Not super different to buying a server from Dell, HP etc. Very different target market however.
Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
251–260 of 679 posts
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#252> According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced. What did NAS customers purchase instead? I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.
Change Synology with HP, NAS with printer and HDD with ink cartridge. How does that sound like?
Like a good reason to not by an HP printer.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#253It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry standard expandable memory and storage.
From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.
That's correct AFAIK, but software like Plex and Jellyfin work just fine if you store your media on a separate machine. For the price gap between the Synology NAS and the UniFi UNAS you could buy a cheap machine to run some workloads on over the network. Even better since the UNAS has very good connectivity out of the box (10GbE) that I figure it will basically always be bottlenecked on the HDD speeds anyways. Maybe…
I don’t disagree with any of this. But I have a few non-tech savvy friends (and particularly older folks) who just want a clever box they can plug in and it will do stuff - even if it’s a bit clunky. I wonder how much of the Synology market people like that represent.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
The printer market is a cartel with everyone pulling the same bullshit. DIYing an affordable and performant printer is out of reach for the individual. Printer ink is not a commodity otherwise. Consumers don't really have alternatives. Desktop NAS market is very different.
> Desktop NAS market is very different. This was the first step or attempt to change that.
The thing is, you can't set up a cartel unilaterally. For this to work, they would need to get not only the other NAS appliance manufacturers on board (who clearly didn't and happily took the business that they were losing), but basically the whole PC and server hardware market.
(I think some comments elsewhere in the chain got it right: they were calculating that they had enough brand lock-in and non-technical buyers who would not have much choice, as opposed to a largely technical userbase who could set up any number of options but were choosing them because they were both reasonable value and low maintenance)
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#256I wonder if that's related to UniFi pushing into that market for consumers (https://www.ui.com/integrations/network-storage) recently. It's still not there yet as there's no way to run containers etc. on the appliance itself but this surely will come within the next 1-2 years.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The RPI CM5…
The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...
[1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.
Synology photos is garbage... it does do one thing ok which is backup photos. The software stack of usability is severely missing. So they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of it well. In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only does storage.
Agree! Though to be clear I’m not saying it’s necessarily amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem to like it!
I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line. Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied w…
I’ve worked in tech support at all levels. At most companies it doesn’t matter what customer service is happy or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given. Customer support as an organization’s opinion isn’t generally valued at most companies. Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy…
That's also my experience.
That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#260Earlier 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…
Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.