Synology Reverses Policy Banning Third-Party Hdds
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Synology reversed its policy of banning third-party HDDs after facing backlash and plummeting sales, but many customers have lost trust and are switching to alternatives.
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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.
That + a Jonsbo N2 is a great option, it's what I run.
You can't run Plex directly off the device like a DS224+ would.
Next time I upgrade I'm just buying mikrotik again...
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 ship this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as Network Attached Storage, after all.)
And it feels like for most of these companies it's a whack-a-mole of cycling from which happened to burn you last rather than any actually being fundamentally "better". Pretty every alternative mentioned in this thread have released some real bad products.
Go to the Synology website and browse to a NAS. Here's Synology's closest product to the new UniFi UNAS offering, the DS1825+.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1825+
> See why Synology drives are ideal
And it just links to a marketing video announcing Synology drives... Does it explain why you should use Synology drives? ... No. It is literally 100% marketing puffery. They do not mention or acknowledge any of the dumb software lock-in tricks they were playing. Coupled with no formal announcement, they are apparently willing to do the absolute bare minimum to win back customers who left over this. Apparently for some people, this is good enough, even though unlike many markets there are actually plenty of competent NAS products. And we wonder why enshittication is so prevalent? We're paying for it. Its a positive signal that they can't get away with anything, only almost anything. Feel free to experiment with user trust! There's no consequences anyways!
And honestly, while Synology DSM is a pretty decent experience, though to be clear I have personal misgivings with it all over the place, I really struggle to see how it can justify the price tag. The UniFi UNAS Pro is a new and weird product, but by any account it does have solid fundamentals for the job of network attached storage. Comparing the specs... The DS1825+ comes with 2x2.5GbE... versus the UNAS Pro's 10GbE. It comes with 8 bays over the UNAS Pro's 7. It comes with a Ryzen V1500B over the UNAS Pro's Cortex-A57, both with 8 GiB of RAM. One thing the Synology NAS has is the ability to expand to 18 bays with additional enclosures, which is certainly worth something, but what I'm trying to say is, the specs are not actually leagues different especially considering that this is what you get without paying extra. For Synology you will pay $1,149 over the $499 of the UNAS.
Don't get me wrong. UniFi UNAS is brand new. I don't think it has support for running third party applications or Docker workloads, and there are definitely less storage pool options than with Synology DSM. But, it really seems like for the core NAS functionality, the UniFi option is just going to be better. Given that neither of these devices are actually all that powerful, I reckon you'd probably be best off actually just treating them like pure storage devices anyhow, and taking advantage of fast networking to run applications on another device. Especially with 10 GbE!
You could literally buy two UniFi UNAS Pro units and a Raspberry Pi 5 and still come up a little short on the price of the DS1825+. Not that you should do that, but it says a lot that you could.
So sure, buy whatever you want, but Synology already played their hand, so don't be surprised when they do what they've already shown they are more than happy to do. I'm not buying it.
And P.S.: Yes, there are plenty of mediocre or crap products on the NAS market, but you literally don't just have to buy on brand names alone. There are plenty of reputable reviewers that will go into as much detail as you want about many aspects of the devices, and then you can use brand reputation to fill in any gaps if you want. It feels silly to hinge entirely on brand reputation when you have this much information available...
Synology: Switching to Unifi
Sonos: Switching to Wiim.
I wouldn't want a company to be "rewarded" for reversing an anti-customer decision, but instead they should be made to realise that their customers goodwill can disappear and be very difficult indeed to be won back.
However, most consumers aren't aware of these kinds of issues/boycotts, so most companies don't get to reap the full impact of shitty decisions.
I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good stride and just released some pretty solid good value products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without it, it is challenging to ignore how much better of a deal you're getting for the core functionality for sure.
I of course hope people do some level of research before buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people. I do acknowledge Synology DSM has a lot of stuff built in, but frankly most of it just isn't that great.
