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 is gone.
My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.
I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
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 their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.
I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.
Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.
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.
> 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 employee owner, you are likely incentivized to not kill the golden goose versus folks at the top making decisions unilaterally, but you also need some ability to say no to bad decisions. Like Costco, employee and customer happiness first, profits after.
(big fan of employee ownership and control contributors, aligning incentives and outcomes and all that jazz)
The only peers at the company who were enthusiastic about the decision were the ones who were buying more company stock and wanted it to go up. They thought that anything that increased the bottom line would increase the stock price, and therefore they were on board.
So, no, I don't think increased employee ownership solves anything.
Work for a salary. Invest in a diversified portfolio that's not tied to your employer.
Employee control doesn't reduce investor pressure for increased profitability. Employee ownership just means that the employees are now the ones exerting the investor pressure and if anyone thinks employees will be willing to take less total compensation (why? "Loyalty to the company"? "Solidarity"?) instead of hopping to a new job, well, good luck with that.
1) The shares can be non-voting shares. LOL.
2) Only a relatively small portion of the overall "pie" has to go to employees for them to be able to say they're "employee owned". There can still be non-employee owners involved to a large degree.
3) That slice of the pie will tend to be weighted so heavily toward those near the top of the org chart that in practice it may be more like "upper-management owned" anyway.
I think the main reasons companies in the US choose it are:
1) Propaganda. "You're an owner!" It's a way to trick unwise employees into working harder for (effectively) nothing extra, and even into exhorting others to do the same.
2) Probably some kind of tax-avoidance reasons.
3) As a vehicle for a kind of stock-compensation system without having to take the company public or do occasional odd maneuvers with investors for that stock to be de facto liquid for employees.
IME there's zero percent more meaningful "ownership" involved than, say, Google folks who receive stock as part of their comp (and nobody calls Google "employee owned"). It's a misleading name for the structure.
I’m unaware of any tax avoidance advantages but I should ask my accountant (pretty sure he’ll say no though. :D )
I’ve actually considered various ways of assigning non-voting shares in the past as a way to grant employees some skin in the game without ceding control or permanently diluting ownership. It’s not a ‘startup’ in the HN sense so handing out shares willy nilly doesn’t make sense.
Technically competent doesn't always mean empathetic.
The decisions can sometime look like the xkcd cartoon about scientists[1].
[1] - https://xkcd.com/242/
There are advantages to employee ownership. Preventing bad business decisions is not one of them.
Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in.
You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are planning on turning customer hostile.
I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is staged, and profits flow (for better or worse).
The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes, which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines. They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping on.
In this case, the customers were loyal to Synology for the NAS but not the hard drives.
By locking them in further, they thought they could capture their customers' hard drive purchasing, too. They thought the brand loyalty would allow it.
You see this a lot when a company’s founders leave and are replaced by MBAs. Customer goodwill isn’t a tangible asset, so the MBAs burn it to produce more quarterly revenue. It works great for a while until the customers wisely decide never to let that company burn them again.
By that stage the MBAs have scored even higher paying jobs at bigger companies based on how much they boosted profits, so I guess it continues to work for them afterwards too.
Sounds very much like "doing a Ratner": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
Apple is only company that is allowed to get away with that.
So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.
DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
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!
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585048
https://www.auvik.com/franklyit/blog/vendors-clock-signal-fl...
Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel? I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.
What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
A friend has a Synology NAS and I have a QNAP NAS. In my experience, QNAP's QTS (QuTS Hero if you want ZFS) is directly comparable.
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 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.
I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.
-----
As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.
It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.
For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.
It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're going to resync the array anyways.
I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and reliable storage in a very small footprint.
And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.
What are you thinking of, here? Just a scary feeling?
Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology.
[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html
They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives.
Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.
Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying another Synology product.
For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.
I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages.
RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that?
I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
LOL, clearly an amateur. That's longer than it took me to build Dropbox. /s
The kind of person who wants to do that is squarely outside their market. And you’d be paying a real premium for nothing.
