Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs • Hacker News Board

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#141

Post by dspillett » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

leakycap wrote: post #125

bapak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Companies exist to make profit. They can only make a profit if people are willing to buy what they're selling > Their business is selling hard drives. Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives. The drives are interchangeable and upgradable, that's the whole point of a hot-swap NAS system. > I bet a large portion of profits come from that I think they wanted a large portion of profits t…

> most NAS purchasers know that hard drives are a commodity/standardized and won't pay a premium for ... no benefit.

Also, some will deliberately mix drives from various manufacturers to reduce exposure to potential “bad batch” problems where multiple drives fail in a short space of time (possibly extra failures while rebuilding an array after the first failure, rendering the whole array untrustworthy or entirely broken). This is not possible if you can only purchase from one manufacturer.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#142

Post by jychang » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

aranw wrote: post #19

closewith wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just want storage and not apps, Ubiquiti's UNAS line is a much better choice, especially if you're in their ecosystem.

Yeah UNAS is one option I'm exploring. But the only thing I'm wanting on top of all that is something like Plex or Jellyfin and I don't know how well it will play with a UNAS if running on a external server

It works fine as a NAS, but you need to run Plex on a different server.

You can't run Plex directly off the device like a DS224+ would.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#143

Post by palata » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #79

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?

I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle. Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial. In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference.…

> I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.

That's how we all benefit. But if a company wants to benefit more than you, they can. That's how enshittification works.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#144

Post by yason » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:26 AM UTC

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…

> Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject > support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".

All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#145

Post by NKosmatos » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

After all the complaints and upheaval created after their silly management/leadership decision, they finally understood something.

As an owner and administrator of many Synology NASes I agree that Synology offerings are a bit underpowered compared to what is available in the market (from H/W point of view), but the ease of use and peace of mind within the Synology ecosystem (DSM software, apps) outweighs whatever drawbacks they have.

If Synology management takes the decision to refresh their H/W with new CPUs, NICs and more RAM, I'm sure they'll stay on the market ;-)

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#146

Post by palata » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

When something like this happens, you fire the CEO. I don't care how the decision process works internally, and how much they thought it would "help" the customers and were all in good faith. The company fucked up, the company has to acknowledge that, and the way to show it is to fire the CEO.

To change a company culture, you change the CEO. My view of Synology today is that they will pull the rug for their own benefit, at my expense. There is no way I trust this Synology ever again. Now I'm on TrueNAS, so I'm already lost to them, but I also tell everybody not to trust Synology. And that won't change if they don't show me that the company has changed.

Similar to Sonos, I feel.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#147

Post by submeta » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:33 AM UTC

Too late. Sold my Synology NAS a few weeks ago and moved on to TrueNAS. - I absolutely despise when companies get greedy and try to get the maximum out of their customers. Adobe does this. Apple does this. And some other companies.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#148

Post by NikolaNovak » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

I installed Seagate Ironwolf Pro in my Synology last night.

It complained it wasn't compatible.

If that drive isn't compatible than I don't know what legitimate criteria possibly could be.

(Yes, I get the criteria is "what we prioritized to test" but my point stands,it's the high end of consumer-available NAS drives, not a compute model or a shucked SMR drive:)

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#149

Post by michaelsshaw » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

bapak wrote: post #82

jeffparsons wrote: post #21

Don't get confused here: they didn't decide that their policy change was wrong — they just didn't expect quite as much backlash. Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.

[flagged]

> Their business is selling hard drives.

If you want to get technical, their business is dogshit, and I'll be glad to never buy from them.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#150

Post by taneq » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

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…

Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a bad decision (or even a decision that’s seen to be bad)? In my experience internal morale often suffers before the customers catch on.