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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#351

Post by mguerville »

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…

Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#352

Post by rzwitserloot »

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…

It's an interesting lesson.

I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:

* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.

* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.

So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.

If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.

But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#353

Post by etempleton »

Whenever I hear about a company making a decision like this I no longer trust said company. It says the company no longer is thinking about their product or consumers at all. Anyone who cared about either even a little bit would never even consider such an idea.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#354

Post by mixermachine »

potato3732842 wrote: post #226
mixermachine wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't SFP evolve pretty heavily here? The newest version is from --2022-- 2016. There are also quite high data-rates involved. SATA and Smart are stable for a long time. Smart has some special commands depending on manufacturer but the core set of functions always work.

I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems. "Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."

They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives". TBH this is quite sad. I recommended Synology to some people before... Feels like I have to walk back on my word.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#355

Post by Larrikin »

There needs to be more of a name and shame culture if companies want to actually win consumers back. Synology as a company did the right thing by reversing this decision, but I still can't trust them unless I know the executives and product managers that introduced this idea and executed it are fired. If they are still lurking around the company, these money over consumers psychopaths are just going to introduce another horrible thing once sales start to tick back up.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#356

Post by viridian »

mort96 wrote: post #193
yason wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

At that point, you have essentially made it a policy already that you only support Synology-branded drives.

There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is actually significantly better for the user than just straight up preventing the use of non matching proprietary drives.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#358

Post by wat10000 »

mort96 wrote: post #274
Uvix wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We only support Synology-branded drives” would have gone over a lot better, because we could have used non-symbology drives without support. Instead they actively prevented non-Synology drives from working.

It would have been way better than what they did, I agree. However, it would've been pretty shitty from a user perspective still. I'd be pretty angry as a customer if customer support just refuses to help me with anything unless I buy Synology-branded drives.

Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components. It's not realistic for them to support those components. The standard approach is to support the aspects they can control, and the customer is on their own for problems that involve the third-party component. Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours. It works with ours? OK, our job is done, go talk to the company that made your charger.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#359

Post by jghn »

leokennis wrote: post #290
cm2187 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2). So in my mind I was already thinking of m…

I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project". DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.

Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.

Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.

Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.

All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#360

Post by sixothree »

leokennis wrote: post #290
cm2187 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2). So in my mind I was already thinking of m…

I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project". DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.

It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM. It really is something special. It's worth a small premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the concerns as everyone else here and will be considering other options.
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