Debian has docs on installing on at least one model of their arm boxes: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology
I run Debian on a few different models of qnap because their hardware occupies a niche of compact enclosure, low noise, and many drives.
If you want a device to tinker with, this is the wrong product for you.
They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.
Enshittification is a bold strategy when you have solid competition.
I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.
After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.
I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.
As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make
When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.
So, I started to look around and landed on Ugreen. They offered a NAS with more RAM (and the ability to upgrade), better connectivity (2.5GbE + 10 GbE), faster CPU, ability to install custom OSes (like TrueNAS), the OS resides on a separate, user-replaceable M.2 NVMe drive. All that for less money. Plus, since I control the OS, there's no way they can push some garbage it's-for-your-own-good-wink-wink update down my throat.
Bought it, didn't even start their OS and put TrueNAS Scale on it and I've never been happier. The caveat here is that I use my NAS as a NAS - no apps, no docker, no photos app. All that is on a separate box in the rack.
For me to ever trust Synology again I'd have to see some punitive action towards the idiots there that thought that whole HDD restrictions mess was a good idea. Even then, now that I've had a look around what else is available, I'm pretty sure I'll stay clear for a couple of years.
For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't.
But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box...
And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
External drives were on sale, I bought several and setup with a RPI. Lots of headaches. It took effort to iron out all the USB and external disk issues. Had to work out alternative boot. Had power adapters fail for the RPI. Had to enhance cooling. etc. Kept running into popular Docker containers still not having aarch64 variants.
I finally replaced the RPI with a used Dell SFF. Kept the USB drives and it's been solid with similar power draw and just easier to deal with all around.
Though I am considering going back to a tower, shucking the drives (they're out of warranty) and going back to SATA.
With a proprietary on-disk format you can't exactly hook them up to any random controller and expect it to work: either you find a new one from the same controller family, or your data is gone.
You say that like it’s a mystery why people by then but NUCs are fantastic little PCs.
The power adapter is just hidden under the desk whereas the NUC is sat on the desk (or behind the monitor/TV).
It’s the same as with Mac Minis and Apple TV. And other devices of that ilk.
There seems to be a Windows-only update tool available that might fix it, but that's rather inconvenient when it's used as a server running Linux! No update available as a standalone boot disk or via LVFS. So I haven't gotten it fixed yet because doing so involves getting a second SSD, taking my server offline to install Windows on it, just to run a firmware update.
It's of course more work to set up than synology, and if you want a neat box, you have to figure that out yourself
However, in my experience with a Pi 4, the issue is encryption. The CPU simply isn't fast enough for 1Gbps of AES! Want to use HTTPS or SSH? You're capped at ~50Mbps by default, and can get it up to a few hundred Mbps by forcing the use of chacha20-poly1305. Want to add full-disk encryption to that? Forget it.
The Pi 5 is supposed to have hardware AES acceleration so it should be better, but I'm still finding forum posts of people seeing absolutely horrible performance. Probably fine to store the occasional holiday photo, but falls apart when you intend to regularly copy tens of gigabytes to/from it at once.
1293685061 bytes (1.3 GB, 1.2 GiB) copied, 5.14336 s, 252 MB/s
which is good enough for me on magnetic disks
It apparently hit 387MBps for a few hours while running the montly raid scrub. I run luks on top of mdraid though so the raid scrub doesn't have to decrypt anything.
scp to write to the encrypted disk seems to get me something in the 60 - 100MB/s range.
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.
They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche. The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux system really doesn't have a competitor at its price point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python program to log the data from the sensors to a spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and it really sparked her interest.
I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning. Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet, and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.
Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.
And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".
Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.
So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.
Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box):
Coffee table Digital Touch map.
Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo battery.
ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.
Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.
Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.
Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.
Wearables.
