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

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#621

Post by j45 » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #590

kstrauser wrote: post #532

Earlier 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…

Incorrect.

Western Digital deceptively sold and charged a premium for the WD Red drives sold as NAS drives that were CMR, when they were not.

Western Digital didn't withhold anything about SMR being good or bad.

Western Digital confesses some WD Red Drives use SMR without disclosure:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds...

I know several folks who bought these drives as NAS drives, for NAS use, when they were not all the same. Folks could have just bought SMR drives from WD, but specifically bought NAS drives.

Western Digital's denial, and the fact it took a class action lawsuit, were enough that WD no longer sells WD RED, only WD Red+ and WD Red Pro.

SMR drives don't work well for NAS'. SMR is useful for things other than NAS storage which is on all the time.

Rebuilding a NAS because things overlap so much takes a lot longer with SMR drives, compared to CMR. SMR drives used in NAS formation seem to fail more too.

Building any kind of NAS with SMR drives is asking for trouble and pain. I guess SMR drives could be proactively replaced, would need to factor that into the cost / tco.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#622

Post by thoroughburro » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

pfexec wrote: post #472

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…

Would you say the same thing about Apple? The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice. Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it. The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).

Synology has equivalent competition. Apple doesn’t.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#623

Post by alsetmusic » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

mapontosevenths wrote: post #262

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…

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.

I started with FreeNAS or whatever flavor of it existed well over a decade ago. It was enough hassle that I went Synology because the stuff I like tinkering with isn't the storage of my most important data. Everything I do with NUCs, Pis, VMs, etc is somewhat ephemeral in that it's all backed up multiple times and locations.

I spent five hours debugging a strange behavior in my shell with some custom software this morning and submitted a bug report to a software vendor that was not the expected cause of the issue. I feel great about it. I used to feel great about my Synology NAS, too.

Qnap, Ugreen, whatever else, we'll see when my current model is due for replacement. Synology will have to perform pretty much miracles before then for me to consider them again after three generations of their hardware that were all very satisfactory. What a major mistake.

They weren't perfect, but they were perfect for my needs. Not anymore.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#624

Post by kstrauser » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

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…

No, it was a pretty complete ban. From a reputable reviewer[0]:

> New Installations Blocked for Non-Verified Drives

> As discussed in our NASCompares coverage and testing videos, attempting to initialise the DS925+ with hard drives that are not on the 2025 series compatibility list will block you from even starting DSM installation.

and

> Expanding Existing Storage Pools with Unverified Drives is Blocked

> Another key limitation to note is that you cannot expand an existing storage pool using unverified drives — even if your system was initialized using fully supported drives.

and

> To test RAID recovery, one of the three IronWolf drives in the migrated SHR array was removed, placing the system into a degraded state. We then inserted a fresh 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive.

> Result: DSM detected the new drive but refused to initiate RAID rebuild, citing unsupported media.

You could pull all of your drives from an older Synology and put them in the new device, but you couldn't add drives to the volume or replace crashed drives. And if you were starting with a brand new NAS, you couldn't even initialize it when using 3rd party drives.

I'm OK with a warning notice. I'm not even remotely OK with this.

By the way, their official drive compatibility list for the DS923+[1] shows dozens of supported 3rd-party drives. The same guide for the DS925+[2], an incremental hardware update, shows 0. So if you bought a bunch of drives off their official support list, they're useless in newer models. Apparently a Seagate IronWolf was perfectly fine in 2023 and a complete dud in 2025.

Oh, and Synology only sells HDDs up to 16TB in size[3], and they only have up to 12TB drives (for $270) in stock today. That price will get you a 16TB IronWolf Pro off Amazon. If you have cash to spend, you can buy a 28TB IronWolf Pro there, which is 2.3x bigger than the largest Synology you can order from the first-party store today.

[0] https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-2025-nas-series-3rd-p...

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=drive...

[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=drive...

[3] https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/store#product-storag...

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#625

Post by blindriver » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

Their biggest sin in my opinion as a multi-Synology-NAS-owner is their 2025 generation of NASes didn't have a CPU upgrade. I was ready and waiting to get the ds1825+ and when I saw that it had the same CPU as the ds1821+, the same as 4 years back, I gave up on them.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#626

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

phoenix3200 wrote: post #579

crazygringo wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. Recovered how? As far as I know, like many electronics companies, they don't do repairs period. If an enclosure fails under warranty, they replace it. They don't repair it. So if your NAS motherboard died out of warranty and they no longer sold that model, it's not surprising they recommended you buy the current version of that model. So I don't know what you were expecting? Hardware dies. What di…

As best as I could understand, the hardware wasn't dead. It was "soft bricked" due to no fault of my own. And they wouldn't stand behind their product and instead insisted I upgrade to a newer and less capable product. No, I wasn't expecting replacement hardware. I was expecting support for a product that they were still releasing software for.

How was it soft bricked? Is that a known thing, that everyone with that model, it stopped working? So you have good reason to believe that?

And if it wouldn't even turn on, what kind of support were you expecting to receive?

If a device that is out of warranty fails to turn on, there aren't many companies that are going to give it any support except to tell you to buy a new one.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#627

Post by blindriver » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:16 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #16

joshstrange wrote: post #3

Thank god they reversed course. I’m coming up on needing another NAS and I was not looking forward to digging through alternatives. I’ve run raw Linux servers, I’ve run UnRaid, and now I have Synology and it’s been the best “set it and forget it” solution yet. Yes, the hardware is overpriced but it works and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.

I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.) If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to s…

I don't think Unifi UNAS has the same functionality as Synology. From what I read, it's focused just for storage as opposed to letting you run things on it like Docker, Plex, etc. I have an extensive Unifi investment across multiple sites so I'm well versed in Unifi but I don't think it's the same use case for UNAS.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#628

Post by blindriver » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #184

saaaaaam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.

Synology photos is garbage... it does do one thing ok which is backup photos. The software stack of usability is severely missing. So they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of it well. In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only does storage.

I just went through a complete restore of my NAS from backup and then migration to a new NAS. It was flawlessly executed through Hyperbackup so I don't agree with you at all.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#629

Post by thoroughburro » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:20 PM UTC

8fingerlouie wrote: post #162

The 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,…

> as a Plex server

Well, Jellyfin. Plex pulled a Slymology long ago.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#630

Post by OptionOfT » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 10:35 PM UTC

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…

This really feels like they hired a study from one of the big 3 and this the recommendation they came up with.