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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#561

Post by leakycap »

bapak wrote: post #366
avianlyric wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so. Well clearly enough of Synologys customers decided they did have the time to buy commodity HDDs and slap them into a competitors product, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion. As GP said, Synology may want to believe they’re in the business of selling premium priced HDDs, with a side salad of NASs. But it tur…

> it turns out Correct. I never said that it was the right choice, I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make. Lots of companies substantially raise prices and still come up winning. Netflix doubled their subscription cost since 2008, but market cap did 100x and subscribers are 30x. They even offer fewer good movies than they used to. You may still hate them, but their wallets don't care about your feeli…

> I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make

Valid means well grounded - read this thread, it was not a well-grounded decision

Valid means producing the desired outcome or effective - if this was the case, they would not be rolling it back

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#562

Post by gopalv »

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…

> would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?

Technically competent doesn't always mean empathetic.

The decisions can sometime look like the xkcd cartoon about scientists[1].

[1] - https://xkcd.com/242/

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#563

Post by dstroot »

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…

In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the leadership who did this not being impacted or punished is even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it’s much worse for morale.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#564

Post by rconti »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #230
AJRF wrote: post #48

They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them. Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.

And they might only be backtracking to get a few more sales until re-applying the restrictions, feeling justified because that's how the devices were originally advertised. The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandato…

What I don't get is, what's the point of doing it quietly? Bad publicity hurt your sales.

How is sneaking in a fix and hoping people notice going to help sales?

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#565

Post by beart »

drnick1 wrote: post #552

Are these devices really better than a Samba server on a plain Linux distro? I run one on a retired gaming PC and access it remotely through a Wireguard tunnel. I feel like any proprietary solution is going to be far less elegant or flexible.

Difficult to answer your question. Sounds like you just want a simple network share, so obviously would not be taking advantage of the other features these systems offer.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#566

Post by qmmmur »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #389
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…

Apple uses a mix of Google Cloud and AWS, as well as their own data centers. As for Google and AWS, they are using multi geographic redundancy, and I can only assume they do that for their own data centers as well. The data in the 3rd party data centers is encrypted. That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data center, but in multiple data centers,…

I just backup the entire photo library with kopia. Is that as good as what you do?

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#567

Post by beart »

stego-tech wrote: post #304

Too little, too late. The second they made that decision, I struck Synology as a partner for both my homelab (gotta replace the DS1019+ at some point) and in my purchasing capacity at work. That was some NetApp-grade BS and I wasn’t going to tolerate it. I’m just glad the NAS scene saw the opening left by Synology’s boneheaded decision-making and capitalized on it. Unraid and TrueNAS have stormed the battlefield and…

I started with a Synology. I still have it running, but it is only used for backups now. My second system was a repurposed PC running Proxmox with various services containerized. I was impressed with it. However, I got to tinkering with Unraid and really love it. It is what synology tries to be, but better in every way (IMO).

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#568

Post by jauer »

pabs3 wrote: post #311
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…

Can you run a standard Linux distro on them? Is their OS custom or based on OpenWRT or something else?

Trivially on their (and qnap's) amd64 systems at least. There are some quirks where they are more similar to an embedded system than a PC, but it's not a big deal. Things like console over UART (unless you add a UART) and fan control not working out of the box, so you set it to full speed in bios or mess with config.

Debian has docs on installing on at least one model of their arm boxes: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology

I run Debian on a few different models of qnap because their hardware occupies a niche of compact enclosure, low noise, and many drives.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#569

Post by mort96 »

wat10000 wrote: post #358
mort96 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components.

Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.

> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.

That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#570

Post by surlyville »

jghn wrote: post #359
leokennis wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

Same here. Still rocking a DS415+ from 2015. Had to solder a 100ohm resistor to work around the Intel Atom C2000 flaw. Has had a new set of spinning rust in that time too. It's also connected to UPS so will power down if there's an extended outage. Stuck on DSM 7.1 but it does the job.
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