Playing with high density distributed computing. (More than 5 machines)
Where the mini pc really shines is:
Storage. (NAS included)
Media PC (TV sold separately)
Gaming Console
Personal Cloud (docker + nfs + caddy + <insert personalized preferences>)
General Autopilot (sensors that need GPU support).
You have left over old PCs and don’t want to open your wallet…
I was commenting in the context of why people choose them for servers but I recognize that I did not make that clear.
For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured.
For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course).
For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it.
For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly).
And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
For $300 I could get an ITX to run.
So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
My server is repurposed desktop hardware in a desktop tower case and is nearly silent except for the subtle hard drive noises. The hardware cost next to nothing and is far faster and more capable than any pi (except the pio of course which wouldn’t be used anyway).
At the very least you want the case and psu. At which point the question is which cpu+motherboard+ram combo do you want in that case. The rpi is one of many such options and is actually quite expensive for the amount of cpu+ram you get for the price.
After looking at lots of small board options, I got a NUC for $110 to be the brains of my NAS.
What's the gain of running 12 RPi, exactly? Do you do research work requiring distributed low-cost computing?
To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless.
I am much more concerned about data center power usages, especially in the age of LLMs.
Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept preaching we should stop using electric kettles because it's bad for the planet. While the 3 plants in her hometown amounted to ~83% of all power usage and ~92% or all pollution. Boy, was she unhappy when I did that research and pointed it out to her.
Pi-s / SBCs are I suppose very good for computing out there in the meatspace, where you might need a battery because sometimes power stops for 6 hours? Could be that.
She was, shall we say, disappointed with the response.
Also this was some 15 years ago.
The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology.
Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity.
Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.
I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.
There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.
Having used both, I can't help but notice how NAS' routinely run just fine without it.
How do you verify your data to confirm that?
I currently manage four NASes (two primary, two backup replicas). Only one has ECC RAM. And I'm okay with my setup.
ECC is great to have, but it is oversold by some as being absolutely required for all storage devices, IMO.
How many files have you personally seen gone corrupt on non-ecc?
ECC originated first out of server grade servers. Self-hosting rarely hits that level of demand.
I'll share any more that come to mind.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...
[1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be.
Broadcom BCM2712
Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.
So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
"There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.
I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?)
Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available.
This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own.
For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.
I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.
You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing.
If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid.
Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR.
Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS.
Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market.
Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality
2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy.
I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer.
My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
It's literally the "Why would you buy Dropbox when I can glue it together with rsync" level of ignorant comment, completely ignoring how behind most of those solutions like TrueNAS are in time cost.
But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z.
They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions.
For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)
"Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"
All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
Typically you'd want to tier it out
1. Fully supported drives: Synology branded
2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features
3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
4. Does not work: list of drives.
There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.
Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.
> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.
That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".
Not if they follow yason's guidance of:
> All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
---
Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.
But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.
"The official drives have a MTBF which is X longer which saves you Y amount of time and Z dollars, but the choice and the risk is up to you."
Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.
I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales.
Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he found the "silver bullet"...
As a life long customer support person I disagree.
Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.
Post sales, the feedback comes from customers.
Pre-sales, it might be heard from sales.
R&D and Product might not get real world input or feedback as directly as the actual paying customers.
Maybe it's just me.
But it actually is: because sales must keep growing, so the support burden typically increases linearly - while hiring does not, more often than not.
I've seen this at a few companies now:
* CS teams get built, delivers great support
* sales increase (partially thanks to that support, but there is no way to show it with metrics)
* hiring in CS does not keep pace (because it's largely seen as a cost centre)
* CS teams get overwhelmed and look for ways to downscale per-customer effort.
That's why some big names have literally declared support bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support (google, amazon...).
They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.
If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.
Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”
That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...
If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.
And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.
It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.
I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)
And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...
I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems. "Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."
They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives". TBH this is quite sad. I recommended Synology to some people before... Feels like I have to walk back on my word.
Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.
Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.
HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.
Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".
Show this was anything other than a money grab so the Synology was the sole supplier for drives.
