Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

Synology isn&#x27;t about the NAS hardware and OS. Once setup, it doesn&#x27;t really matter as long as your config is reliable and fast, so there are many competitive options to move to.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I can understand Synology going this way, it puts more money in their pocket, and as a customer in professional environment, I&#x27;m ok to pay a premium for their approved drives if it gives me an additional level of warranty and (perceived) safety.<p>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&#x2F;purchasing the brand at work.<p>This is a tech product, don&#x27;t destroy your tech fanbase.<p>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.<p>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.

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”.<p>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.

There is one argument for Synology doing this: There have been cases where hard drive companies mislead their customers. I personally fell victim to this when Western Digital started selling SMR drives as WD Red, without labelling them as SMR drives.<p>So lots of customers thought they were buying a drive that&#x27;s perfect for NAS, only to discover that the drives were completely unsuitable and took days to restore, or failed alltogether. Synology had to release updates to their software to deal with the fake NAS drives, and their support was probably not happy to deal with all the angry customers who thought the problem was with Synology, and not Western Digital for selling fake NAS drives.<p>If you buy a drive from Synology, you know it will work, and won&#x27;t secretly be a cheaper drive that&#x27;s sold as NAS compatible even though it is absolutely unsuitable for NAS.

I currently run 2 Synology NAS&#x27;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.

I&#x27;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.<p>It was simple, it just worked, and I didn&#x27;t have to think about it.<p>* TB SDDS - a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three &#x27;types&#x27; of SDDS I and a colleague discovered - &quot;Type A&quot; power management IC failures, &quot;Type B&quot; unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and &quot;Type C&quot; failed batteries. Type B units&#x27; SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.

I&#x27;m not sure what customers Synology is targeting. Small office&#x2F;home office (SoHo) was their original market, but these customers won&#x27;t be willing to pay high prices per drive. Medium-sized businesses? They mostly move their infrastructure to the cloud, which probably leads to low sales volumes. Plus, they&#x27;re very price-sensitive too. Large enterprises and corporations? This is the domain of established providers like NetApp. Synology might dream about the high prices that these major storage vendors can charge, but this market is difficult to enter without years and years and years of proven reliability in hardware and service.<p>I don&#x27;t think this will work the way Synology imagines it.

Something I haven&#x27;t seen emphasized enough with this move is that by obfuscating a drive&#x27;s vendor and manufacture date, <i>you won&#x27;t know if your drives are from the same batch.</i> This is important because if there&#x27;s any manufacturing defects in a given batch of drives, the failures are likely to happen around the same time, greatly increasing the chance of losing data.<p>Basically, Synology drives are not only more expensive, they&#x27;re also statistically speaking less reliable when building a RAID with them, negating the very purpose of the product. What a dumb move.

I personally think that in 2025, you should treat the NAS as a purely storage product and buy your hardware from that perspective. TrueNAS or UniFi’s new NAS product fulfill that goal. From there, supplement your NAS with a Mac Mini or other mini-PC for storage-adjacent tasks.<p>Synology’s whole business model (arguably QNAP’s too) depends on you wanting more drive bays than 2 and wanting to host apps and similar services. The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier.<p>But the fundamental suggestion I make is to consider a NAS a storage-only product. If you push it to be an app and VM server too, you’re dependent on these relatively closed ecosystems and subject to the whims of the ecosystem owner. Synology choosing to lock out drives is just one example. Their poor encryption support (arbitrary limitations on file filenames or strange full-disk encryption choices) is another. If you dive into any system like Synology long enough, you’ll find warts that ultimately you wouldn’t face if you just used more specialized software than what the NAS world provides.

