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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#151

Post by greggsy »

bayindirh wrote: post #105
sschueller wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#152

Post by rpdillon »

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.

Yep, I had two different models that had been running for about seven years each and had an excellent experience overall until Synology tried to change their drive policy.

I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#153

Post by bryceneal »

fennecbutt wrote: post #42

I have a ds920 4 bay from synology. It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes). But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again. I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But somet…

I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.

Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#154

Post by NikolaNovak »

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…

What kind of tasks?

I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.

Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#155

Post by immibis »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #148

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:)

IIRC it was official Synology-branded drives only. And they cost about twice as much as the exact same drives without the Synology brand.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#156

Post by bayindirh »

greggsy wrote: post #151
bayindirh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?

The problem is not getting TrueNAS on a disk. You can do it externally, but you need to disable the on board flash storage and change the boot order from the BIOS.

That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot without a GPU.

Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#157

Post by Shank »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #154
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…

What kind of tasks? I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage. Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself th…

A significant part of the prosumer NAS market isn’t running these for storage exclusively. They usually want a media server like Plex or Enby or Jellyfin at minimum and maybe a handful of other apps. It would be better to articulate this market demand as for low power application servers, not strictly storage appliances.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#158

Post by immibis »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #127

I mean, I've never come across Synology branded HDDs. I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope. And part of the magic of a NAS is not necessarily having to have matching hardware. In addition to other design basics like using drives from different batches to minimise the l…

> I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.

Correct. They were, and they did. The goal was profit - the rebranded drives cost more. Just like printer ink.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#159

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

glenstein wrote: post #115
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?

My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.

And by guessing, we mean grasping wildly at nonsense.
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