Fantastic that people managed to make reverse (or even just postpone) this awful decision. A good example of people voting with their money!
Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
601–610 of 679 posts
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They're defective by design when advertised as NAS drives. It was impossible for them to work as users expected given their construction. It wasn't defective in the sense that there was a manufacturing flaw that made some of them fail, but in the sense that it was inherently unfit for purpose. If you design a car's brakes to fall off when they get hot so as to protect the braking system at the expense of the car, even if it works as designed, it's still defective.
I don't know how to reply to the rest. If you think it's a good idea for Synology to make their systems not work with even known-good drives from reputable manufacturers, I don't think there's likely to be a common ground we can find to discuss it further.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ve…
That really depends on the company. Comcast would tell me to reboot my computer even after it was clear their modem wasn't getting a signal. Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example. But if your phone only fails on one charger made by somebody else, and works otherwise, they're not going to help you fix the charger.
> Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example.
Not if they follow yason's guidance of:
> All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
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Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.
But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, just put together a TrueNAS system. Mine has been running for 10 years. Drive replacements and upgrades are so easy with ZFS.
I have been running TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) for ~10 years now and never had issues. There is the risk that TrueNAS gets rug pulled and no longer is free for non commercial use, but so far it has been fine.
The thing is, I'm still running FreeNAS 9, not even TrueNAS. If they rug pull, not only will there be forks, but the old versions should just continue to work!
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#605When 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…
Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are building their own NAS because they will just see the spec sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very performant to begin with.
And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#606When 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…
Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud serv…
I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because it's easy.
If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud serv…
I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because it's easy. If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS…
It is also competing for simple solutions like an old mac mini and DAS. Now that would truly be an "iphone" like experience for someone already in the mac ecosystem since time machine lets you choose another mac on LAN as a backup endpoint with little fuss, and now you can make use of Airdrop for mobile devices. AFAIK backing up to a linux box is not nearly so trivial at least with still using Time Machine.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not a fan of employee ownership. It's the antithesis of diversification. You're now depending on one company for both your salary and your investments. Work for a salary. Invest in a diversified portfolio that's not tied to your employer.
Being a partial owner of the company you work at doesn't preclude you from managing your own investments. Employee ownership doesn't mean an ESPP.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync" and equally silly.
It really isn't, though. 1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality 2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy. I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but…
I looked at all of those and they came nowhere near the convenience and software that Synology provides.
It's literally the "Why would you buy Dropbox when I can glue it together with rsync" level of ignorant comment, completely ignoring how behind most of those solutions like TrueNAS are in time cost.
Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valid, thanks. But to what degree? The light bulb that runs 18h a day in the kitchen likely draws the same power that my mini form factor Optiplex 3060 does. To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless. I am much more concerned about data center power usages, especially in the age of LLMs. Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept preaching we should stop using electric kettles because it's bad for…
Wait how did she suggest people heat water for tea/coffee instead? I've never heard an environmentalist attack electric kettles before.
She did not offer any alternatives. That was also a very funny element to her preaching. She saw a class of students and thought she can signal her virtues.
She was, shall we say, disappointed with the response.
Also this was some 15 years ago.