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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#501

Post by StillBored »

beAbU wrote: post #451
StillBored wrote: post #437

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…

So initially I wanted to give you a knee-jerk response about how Synology could have gone with a warning rather than an outright ban. Then I read the article... It seems that this was never an outright ban, but non-blessed drives either generated a warning or they had reduced functionality. What TFA fails to mention is what this "reduced functionality" is. If it's something like RAID rebuilds take longer because othe…

I don't know the details of the warnings either, but from the original articles it sounds like they had moved to a QVL list that didn't include 3rd party devices, only their rebranded ones. Which is possibly because they got seagate/wd/etc to tweak something in the firmware. Which isn't unheard of for large vendors. And it is somewhat fair, qualifying drive persistence is probably some ugly unit test that takes hours to run, and requires being able to pull power on the drive at certain points. So the warning ends up being the equivalent of "we don't know if this drive works, lots of them don't we are going to disable this aggressive cache algorithm to assure your data is persisted" and that kills the performance vs the qualified drive. But because some non technical PM gets involved the warning shown to the user is "This drive isn't qualified".

The other take though, was that it was just a $ grab by rebranding and charging more for drives that were functionally the same. Which for logical people made sense because otherwise, why not say why their drives were better. But sometimes the lawyers get involved and saying "our rebranded drives are the only ones on the market that work right when we do X, Y, Z" is frowned on.

Hard to really know without some engineer actually clarifying.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#502

Post by jacquesm »

ryandrake wrote: post #470
crote wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reckon the issue is more in replacement than transient data loss: what are you going to do when you can't find a replacement controller card, or it only available at ludicrous prices? With a proprietary on-disk format you can't exactly hook them up to any random controller and expect it to work: either you find a new one from the same controller family, or your data is gone .

Replacing your RAID controller is already major maintenance, so there's going to be downtime. I wouldn't be opposed to just wiping the drives and restoring from the latest backup. I routinely do this anyway, just to have assurance that my backups are working.

And a risk! I've had this on a premium machine put together specifically for that purpose and when the raid controller died something got upset to the point that even with a new raid controller we could not recover the array. No big deal, it was one of several backups, but still, I did not expect that to happen.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#503

Post by ncr100 »

metaphor wrote: post #430
Fischgericht wrote: post #264

NOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read: https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...

> Last updated:Jul 30, 2025 Appears to be stale documentation.

Incompetency.

Good to get this fact about the Synology organization.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#504

Post by xp84 »

xp84 wrote: post #370
reactordev wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed. For $300 I could get an ITX to run. So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.

An ITX isn’t the competitor for a Pi. I’d suggest a USFF prebuilt. I use an HP Elitedesk and Dell and Lenovo each have similar tiny PCs. They’re nearly silent or completely silent, and half the size of a Mac Mini. Cost is about $150 for hardware that is more than enough for me, plus they can have 1-2 SSDs and a hard drive inside the case.

Clarification: They're about half the height of the OLD Mac Mini. Better comparison: They're the size of a typical hardcover book if you chopped it to be square.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#505

Post by CamperBob2 »

fasteo wrote: post #25

> 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.

An older Synology model, in my case. I just bought a DS1522+ for this very reason. Haven't even provisioned it yet.

So, thanks, guys, I guess.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#506

Post by jacquesm »

pdimitar wrote: post #216
deelowe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.

Power consumption is a major draw (pun intended) to keep Pis and other SBCs of that kind of form factor employed.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#507

Post by calenti »

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…

Complacency about customers requires a monopoly, which Synology does not have.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#508

Post by al_borland »

QuiEgo wrote: post #462
al_borland wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent. I use iCloud Photos for my photos, so I don’t have to manage storage on my phone, while always having access to everything. I quite like it. I also have a Synology NAS for other things. A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me to also backup my photos to the NAS, because I have no idea how Apple is backing things up. I might be…

The nightmare scenario is that Apple locks you out of your Apple ID for some reason. Luckily, Apple also provides a pretty easy backup path that lets you have a local copy, if you have a Mac and a NAS: - setup your Mac’s photos app and iCloud to download everything locally - setup Time Machine backups from your Mac to a NAS That’s it. You get 3-2-1 (your Mac, iCloud, and your NAS) and can get a copy of your data even…

I thought about going this route, but I have 73GB of photos currently, which will only continue to grow over time.

While not the biggest library, it’s approaching the point where I’d need to start buying upgraded storage on any new Mac I buy, or use external storage for my Photos library. One of the things I like about iCloud Photos is my computer doesn’t need much local storage, Photos will manage it, downloading full res images on demand and purging them as needed.

I’d want a backup solution that is optimized for this, to allow for backups of the originals, without having to have them all downloaded all the time.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#509

Post by b3lvedere »

Jaepa wrote: post #387
b3lvedere wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They did that though. They have doubled down and told the users they were wrong & that this was a needed Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-removes...

I stand corrected. Thank you. I was under the assumption you could use any type of drive from any brand now again. It appears i assumed wrong. Just use any SSD brand, but forced to use Synology branded platter HDDs is not quite acceptable.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#510

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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