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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#221

Post by bravetraveler »

kstrauser wrote: post #195
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at a couple of places where I've had similar experiences and I get to the point where I'll explain it once, and if they're not listening or discard the suggestion without really considering it, then I'll just wait for them to figure it out themselves. I get paid either way. I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.

I’ve been there. After a while, I realized that they’re paying for my advice. If they take it, awesome. If they don’t, and I feel like I did a good enough job communicating my reasons, then that’s their option, and their consequences. It’s annoying, but either way I get paid.

I find I get stuck with the inevitable clean-up work, having voiced an opinion earlier. Learning that not many of these battles are worth choosing.

There's no advancement, just bigger piles of bullshit. The goal is to get paid for shoveling the least.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#223

Post by teekert »

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…

I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent.

It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.

I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#224

Post by rickdeckard »

chrbr wrote: post #196
rickdeckard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.

Yes, but it's not support wagging the dog, If they sell a NAS, the customer adds drives to it and already runs into issues requiring support, it creates cost which becomes part of a product problem.

In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#225

Post by dangus »

joshstrange wrote: post #3

Thank 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.

You should still look at alternatives. A NAS company that is willing to consider a move like this even once is not a trustworthy company.

It shows you that their management is probably not making the right decisions in other areas as well.

I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots and other maintenance.

On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#226

Post by potato3732842 »

mixermachine wrote: post #205
potato3732842 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latt…

We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3 (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface. No product is perfect but these interfaces are very well tested and billions of machines run as expected with them. The move from them was purely for money reasons.

Based on my experience dealing with SFPs I highly suspect they looked at their bug tracker and concluded that 13% of the sketch-ass mystery drives were causing 50% of their labor expenditure.

And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.

Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#227

Post by mrob »

reactordev wrote: post #201
jacquesm wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive t…

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#228

Post by reactordev »

deelowe wrote: post #208
reactordev wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.

Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one.

The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology.

Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#229

Post by b3lvedere »

AJRF wrote: post #48

They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them. Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.

Meh.. i do kinda forgive them. They tried, they lost, they reveserd their decision and hope to keep their customers (read:sales) happy. There are plenty of companies which would double or triple down their bad decisions and flatly tell the customer is the problem.

Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we could not put in any harddisk we'd wanted, but most of our customers did not really care, so we didn't as well. If you absolutely need superb storage you should stop using NASes anyway and get a far better (but more expensive) solution.

Then again if i myself want some NAS functionality, i'd fire up a Debian with Samba using any hardware i want.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#230

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

AJRF wrote: post #48

They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them. Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.

And they might only be backtracking to get a few more sales until re-applying the restrictions, feeling justified because that's how the devices were originally advertised.

The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your device if you catch it in time").

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