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 was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
I seriously want it to work well. How do you find 1 out of 10,000+ pictures you've taken in the last 20 years without spending hours self categorizing beforehand?
It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the drive at my own expense from the UK to Germany and they didn't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their warehouse. I had to buy another drive to repair my RAID cluster while waiting. Absolutely outrageous customer support.
Syno have always been a software company first, a hardware company second, and a storage media company last. It makes sense to try and control the full vertical, but they just don’t have enough clout to compete against the big enterprise companies.
I honestly believe the disk whitelisting thing was part of an attempt to overvalue the company in preparation for a sale.
I don’t have time to wait around for them to ship a drive. I certainly don’t have the budget to stock up on spares at their exorbitant prices.
Hard pass.
I'm likely not buying a Synology at this point.
If anyone has one of their (UGREEN) models (or other brands) I'd be interested in hearing perspectives.
Edit: A lot more mentions of their models in the thread elsewhere at this point.
Looked a lot at NAS alternatives and ugreen, asustor, aoostar all seem pretty good, as you can just run truenas or a linux distro. Can also do DIY chassi with mini itx board.
https://youtu.be/ZdEqEWiA2CE?si=ILPrTNBsZMqgcBNJ
It shows you that their management is probably not making the right decisions in other areas as well.
I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots and other maintenance.
On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.
I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly corrupt the data.
We have to start making open source hardware that we can fully control. It's the only way to be free. Corporations cannot be trusted. Any goodwill they build up eventually becomes a resource for them to capitalize on.
I have a 920+, and it’s too slow, frequently becomes unresponsive when multiple tasks are run.
They lag, and need to be constantly forced to improve?
My Windows 11 often takes many seconds to start some application (Sigil, Excel, whatever), and it sure isn't the fault of the CPU, even if it's "only" a laptop model (albeit a newish one, released December 2023, Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, 3800 (max 4800) Mhz, 16 Cores, 22 Logical Processors).
Whenever software feels slow as of the last 1+ decades, look at the software first and not the CPU as the culprit, unless you are really sure it's the workload and calculations.
But even in the more business/enterprise segment you're getting screwed over. Let's go to the product selector here: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products?product_line=rs_plus... and look at XS+/XS Series subtitled "High performance storage solutions for businesses, engineered for reliability." Let's pick the second choice, RS3621xs+. According to the Tweakers pricewatch (https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1656552/synology-rackstation...) this thing went on sale the 8th of February 2021 (4 years ago). The specsheet says it has an Intel Xeon D-1541, let's look at what ARC (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/91199/i...) has to say about this CPU:
Marketing Status: Discontinued
Launch Date: Q4'15
Servicing Status: End of Servicing Updates
End of Servicing Updates Date: Saturday, December 31, 2022
I'll let you make your own conclusions if that's an OK purchase these days.
That depends on the CPU… Some are optimised for power consumption not performance, and on top of that will end up thermally throttled as they are often in small boxes with only passive cooling.
A cheap or intentionally low-power Arm SoC from back then is not going to perform nearly as well as a good or more performance oriented Arm SoC (or equivalent x86/a64 chip) from back then. They might not cope well with 2.5Gb networking unless the NICs support offloading, and if they are cheaping out on CPUs they might not have high-spec network controller chips either. And that is before considering that some are talking to the NAS via a VPN endpoint running on the NAS so there is the CPU load of that on top.
For sort-of-relevant anecdata: my home router ran on a Pi400 for a couple of years (the old device developed issues, the Pi400 was sat waiting for a task so got given a USB NIC and given that task), but got replaced when I upgraded to full-fibre connection because its CPU was a bottleneck at those speeds just for basic routing tasks (IIRC the limit was somewhere around 250Mbit/s). Some of the bottleneck I experienced would be the CPU load of servicing the USB NIC, not just the routing, of course.
> far more than enough even, to power an NAS device.
