I wonder what took them so long to realize that their policy would have the result that it did. I'm glad they've reversed the policy, and I hope that they've learned something.
Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
581–590 of 679 posts
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Most of the time, customer support finds out about things product did from customers. "Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"
> "Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?" Because you wouldn't read it anyway.
Let's be honest: because some developer forgot to send a message somewhere
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#583Earlier 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…
This works as long as you have enough storage locally. Our photo library is ~3TB split over 2 users, and while you could theoretically use an external SSD for storage, that kinda cuts down on mobility. You could leave the drive attached and drag it around, or detach it and lose access to your photos on the go.
For a long time, I had a Mac mini running 24/7, where each user was logged in (via Remote Desktop), and that would synchronize photos to an external drive, and the Mac would then make backups (via Arq) to my NAS as well as a remote location.
I don’t count the Mac copy in my 3-2-1 as it is basically sync (each side, iCloud and Mac, are sync), and without versioning, ie APFS snapshots, if one side goes bad, so does the other.
I’ve since switched to using Parachute for day to day backups, and every ~6 months I make a manual full export of the photo library in case Parachute missed something.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#584If you're looking for a really good alternative: Supermicro makes large chassis that will hold a fair number of drives (I have one that will take drives). They're usually sold cheap on ebay and other such sites when they're written off. If you're willing to replace a couple of fans and do your own software installation they're unbeatable for value-for-money, and they last just about forever. I've still got two Synolo…
Same setup here with a Supermicro Denverton board except in an iStarUSA chassis that I got brand new: https://istarusa.com/product/product-detail/?brand=istarusa&...
Though it looks like their SFF-8087 miniSAS chassis are EOL and soon replaced with SFF-8643 HD-miniSAS equivalents: https://istarusa.com/product/product-list/?brand=istarusa&se...
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Can’t say anything about UGREEN, but UNAS with Unifi identity endpoint is magic on a Mac. You install it, sign in with your UI credentials, and it automatically mounts all shares you have access to whenever you’re on a network where the NAS is reachable.
It works on my LAN, but also over my site to site VPN from my summerhouse, as well as my road warrior wireguard VPN.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#586When 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…
If their branded hard drives are so good, they needn't be afraid of their customers having a choice.
If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them.
Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope". I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one st…
Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being crazily overpriced.
The sales team should be able to sell the value proposition using hard facts.
"The official drives have a MTBF which is X longer which saves you Y amount of time and Z dollars, but the choice and the risk is up to you."
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS. I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage. ----- As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ab…
Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
Hot swap drives are necessary on data centers where you don't want to have to pull the whole server and open the top cover just to replace a disk.
But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're going to resync the array anyways.
I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and reliable storage in a very small footprint.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#589The decision to restrict 3rd party harddrives may be part of the reason why sales (allegedly) plummet, but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part. Synology has been resting on the laurels for years. They had a "hit" with DSM 6, then did mostly nothing for a decade, released DSM 7, and again, nothing but minor things since. On the hardware side of things, they're mostly still using decade old hardware,…
>>> but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part. It's a NAS. It just needs to be reliable.
There are plenty of NAS boxes out there with better specs, lower power consumption, faster networking, and half the price.
Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.
In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.
Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).
And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.
If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).
Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.
The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Whe…
SMR drives aren't defective though. They have a capacity and they are capable of storing at that capacity. They just can't keep up with the throughout requirements of a nas. And remember the WD SMR scandal was because they weren't being forthcoming about that limitation. I fully support Synology's move to lock it drives. I think it's the tech crowd that got it wrong... mostly. Synology should have sweetened the deal and along with the lock-in, offered cheaper prices with proof of purchase of the Disk Station.