I dislike writing these articles, but here we are. According to HardwareLuxx, Synology is on a rough course with generations-old sub-par NAS hardware and now appears to be locking its NAS units to its own branded hard drives in its upcoming 2025 Plus models. This is a shame since a few years ago, Synology had neat hardware.
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
In 2021, we covered how Synology launched an Enterprise Hard Drive Line and started locking Drives for New NASes. That was in a higher-end segment. Realistically, it became hard to recommend that type of solution. QNAP and iXsystems (TrueNAS) pushed ahead with ZFS support and better hardware, but it did not impact the majority of users.
Translating a relevant bit for our readers.
“…since an estimated hard drive health report is essential for both private and professional use, this creates a compulsion to use Synology’s own or equivalent drives. Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled. There are also restrictions on the creation of storage pools, as well as, of course, support in the event of failures, which are not further specified.” (Source: Translated from HardwareLuxx)
Changing this to require Synology branded drives in the “Plus” line is silly. There are only a handful of hard drive manufacturers, and Synology does not have anywhere near the scale to compete at hard drive manufacturing. Consolidation in the hard drive industry was driven by huge economies of scale benefits. Without scale, and a library of patents, it is a very hard market to enter. As a result, Synology must be simply re-branding drives. Labeling drives as a “Dell”, “NetApp”, “HPE”, or other big vendor drive has been going on for years (decades?) on both the hard drive and SSD sides of storage. Realistically, there is usually very little that gets changed in vendor firmware from the drive manufacturer firmware. When we see some changes, it is usua
31 Comments
benoau
Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH, this year's upgrades were to like ~2020 tech and some of these models won't be upgraded again until 2030!
The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I've previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I'll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardware options that exist for NAS.
nodesocket
My next NAS is going to be Ubiquiti UNAS Pro . 7 drive bays for $499. Can’t beat it.
bob1029
Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home. I have completely lost patience with maintaining local hardware like this. If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective. This feels like smuggling cargo on a federation starship, which is way cooler to me than filling up a bunch of local disks.
I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.
Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.
dostick
Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space.
The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensitised to warnings.
I submitted this to them at least four times, and they reply that this is fine, it’s already decided to be like that, so we will not change it.
Another stupid thing is that notifications about low disk space are sent to you via email and push until it’s about 30 GB free. Then free space goes below 30 GB and reaches zero, yet notifications are not sent anymore.
My multiple reports about this issue always responded along the lines of “it’s already done like that, so we will not change it”.
Most modern, especially software companies, choose not to fix relatively small but critical problems, yet they actively employ sometimes hundreds of customer support yes-people whose job seems to be defusing customer complaints. Nothing is ever fixed anymore.
PeterStuer
I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.
kotaKat
I'm going to buck the nerds and say I wish Drobo was back. I love my 5N, but had to retire it as it began to develop Type B Sudden Drobo Death Syndrome* and switch out to QNAP.
It was simple, it just worked, and I didn't have to think about it.
* TB SDDS – a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three 'types' of SDDS I and a colleague discovered – "Type A" power management IC failures, "Type B" unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and "Type C" failed batteries. Type B units' SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.
AndrewDucker
What's better for running Plex?
Assuming I want 4 drives and something that can transcode multiple files in real time.
aborsy
Can you “btrfs send” snapshots in a raid array in DSM to a Linux server?
If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system.
I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.
ksec
I think they are on their way to exit the consumer market. Their linux kernel is old. And DSM dont update the kernel.
codecraze
I have a 8 bay nas from synology and i’m now considering a move out when i’ll have to replace my nas.
Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.
nichos
I wish 1 or more HD manufacturers would get together and sell a NAS that runs TrueNAS on it. Or even an existing NAS manufacturer (UGreen, etc)
All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.
ziml77
Hopefully they don't start pushing this change to older products. I don't want to have to replace my NAS, but if I ever do, it certainly won't be with another Synology product, even if they walk this decision back.
mgsouth
I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers.
However…
Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.
[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)
rpcope1
Honestly given how lots and lots of things just build on Debian, seems easier to me to just use an off the shelf older Supermicro motherboard with an plain IT mode SAS HBA and something like an Enthoo Pro case and just call it a day running stock Debian. Certainly far few surprises and bullshit.
kyrofa
> When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon.
In a way this is a valid point, but it also feels a bit silly. Do people really make use of devices like this and then try to overnight a drive when something fails? You're building an array– you're designing for failure– but then you don't plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.
dmoy
I bought a Synology last year and then had to return it because it didn't support two of the enterprise drive model revisions I have (but worked with the others, even one that's the same make).
For the same hardware cost I got a random mATX box that can hold 2.5x more hard drives, a much much beefier CPU, 10x the RAM, and an nvme. And yea it took an hour to set up trueNAS in a docker image, but w/e.