People are using these for much more than just network attached storage, and they are sold as being capable of the extra so it isn't like people are being entirely unreasonable in their expectations. PiHole, VPN servers, full media servers (doing much more work than just serving the stored data), etc.
> There must be more than that, another explanation
Most likely this too. Small memory. Slow memory. Old SoC (or individual controllers) with slow interconnect between processing cores and IO controllers. There could be a collection of bottlenecks to run into as soon as you try to do more than just serve plain files at ~1Gbit speeds.
Their hardware is limited already, and they also artificially limit it further by software.
They changed course now, and allow using any HDD. Will DSM display all relevant SMART attributes? We will see!
The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for so long. It allows entry level users to get into the selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.
As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464. The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip, 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.
Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing only good things about their own system AND (except for the smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and flexible with support for the own OS.
As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2 for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.
Transcoding was the reason I moved away from Synology. The rest was fine, not great but ... Okay
But there was no way to improve transcoding performance. If a stream lagged, it would always lag. Hence I jumped ship and just made my own
But my “NAS” is ex-lease enterprise server.
But I'm with you. The rest is fine, not great, but rather working well enough.
Ugreen, aoostar and terramaster are also good alternatives.
I have had terrible luck with Drobo.
It's entirely possible that their newer units are crappier than the old workhorses I have.
I don't use any of the fancier features that might require a beefier CPU. One of the units runs a surveillance station, and your choices for generic surveillance DVRs is fairly limited. Synology isn't perfect, but it works quite well, and isn't expensive. I have half a dozen types of cameras (I used to write ONVIF stuff). The Surveillance Station runs them all.
I would love to know what a "good deal" is. Seriously. It's about time for me to consider replacing them. Suggestions for a generic surveillance DVR would also be appreciated.
Thanks!
I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware, but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.
Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.
Why?
Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics, office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.
Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.
So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of the above.
But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid running the show.
I haven't looked at them in years, but there are formulas for all of that. EG to help you work out if it makes sense.
This will never work in a competitive market like for NAS. The only thing that will get you higher profit margins is a good reputation. If you're coasting by on your reputation, sales and customer experience matter. Less sales one quarter means less people to recommend your product in the next one, which is a downward spiral. A worse customer experience obviously is also a huge problem as it makes people less likely to recommend your product even if they bought it.
They went for a triple-whammy here from which they likely won't recover for years. They now have less customers, less people who are likely to recommend their product, and their reputation/trustworthiness is also stained long-term.
Crappier products at higher margins only works if you're a no-name brand anyways, have no competition, or have a fanatical customer base.
In tech the model is often misleading, since the large investments to improve the product are not just a question of current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.
I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through all my years of NAS-oriented usage.
Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers on it, and for that I can see how one could run out of juice quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).
As soon as my Synology dies I'm replacing it with Unifi. I don't want all that extra software with constant CVEs to patch.
a) it increases energy cost
b) accessing storage over smb/nfs is not as fast and can lead to performance issues.
c) in terms of workflow, I find that having all containers (I use rootless containers with podman as much as possible) running on the NAS that actually stores and manage the data to be simpler. So that means running plex/jellyfin, kometa, paperless-ngx, *arrs, immmich on the NAS and for that synology's cpu are not great.
In general, the most common requirements of prosumers with NAS is 2.5gbps and transcoding. Right now, none of Synology's offerings offer that.
But really the main reason I dislike synology is that SHR1 is vendor locked behind their proprietary btrfs modifications and so can only be accessed by a very old ubuntu...
I agree with the rest, though.
Last I checked, I believe I didn't find anything that satisfied all three. So DSM sits in a sweet spot, I think. Plus, plastic or not, Synology hardware just looks great.
My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.
What did NAS customers purchase instead?
So you can't buy 3rd party HDDs --- but Synology can?
Looks likes a blatant FU to the customer was returned in kind.
You can find the compatible drives here https://www.synology.com/en-uk/compatibility
And now I won't buy Synology for the same reason I won't buy ink jet.
