It was a bald strategy move, but market was just not ready for the innovation
I don't think anything about this was innovating. I think it was purely a money grab attempt
I think the comment was intentionally ironic
Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
161–170 of 679 posts
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#162The decision to restrict 3rd party harddrives may be part of the reason why sales (allegedly) plummet, but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part.
Synology has been resting on the laurels for years. They had a "hit" with DSM 6, then did mostly nothing for a decade, released DSM 7, and again, nothing but minor things since. On the hardware side of things, they're mostly still using decade old hardware, but i guess that matches the Linux kernel they're using, which was also EOL close to a decade ago.
Meanwhile the NAS market has been flooded by viable alternatives with better hardware, equal or better software, and usually cheaper. UGREEN and others have released more or less drop in replacements, and Ubiquiti released the UNAS line, and while it doesn't work as an application server, will run around circles any similarly specced (drive wise) Synology in raw file transfer performance, for half the price.
I'm guessing the 3rd party drive removal was simply just the final push that caused many people to switch to something else. Transcoding removal was likely also a big driver, as many people also use their Synology NAS as a Plex server.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#163However, now we know the direction their leadership would like to take, I can't see much of the tech savvy crowd returning to them, given we know they'll find another revenue screw to turn.
I'm not convinced of the existence of executives who wouldn't do this. It's just like ads. Someone is bound to notice that money is being left on the table. Once it becomes known, they'll either do it or they'll be replaced by someone who will. We have to start making open source hardware that we can fully control. It's the only way to be free. Corporations cannot be trusted. Any goodwill they build up eventually bec…
Bankrupting every company who tries it is also a pretty good strategy.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#164It’s so incredibly easy to build a TrueNAS box these days I don’t know why anyone would go the Synology route.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#165But 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…
10G. You're cute.
My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#166I 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 know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster. Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable Half of the "b…
> a box that is mostly just an SMB share
...and supposedly keeps your files, safe - at least that what keeps me from tinkering too much with such a solution.
Sure, having backups still is necessary, yet, a NAS to me is a means to an end..
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#167But 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…
Not OP, I went back and forth about having containers etc on my NAS. I can of course have a separate server to do it (and did that) but
a) it increases energy cost
b) accessing storage over smb/nfs is not as fast and can lead to performance issues.
c) in terms of workflow, I find that having all containers (I use rootless containers with podman as much as possible) running on the NAS that actually stores and manage the data to be simpler. So that means running plex/jellyfin, kometa, paperless-ngx, *arrs, immmich on the NAS and for that synology's cpu are not great.
In general, the most common requirements of prosumers with NAS is 2.5gbps and transcoding. Right now, none of Synology's offerings offer that.
But really the main reason I dislike synology is that SHR1 is vendor locked behind their proprietary btrfs modifications and so can only be accessed by a very old ubuntu...
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#168Thank god they reversed course. I’m coming up on needing another NAS and I was not looking forward to digging through alternatives. I’ve run raw Linux servers, I’ve run UnRaid, and now I have Synology and it’s been the best “set it and forget it” solution yet. Yes, the hardware is overpriced but it works and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.
Good luck when it doesn't work though. I decided to take the hit and pay their exorbitant HDD prices on the basis that they came with a warranty etc and one of the drives failed within 3 months. It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the drive at my own expense from the UK to Germany and they didn't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their warehouse. I had to buy another drive to re…
You need to have pretty tight supply chains if you’re going to support warranty claims on something as consumable as disks. I don’t know who supplies their HDD and SSDs, but you’d want the relationship and traceability to be pretty robust.
Syno have always been a software company first, a hardware company second, and a storage media company last. It makes sense to try and control the full vertical, but they just don’t have enough clout to compete against the big enterprise companies.
I honestly believe the disk whitelisting thing was part of an attempt to overvalue the company in preparation for a sale.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#169When 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…
This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to. The reality is that often such leaders can come out net positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to the ground because they extracted out everything in a short term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But at least the company and its products disappear. It's evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some kind of internal hero.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#170How many will still think this is the policy regardless of its reversal? Good job Synology.