Same exact hard drives working perfectly fine in fedora. If it weren't for hard drive locking I'd have stuck with the Synology box out of laziness.
romanhn
Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.
senectus1
I have a DS920+ for home lab purposes that I'm very happy with, but this sort of bullshit is going to make me drop that brand from any future recommendations or purchases.
I'm likely to go down the BYO NAS path going forward. Just a stupid customer punishing policy. A real slap in the face.
I bought a N100 based device from AliExpress that supports two drives for my backup server. its a cracker and runs debian wonderfully. Very smooth and responsive. runs quietly and transfers data fairly quickly.
Renaud
Synology isn't about the NAS hardware and OS. Once setup, it doesn't really matter as long as your config is reliable and fast, so there are many competitive options to move to.
The killer feature for me is the app ecosystem. I have a very old 8-bay Synology NAS and have it setup in just a few clicks to backup my dropbox, my MS365 accounts, my Google business accounts, do redundant backup to external drive, backup important folders to cloud, and it was also doing automated torrent downloads of TV series.
These apps, and more (like family photos, video server, etc), make the NAS a true hub for everything data-related, not just for storing local files.
I can understand Synology going this way, it puts more money in their pocket, and as a customer in professional environment, I'm ok to pay a premium for their approved drives if it gives me an additional level of warranty and (perceived) safety.
But enforcing this accross models used by home or soho users is dumb and will affect the good will of so many like me, who both used to buy Synology for home and were also recommending/purchasing the brand at work.
This is a tech product, don't destroy your tech fanbase.
I would rather Synology kept a list of drives to avoid based on user experience, and offer their Synology-specific drives with a generous warranty for pro environments. Hel, I would be ok with sharing stats about drive performance so they could build a useful database for all.
They way they reduce the performance of their system to penalise non-synology rebranded drives is bascially a slap in the face of their customers. Make it a setting and let the user choose to use the NAS their bought to its full capabilities.
j45
Spot on.
I’d add that mandatory drives when they aren’t the experts in it making drives a bad move.
Maybe other manufacturers are the way.
emmelaich
I have some sympathy for this. With the disasters of the WD 'Green' series and the recent revelations on how used disks were being sold for new. Synology doesn't want to be lumped with other companies problems.
They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.
7bit
I will never use their plus line, but I care about the company, so this is really sad. They provided security updates over a very long time. Recently they cut automatic updates (not updates at all) for older models to make it inconvenient to run older models. Now this. With that development, I'm not sure that I will buy my next NAS from them.
locusm
The only moat Synology have is their software. How far is Truenas from catching up?
trumpeta
The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR "filesystem", where you can continue adding heterogeneously sized disks after constructing the FS and it will make the most use possible out of the extra capacity in the new disks.
When I researched it ZFS did not yet have the resizing feature merged, now it does, though I think it is still not able to use this extra space.
I'm wondering if anybody has any better recommendations given the requirement of being able to add storage capacity without having to completely recreate the FS.
niuzeta
I've been very happy with my Synology NAS that has served me so well, but forcing this sort of vender lock-in is simply unacceptable.
I suppose this means I'll have to look for some other solution.
The problem is – I've formatted my drives with SHR(Synology Hybrid RAID – essentially another exclusive lock-in) and this would mean a rather painful transition to the new drive, since this now involves getting a whole new drives to format and move data to, rather than a simple lift-and-drop.
Ugh.
system2
We've deployed Synology across multiple client environments for almost a decade, and it's been an incredibly reliable platform. Barring the usual hard drive failures (which are inevitable over time), we've had zero issues with SSO integration, expanding arrays with expansion units, seamless hardware upgrades, or the application layer. It just works.
That’s why I’m hoping Synology rethinks its position. Swapping out trusted, validated drives for unknowns introduces risk we’d rather avoid, especially since most of our client setups now run on SSDs. If compatibility starts breaking, that’s a serious operational concern.
badmonster
How might Synology’s decision to lock its 2025 Plus NAS models to only support its own branded hard drives impact long-term reliability, upgradeability, and customer trust—especially when compared to more open alternatives like QNAP or TrueNAS?
GuestFAUniverse
Good. Will stop collègues from buying that crap.
Managing an aging fleet of those is a PITA.
Why bother with a crippled Linux, if a full-blown, real OS is available on better hardware anyway.
jwr
I am very disappointed to see that. I've been using Synology NASs for the last, oh, 14 years or so, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. Most importantly, their software works and requires nearly zero maintenance in the long term. I care a lot about this: I have too many things in my life that require my attention and impose on me. I am OK with paying more for things that Just Work, and Synology has been in that category.
The locking-down is disappointing and unnecesary. Sure, give me the option of using "certified" drives, but don't take away the option of using any drive I have.
404NotBoring
So if I don’t use Synology’s own drives, my NAS gets slower on purpose? That sounds kinda unfair?
bayindirh
I personally thank Synology for removing themselves from my NAS shopping list and ceding the top of the list to Unraid.