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

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#661

Post by xela79 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:14 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #216

deelowe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.

I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.

> Get some old i7 or Ryzen

power draw. running 24/7 it makes a huge difference in overall power usage, and by switching from a repurposed desktop mobo & cpu, to a dedicated low power saved me thousands in electricity costs every year.

that fact that in EU power isn't cheap... is also a main reason for keeping total power draw as low as possible.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#662

Post by itsoktocry » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:33 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…

>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?

Do you think there's some magical moral/ethical line that gets drawn between employees and executives, where the former are naturally "good" and the latter "bad"?

>Like Costco, employee and customer happiness first, profits after.

This is such a strange myth. Do you go to Costco? There's nothing great about the customer experience. It's a discount store of decent quality that pays the employees decent wages. It's better than Walmart and Amazon, but nobody dreams of working there.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#663

Post by itsoktocry » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:35 PM UTC

yabones wrote: post #435

toomuchtodo wrote: post #412

Earlier 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…

Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.

>They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.

We're going to need a fact-check on this. I'll bet the failure rate of co-ops is well beyond those of standard business structures.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#664

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:47 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #663

yabones wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.

> They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity. We're going to need a fact-check on this. I'll bet the failure rate of co-ops is well beyond those of standard business structures.

No, it's actually true, they are quite stable. What they lack though is outliers in terms of success. They tend to be quite conservative and as a consequence they are risk averse and tend to play it safe. For a high return you need a different appetite for risk. Of course the key to a different risk appetite is to be able to externalize the negatives of that risk but to be able to reap the rewards. Such asymmetric bets are at the root of most successful business empires, you'd never see them in a co-op.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#665

Post by jghn » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

Lammy wrote: post #644

ryandrake wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!

That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358…

That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since.

I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#666

Post by 8fingerlouie » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

thoroughburro wrote: post #629

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.

I have an old lifetime license, so I’m still using it. No issues at all. I also have a lifetime license for Emby but plex is way more polished.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#667

Post by Lammy » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

jghn wrote: post #665

Lammy wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358…

That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since. I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.

I swapped my dead C2750 (Supermicro A1SAi-2750F) board for my cold-spare C3558 (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F) and was right back running again. I guess if you're talking about an appliance it's a little different, but this was just my home firewall/router FreeBSD+PF+Jails machine.

And actually a good reminder for me to eBay up another cold spare, because I totally forgot to.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#668

Post by Arainach » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 11:57 PM UTC

reactordev wrote: post #635

Arainach wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.

The alternative is anything not Synology that can do NAS with SATA SSD or NVMe storage. That’s it. Anything more than that is in a class of enterprise servers that deserve its own discussion over a simple DS1522+

This is nonsense. Both a horse and a pickup truck can be used to pull a wagon, but no one seriously considers one an alternative to the other.

What you are describing is a hobby item for enthusiasts who want to enjoy tinkering, setting something crazy up and constantly debugging it. That is very much NOT the market of people who buy Synology products.

Synology is not a JBOD RAID. It is an appliance that does many things (storage, services, web access, etc.) and can automatically keep itself up to date with no additional contact necessary. It can be hooked up to a UPS for resilience. If you have a problem there are support forums and online articles. It can be synced to other Synology devices at other sites. Etc., etc.

A pile of RPi is none of that.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#669

Post by TheWookieDavid » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:11 AM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #663

yabones wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity.

> They might not be moonshots or unicorns, but they always have longevity. We're going to need a fact-check on this. I'll bet the failure rate of co-ops is well beyond those of standard business structures.

And you'd lose that bet. Co-ops have a survival rate way higher than those standard business structures. Not marginally higher, a lot higher.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#670

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

coisnepe wrote: post #240

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 someone else mentioned here, I'd wager a large part of Synology customers were people who'd have had the technical ability to setup their own NAS server but didn't want to bother, instead electing a "setup and forget" solution. I know that's who I was when I bought my first Syno DS several years ago. A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpr…

Yep. I was one of those. Started with QNAP, went to Synology because their stuff was more powerful for the price (Could run Docker stuff on it and upgrade memory)

Then it stopped booting and the light just blinked -> it happened to be close to Black Friday and I had been thinking about moving to a bespoke build with Unraid for a while. Pulled the trigger and dropped some cash on the problem.

Finally I found out the issue was a bad PSU: it kinda-sorta fails, a common problem, just enough to start booting the system but it fails when all the drives start up.

Bought a 3rd party PSU from Amazon and now it's my offsite backup.