaced my smaller Synology with a UGREEN, put TrueNAS on it first thing, runs great. The HDD thing was only the final nail in the coffin, but before that, there were plenty of ridiculous "upgrades" that made products worse than in the previous generation. Literally removing features, or continuing to use the same outdated hardware. That's what companies do that don't think they have competition.

ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a PCIe slot... You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental…

I bought a small ASUSTOR NAS at work to check it out and I like it, it's definitely faster than comparable Synology units, however the camera system is quite underdeveloped compared to Synology. Synology's surveillance station rocks and ASUSTOR has a long way to go in that niche.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#107

Post by glenstein »

m000 wrote: post #73
INTPenis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?

A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.

Evidently profitability went down due to the change, so if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is coming from.)

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#108

Post by cyanydeez »

rickdeckard wrote: post #85
osivertsson wrote: post #51

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale. Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work…

While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope". I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one st…

This was greenlit as a cash grab first, justify support later.

They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.

If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#109

Post by b112 »

aborsy wrote: post #7

But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it, as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can’t upgrade the component and should buy the whol…

Min/Max pricing theory?

Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.

Why?

Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics, office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.

Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.

So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.

There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of the above.

But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid running the show.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#110

Post by bkma »

rickdeckard wrote: post #85
osivertsson wrote: post #51

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale. Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work…

While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope". I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one st…

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