Synology sells hardware and you get the software without yearly license.<p>Investors want bigger returns. They know they will not get away at this point by selling a monthly license. A large percentage would not buy anymore.<p>What other options do you have for recurring revenue? Cloud storage, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a great success.<p>And then... yes, harddisks. They are consumable devices with a limited lifespan. Label them as your own and charge a hefty fee.<p>The disks in a (larger) NAS setup are more than what the NAS costs. They want a piece of that pie by limitting your options.<p>No more syno for me in the future

I&#x27;ve no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers.<p>However...<p>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&#x27;s no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.<p>[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)

Synology provided more info to the owner of YouTube channel NASCompares, who then posted it on Reddit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;synology&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1k53gk0&#x2F;official_response_from_synology_on_using&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;synology&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1k53gk0&#x2F;official_...</a><p>It starts with &quot;Synology&#x27;s storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model.&quot; As a long-time user, all of this collectively moves Synology from &quot;highly recommended&quot; to &quot;avoid.&quot;

I&#x27;m confused.<p>It sounds like only certain features will be unavailable for non-Synology drives:<p>&gt; <i>Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled.</i><p>It sounds like you can still use non-Synology drives just fine, but not do certain advanced things with them?<p>So why is this being called &quot;locking&quot;? I use Synology at home just as very basic RAID. Am I correct that this wouldn&#x27;t affect me at all?<p>And are there any reasons why this is justifiable (e.g. hard drive manufacturers lying about health information) or is it just a cash grab?

The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR &quot;filesystem&quot;, 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.<p>I&#x27;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.

Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You&#x27;ll never beat the QoS and resilience of <i>the</i> 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.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>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.

Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They&#x27;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&#x27;ve been looking for.

As a Synology user, I don’t just feel a huge letdown by such a short-sighted company but I’m compelled to boycott them. And it’s not about the money but the major lock-in and nonsense decisions. My DS1821+ is full, no more purchases from Synology, no further expansions, and no good publicity.

Isn&#x27;t this a simple solution?: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;007revad&#x2F;Synology_HDD_db">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;007revad&#x2F;Synology_HDD_db</a><p>Some of us are using that with great success to eliminate the locking situation.

I have some sympathy for this. With the disasters of the WD &#x27;Green&#x27; series and the recent revelations on how used disks were being sold for new. Synology doesn&#x27;t want to be lumped with other companies problems.<p>They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.

I&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to look for some other solution.<p>The problem is - I&#x27;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.<p>Ugh.

I have a 8 bay nas from synology and i’m now considering a move out when i’ll have to replace my nas.<p>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.

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)<p>All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.

They should&#x27;ve designed a model with open source firmware, written useful technical articles about storage, done PR campaigns, and sold premium versions of said hardware. I imagine that it would create more good will and be a better business move.<p>They could&#x27;ve even sold their own branded drives on the side and explained why they are objectively better, but still let customers choose.

I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.

I used to be a Synology fan with owning many of their devices for work and office. But I&#x27;ve moved on to TrueNAS now and haven&#x27;t looked back. TrueNAS with ZFS is just amazing.

We&#x27;ve deployed Synology across multiple client environments for almost a decade, and it&#x27;s been an incredibly reliable platform. Barring the usual hard drive failures (which are inevitable over time), we&#x27;ve had zero issues with SSO integration, expanding arrays with expansion units, seamless hardware upgrades, or the application layer. It just works.<p>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.

As an owner of two Synology boxes (and maintainer of a couple more), I’m not happy about these news. Synology needs to rethink its user base, upgrade their hardware offerings and avoid be lead by profit hunting board members.<p>I hope someone high ranking from Synology reads all the comments from this post (and many others from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mariushosting.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mariushosting.com</a> ) and takes the correct decisions. Please don’t let Synology become like the other greedy companies out there.

Bought a Synology in 2020, been using it for backups and Plex since then. Only recently started doing a little more with it (Immich, Kavita, etc.)<p>Sometimes I brush up against its limitations and its annoying to me; other times I like the convenience it provides (Cloud Sync, Hyper Backup). Even before this announcement, I think that when this thing bites the dust, I would likely build something myself and run Unraid or TrueNAS.<p>IMO what they really needed to do was improve the QuickConnect service to function similar to Cloudflare Zero Access&#x2F;Tunnels, or integrate better with that. That&#x27;s really the missing link in turning your NAS into a true self hosted service that can compete with big tech cloud services, in that you won&#x27;t expose your home IP and won&#x27;t need to fiddle around with a reverse proxy yourself.

