Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs • Hacker News Board

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#431

Post by raintrees » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #179

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…

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…

I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#432

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #372

j45 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure. Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.

Nah, not really. They already have a compatibility page of known-good drives and they recommend people stick to it. They could also have an incompatibility list showing known-bad drives, and alerting if you install one of them. If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don’t blame Toyota. But if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase wouldn’t have…

In no way am I sticking up for Synology. I'm not a customer of Synology.

Customers should have absolute control over what drives they want, it's their choice to put crappy tires on their car or not.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#433

Post by yoyohello13 » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #375

jghn wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!

As another anecdote, I've had a cheap Synology NAS for 6yrs now and I only really touch it once a year to make sure everything is up to date.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#434

Post by grues-dinner » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #371

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…

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated. The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That th…

> Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.

Sounds very much like "doing a Ratner": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#435

Post by yabones » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #412

Aurornis wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated. The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That th…

Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions? > Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me. Indeed. I believe that if you're a shareholder em…

Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#436

Post by ryukafalz » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #363

nottorp wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd. For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't. But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... And three, the latest Pis have started to require ac…

> But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... You say that like it’s a mystery why people by then but NUCs are fantastic little PCs. The power adapter is just hidden under the desk whereas the NUC is sat on the desk (or behind the monitor/TV). It’s the same as with Mac Minis and Apple TV. And other devices of that ilk.

I've had mixed experiences with my NUC. It has what I think is a firmware bug that causes display output to fail if you connect a monitor after boot. Very annoying if it ever drops off the network for some reason.

There seems to be a Windows-only update tool available that might fix it, but that's rather inconvenient when it's used as a server running Linux! No update available as a standalone boot disk or via LVFS. So I haven't gotten it fixed yet because doing so involves getting a second SSD, taking my server offline to install Windows on it, just to run a firmware update.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#437

Post by StillBored » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

This is a mixed bag. As someone who worked in the storage industry for ~10 years, there are a lot of poorly defined behaviors that are vendor/model specific and I can see how its easier to just pick a particular model, test it and declare it the blessed version having done similar stuff myself.

Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a disk should be replaced, or the user warned about possible impending doom, to simple things like how one sets cache WT/WB and flushes the caches (range based flushing is a thing, doesn't always work, etc) for persistence.

OTOH, much of this is just 'product maturity' because it is possible to have a blessed set of SMART/etc attributes that are understood a certain way and test to see if they exist/behave as expected and warn the user with something like "this drive doesn't appear to report corrected read errors in a way that our predictive failure algorithm can use". Or "This drive appears to be a model that doesn't persist data with FUA when the caches are set to write back, putting your data at risk during a power failure, would you still like to enable writeback?"

And these days with the HD vendors obfuscating shingled drives or even mixing/matching the behavior in differing zones its probably even worse.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#438

Post by devilbunny » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

DerpHerpington wrote: post #347

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 this level of out of touch with their market that gives me zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times according to their package manager, rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They des…

> killed their Videostation product ... rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders

YES, yes, a million times yes.

Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#439

Post by mikepurvis » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #179

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…

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…

I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago, and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically unusable on the anemic CPU it came with— it would spend multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for a few gigs of digital photos.

After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.

I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#440

Post by f4uCL9dNSnQm » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

computersuck wrote: post #43

Yes! Resist the enshittoscene!

I wonder what will they try next. I guess they are really jealous of cloud service providers - that get recurring income - instead of just one time hardware purchase.

"You have connected additional HDD. Please select which bay you want to use or try our 'Synology Super Subscription' to use both drives at the same time".