The differences here are that they actually implemented software checks, for devices bought at MSRP. And so harm is felt.
Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.
Desktop NAS market is very different.
This was the first step or attempt to change that.
(I think some comments elsewhere in the chain got it right: they were calculating that they had enough brand lock-in and non-technical buyers who would not have much choice, as opposed to a largely technical userbase who could set up any number of options but were choosing them because they were both reasonable value and low maintenance)
I understand the point, but HP's approach was not really based on cartel, while it might seem so.
In the beginning, HP had great printers, and they used specific kind of ink. Back in that time, ink wasn't so complicated, so other manufactures started to sell it as well. So there was a moment, when you could get the ink from many different manufactures.
But what changed, was that HP started to make their printers accept only very specific kind ink, which was controlled by the printers and HP, not by the ink manufacturers (compare to HDDs).
They added one sort of digital signatures for the ink, so that printer reads signatures and does not otherwise accept it. So it does not matter whether these was cartel or not; it was just DRM lock-in. As long as the core product was desirable enough. I don't think this is a cartel in a traditional sense, because manufacturing of the ink cartridges wasn't that difficult otherwise, and it wasn't forbidden or highly regulated area.
In Synology's case, this was just that they added similar checks for NAS. It does not matter if other manufacturers don't comply with, if core product is good enough. Synology thought that their product was good enough to play this, but apparently not.
What seems to have happened with the 2D printer market is a race to the bottom to provide customers with the cheapest printers possible while hiding the high [recouped] costs of the ink. Many consumers are duped into buying a cheap printer and not realizing the high cost of printing that comes with it.
This is why brands like Brother have been able to succeed, especially pushing their laser printers: higher upfront hardware cost and cheaper ink.
But that’s exactly what they did. Just in software.
I just settled for a budget QNAP unit. Been great tbh
So, thanks, guys, I guess.
Thanks for all the fish, that was an enlightening experience.
OTOH, I wish them luck. They look fine for un-techy folks to store their data locally. Would like them to stick around. Also, competition is always good.
You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental erasure.
All over great design.
Yes, it's not cheap, but it's almost enterprise class hardware for home, and that's a good thing.
You can either forego NVMe slots (which looks like an add-on card on [0]) and get the slot, or use one of the USB4 interfaces. OTOH, it has 2x10GbE on board, you can just media-convert it.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWgc8W-hIWM
That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot without a GPU.
Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.
I've been looking on and off for a smallish NAS for some use, but I'd really like it to have ECC. As it stands, I'm considering more and more compromising on the size aspect and getting some ASRock + AMD combo.
The one I'm planning to get is at [0]. It clearly states ECC RAM.
[0]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86
Installed unraid on it and it's been working great. So long, Synology.
I took a note of them mentally at that point, but their latest gen hardware is something else. Since I'm a sysadmin by trade, having some of the features that I have in the datacenter at home is a compelling proposition for me.
It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes).
But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again.
I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.
I don't need crazy performance or to fine tune the setup or anything, like I said it's mostly just to plug and play.
And besides the OS you need to install and maintain the apps, like backup software, photo management software, etc.
Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable
Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box that is mostly just an SMB share
...and supposedly keeps your files, safe - at least that what keeps me from tinkering too much with such a solution.
Sure, having backups still is necessary, yet, a NAS to me is a means to an end..
For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in future as long as they don't do anything stupid.
Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
there are plenty "barebones" NAS offerings that have the nice formfactor but you bring your own HDDs and OS
Unfortunately for Synology I will wait to see if it's a policy they stick to or if they might change it again in the future, I have all my backups synchronised to off-site storage (Backblaze and Glacier), so the local NAS was just a nice to have convenience instead of shuffling through different local disks...
If Synology want me back as a customer, they also need to get modern CPUs, 2.5Gb or 10Gb Ethernet and reverse course on H.265 too.
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