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

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#531

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:49 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #339

mapontosevenths wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement. It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.

You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?

There are several drive tray cases for ITX and mATX that you can choose from. As for a Web GUI, you can get TruNAS Scale running relatively easily and there are other friendly options as well... so yes.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#532

Post by kstrauser » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:49 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #486

kstrauser wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your Toyota analogy doesn't hold up. If a customer puts SMR into their NAS, they are absolutely going to call Synology and complain. And they are going to have to re-explain this over and over because most people don't understand nascent HDD writing modes the way they do a vehicle tire. Even then, and appropriate analogy would be a tire that is cheap and new but refuses to spin above 25mph vehicle speed.

First, I don't think that's true. It could even be a FAQ on their website:

Q: Why is my brand new WD drive so slow in my NAS?

A: Because they lied to you and sold you junk. Here are the details...

It would be very easy to push the blame onto the vendor, where it belongs, because the defect is 100% with the drive and not at all with Synology. They don't have any control over it. Synology could even automate this. Whenever you insert a drive that isn't on their compatibility list, it prompts you with a message to make sure you want to proceed. They could very easily make that popup say something like "WARNING: THIS HARD DRIVE MODEL IS DEFECTIVE. WE STRONGLY URGE YOU TO REMOVE IT AND REPLACE IT WITH A DRIVE ON OUR COMPATIBILITY LIST."

But in any case, dealing with those support requests has to be way cheaper than the enormous financial and reputational loss they seem to be taking from this boneheaded move.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#533

Post by kstrauser » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #191

luca4 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and choosing a NAS brand is not something you change your mind like switching an android phone brand after 2-3years. This will stick quite a bit.

Yep. I’d already started moving things out of Docker on my DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology’s police shoved me toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device. It’s going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell. In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated…

(Amendment: Synology's policy, not police. If they have police, so far they haven't shown up at my house and told me to stop it.)

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#534

Post by mszcz » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

slowmovintarget wrote: post #426

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…

I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a happy decision so far. When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.

Same here. I recently started thinking about upgrading my Synology NAS to something newer they offered. When I read about the hard drive restrictions I thought no-one would be _that_ stupid. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be 100% true. I mean, what the fuck?

So, I started to look around and landed on Ugreen. They offered a NAS with more RAM (and the ability to upgrade), better connectivity (2.5GbE + 10 GbE), faster CPU, ability to install custom OSes (like TrueNAS), the OS resides on a separate, user-replaceable M.2 NVMe drive. All that for less money. Plus, since I control the OS, there's no way they can push some garbage it's-for-your-own-good-wink-wink update down my throat.

Bought it, didn't even start their OS and put TrueNAS Scale on it and I've never been happier. The caveat here is that I use my NAS as a NAS - no apps, no docker, no photos app. All that is on a separate box in the rack.

For me to ever trust Synology again I'd have to see some punitive action towards the idiots there that thought that whole HDD restrictions mess was a good idea. Even then, now that I've had a look around what else is available, I'm pretty sure I'll stay clear for a couple of years.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#535

Post by gertop » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

CryptoBanker wrote: post #525

jlarocco wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps that they can tell people to debug the problem themselves.

I've been using them for 4 years across enterprise level HDDs, personal HDDs, portable HDDs, never seen any issues or differences in experience other than speed.

From every success story like yours, how many people have tried it but given up and returned to a commercial solution because of a bug in OMV and absence of support except for a community forum filled with rabid (and usually clueless) fanboys?

I know I'm one of those people.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#536

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #192

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…

> That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.

[deleted]

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#537

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #496

lpcvoid wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well. Especially when you wan…

Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to provide a solution to users who are more interested in the verbs than the nouns. They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out o…

Once you have the case, an hour or two is pretty reasonable... you can even have your boot device pre-imaged while waiting on the case to get delivered.

Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying another Synology product.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#538

Post by kortilla » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:55 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…

Employees are just as stupid as the CEO. The CEO is an employee owner as well and has compensation very highly tied to company equity.

There are advantages to employee ownership. Preventing bad business decisions is not one of them.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#539

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #378

fortran77 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?

I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hy…

When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute, memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s) to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run everything in containers under TruNAS directly.

For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#540

Post by lostlogin » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #508

QuiEgo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

A large library becomes hard to manage.

The family one is somewhere around 759gb. Having this stored locally fills a decent size drive so it needs to be on network storage. Macs don’t love doing this, and somehow it’s difficult to keep a file share mounted 100% of the time on macOS (though it’s 100% reliable on an Ubuntu vm hosted on that same mac).

I concocted a vile script to download iCloud Photos and then save them to a Synology.

I’m looking hard at UGreen or Ubiquiti do my next NAS. The Synology thing where you can put same or larger drives in the array is probably the only bit I’d miss at this point.