Realistically, this will be par for the course among NAS vendors in 10 years, and there will be vigorous defenses of it on Hackernews. &quot;If you want an open NAS, build one yourself. I choose a Yoyodyne NAS because it integrates with the apps I use. And the Yoyodyne disk restriction is no big deal since I know I&#x27;ll be using something supported and compatible.&quot;<p>Any asshole thing a company does, provided they remain solvent enough to stick to their guns for enough time, becomes an accepted industry practice. BonziBuddy generated outrage back in the day because it was spyware. Now Microsoft builds BonziBuddy tech right into Windows, and people -- professional devs, even -- are like &quot;Yeah, I don&#x27;t understand why anyone would want the hassle of desktop Linux when there&#x27;s WSL2.&quot;

&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;re building an array-- you&#x27;re designing for failure-- but then you don&#x27;t plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.

Hopefully they don&#x27;t start pushing this change to older products. I don&#x27;t want to have to replace my NAS, but if I ever do, it certainly won&#x27;t be with another Synology product, even if they walk this decision back.

I bought a Synology last year and then had to return it because it didn&#x27;t support two of the enterprise drive model revisions I have (but worked with the others, even one that&#x27;s the same make).<p>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&#x2F;e.<p>Same exact hard drives working perfectly fine in fedora. If it weren&#x27;t for hard drive locking I&#x27;d have stuck with the Synology box out of laziness.

Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH, this year&#x27;s upgrades were to like ~2020 tech and some of these models won&#x27;t be upgraded again until 2030!<p>The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I&#x27;ve previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I&#x27;ll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardware options that exist for NAS.

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.

Running Ubuntu + Docker + Portainer on a NUC10i5FN (32GB RAM, 1TB HP EX900 M.2 SSD) — I’ve got containers for:<p>AdGuard Home (DNS filtering)<p>Scrypted (bridging CCTV to Apple Home)<p>Jellyfin (media streaming)<p>Immich (photos)<p>WireGuard (secure VPN)<p>The 2TB SSD is handling everything pretty well, but I’ve got a 2.5&quot; SSD slot left unused. Thinking about adding a second SSD for either storage or backups, or maybe caching for media.<p>Any cool apps or tools people would recommend for setups like this? Also, curious about how others are using that extra SSD space in a home lab&#x2F;NAS setup.

It&#x27;s really the apple for NAS. I&#x27;m not concerned since they are anyway to expensive for me but I would be pissed to be obliged to buy their rebranded hard drive

Can you “btrfs send” snapshots in a raid array in DSM to a Linux server?<p>If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system.<p>I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.

I was just about to replace my 2 Drobo units with 2 of 4 bay Synology, my very early Synology single drive NAS is still working so thought I&#x27;d go for familiarity.<p>Read about this BS and thought it&#x27;s bound to end with Synology branded drives costing much more than other brands as people won&#x27;t have the choice. QNAP took my order instead.

I have 3 Synology NAS units with about 80TB of total disk space across the 3. When I replace them I will not be replacing them with Synology, they have lost me as a customer. I switched to Synology after having done the homebuilt NAS for years and just wanted something that works. OSS has come a long way since then so time to go back to what I know and can trust.

I never understand these kind of short sighted decisions. It takes a long time to build a brand, this could potentially hurt their customer willingness to recommend and even buy their brand.<p>People aren&#x27;t stupid, they know that yet they do it.<p>I believe Amazon became so popular because it treated its customer fairly well until recently, now that they are in extremely dominant position.<p>But Synology is far from it.

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&#x27;m not sure that I will buy my next NAS from them.

Is there a good alternative these days for someone that only really wants <i>network attached storage</i>, e.g. some drives in a box, easy RAID setup and local network access via SMB?<p>I use my server for everything you&#x27;d use NAS Apps for. I have an aging Seagate NAS and had been eyeing Synology but this gives me pause.

I had asked them for years for the ability to exclude folders by name (or regex) in Synology Drive Sync to be able to keep out node_modules, .git and other garbage from synchronizing to my NAS. Support responded that I can just unselect the folder manually. They have never implemented it.

My understanding is that they will just block drives that are not in the compatibility list and that list includes drives from all major vendors. Right now when you add a non compatible drive you just get a warning. Am I missing something?

My next NAS is going to be Ubiquiti UNAS Pro . 7 drive bays for $499. Can’t beat it.

A friend of mine ditched his Synology for a very low cost multidrive chassis from Aliexpress, and this... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unraid.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unraid.net&#x2F;</a><p>Seems like a good setup.

I built my own NAS loosely following this tutorial [1] (mostly for the bill of materials), currently with just 3 4TB disks. Installed NixOS w&#x2F; ZFS + K3s on it (I want to use it as a learning playground as well), and deployed a lot of software on it using TrueCharts helm charts, or some other random&#x2F;self-written charts, and deployed with ArgoCD. Yes, I don&#x27;t have a nice UI or a nice cloud integration, I have to do almost everything by hand but it&#x27;s a side-project in itself and fun. For example, now I&#x27;m playing with a Postgres operator to manage the databases resources.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GNMtmUOCtwI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GNMtmUOCtwI</a>

I personally thank Synology for removing themselves from my NAS shopping list and ceding the top of the list to Unraid.

I think they are on their way to exit the consumer market. Their linux kernel is old. And DSM dont update the kernel.

What&#x27;s better <i>for running Plex</i>?<p>Assuming I want 4 drives and something that can transcode multiple files in real time.

Spot on.<p>I’d add that mandatory drives when they aren’t the experts in it making drives a bad move.<p>Maybe other manufacturers are the way.

I am very disappointed to see that. I&#x27;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.<p>The locking-down is disappointing and unnecesary. Sure, give me the option of using &quot;certified&quot; drives, but don&#x27;t take away the option of using any drive I have.

So if I don’t use Synology’s own drives, my NAS gets slower on purpose? That sounds kinda unfair?

It&#x27;s the dumbest move they could make. No one, _no_ one, in a position as the decider on enterprise gear going for a NAS solution in their company is going to buy Synology. They aren&#x27;t even #last on the list. Only corpos have the deep pockets required and historical &quot;the way it is&quot; mindset on being fleeced wrt vendor lockin BS. Synology just does not have the brand cage to pull that off. So corpos that already aren&#x27;t buying their shit are still not going to buy it and homelabers&#x2F;soho types are gonna go elsewhere because they&#x27;ve either ideologically opposed to being fleeced or just can&#x27;t do it even if they don&#x27;t know any better due to being priced out.<p>I hope they implode and some even more evil and incompetent predatory corp consumes them and guts what&#x27;s left of their brand name. The only time I&#x27;d wish the Broadcom treatment on a company. Synology deserve it.

Apparently no one remembers that a while back Synology already &quot;locked&quot; a whole bunch of people their drives, by ripping out BTRFS support on their NAS budget models. And they pushed this update without warning ahead. Your disks just suddenly up and stopped mounting.<p>Their answer to your drives no longer mounting is &quot;connect them to a PC, pull the files and reformat&quot;. Where you are supposed to intermediate 20TB of data is left up to the customer to deal with.<p>Fuck Synology.

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?

As someone who switched about a year ago from FreeNAS to Synology, this is extremely disappointing. Synology has been a great experience up to this point. I have pools, one on supported WD Reds, and the other on a hodge podge of drives I had collecting dust.<p>Both pools have been very reliable so far. But if they continue down this path, I&#x27;ll seek a different solution.

I have a DS920+ for home lab purposes that I&#x27;m very happy with, but this sort of bullshit is going to make me drop that brand from any future recommendations or purchases.<p>I&#x27;m likely to go down the BYO NAS path going forward. Just a stupid customer punishing policy. A real slap in the face.<p>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.

just chiming in, I have 3 synology products, recommended them for a decade. As they&#x27;ve betrayed me, and I&#x27;ll never buy another one, and I&#x27;ll help friends move to whatever I move to. Thinking rock64 appliances with TrueNAS, will start donating to that project.<p>I don&#x27;t know what sect of leadership (MBAs?) sees continual enshittification as the strategy but I&#x27;ll fight this economic warfare forever.

Time to move to Truenas.

The only moat Synology have is their software. How far is Truenas from catching up?

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.

As someone who was in the marekt for getting a Synology, this has moved Synology onto my &quot;do not trust and avoid&quot;-list.<p>It is very hard to get of that list and I will warn everybody wbo asks me about tech advice (so literally everybody in my vicinity) about vendors on that list. Good luck Synology.

Look at all the enshittification!<p>It&#x27;s all profits, at the end of the day. Good for the shareholders!