I know I'm one of those people.
That's all they ever needed to say. Instead, they said, "Fuck you, pay me."
See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it
My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
Half a year is plenty enough to move away.
Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.
I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.
Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.
In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.
Blow the dust out of the connector
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...
That's how we all benefit. But if a company wants to benefit more than you, they can. That's how enshittification works.
Source: worked AppleCare
In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.
Your "guess" is not logical.
If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them.
Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.
High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.
People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.
Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
They're a fun bunch.
It could be confidence.
It could be social standing.
It could be that they are not explaining their viewpoint properly to the stake holders.
If the parent is not gaining traction and blaming it on intelligence, likely, the parent can't see others viewpoints either and is not trying to bring the team along...
Engineering is not just systems...
I get paid either way.
I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.
It’s annoying, but either way I get paid.
There's no advancement, just bigger piles of bullshit. The goal is to get paid for shoveling the least.
But sure, even then it’d get super annoying if they always ignored it. At some point it’d be obvious that my business goals don’t align well at all with theirs, so maybe it’s time to find a better fit.
YES, yes, a million times yes.
Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.
I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:
* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.
* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.
So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.
If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.
But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.
See the problem there...?
1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.
2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.
3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.
However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.
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).
I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.
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, but i guess that matches the Linux kernel they're using, which was also EOL close to a decade ago.
Meanwhile the NAS market has been flooded by viable alternatives with better hardware, equal or better software, and usually cheaper. UGREEN and others have released more or less drop in replacements, and Ubiquiti released the UNAS line, and while it doesn't work as an application server, will run around circles any similarly specced (drive wise) Synology in raw file transfer performance, for half the price.
I'm guessing the 3rd party drive removal was simply just the final push that caused many people to switch to something else. Transcoding removal was likely also a big driver, as many people also use their Synology NAS as a Plex server.
A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpriced, outdated hardware that weren't worth DSM's ease of use. Got Ubiquiti's UNAS with a couple of HDDs, a Beelink mini PC, and for a little time and roughly the same budget of a DS, got something far superior in specs and basically matching in ease of use.
Also, for all server needs I’m running a Raspberry Pi at a single digit fraction of the ongoing power use of my Synology, and it just no longer makes sense to have this weird rare platform as my base when I could just be running things on Debian and systemd.
More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have the mental capacity and willingness to maintain something like a Synology. The only large content I back up are my family’s photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.
I'm more or less in the same situation.
I no longer use a NAS for my "daily driver", and as such it made sense to skip Synology and instead go for the cheaper option, which in my case was the UNAS Pro (only model available at the time).
Next to it sits an "old" Mac Mini M1, which hosts my Plex server, with storage provided by the UNAS over 10Gbps ethernet.
Everything else i might at some point in time have used the Synology for, has instead been delegated to iCloud. Documents, photos, and everything in between is stored there, and each laptop makes a backup with Arq backup to the NAS as well as another cloud provider.
My NAS today is literally just an advanced USB drive attached to a server, and that was also part of my considerations at the time, just getting a DAS and plugging that into the Mac Mini M1, but ultimately the UNAS Pro (with 10Gbps networking) was cheaper than a Thunderbolt DAS, and i already had a switch capable of 10Gbps.
I made a similar "journey" some years back, where i removed pretty much everything cabled from the network, and instead moved everything to WiFi, and instead doubling down on providing "the best" wifi experience i could, which today means WiFi 7 with 2.5Gbps uplinks, hence the 10Gbps switch.
My network is 100% private. I don't expose ports to the internet, meaning maintenance is no longer a "must do" task. The only access is via Wireguard, which can be done with an always on profile that routes traffic for that specific subnet, but more realistically is mostly never used. The most remote streaming is done via a site to site VPN from my summerhouse to my house, where i can stream Plex over.
I use iCloud Photos for my photos, so I don’t have to manage storage on my phone, while always having access to everything. I quite like it.
I also have a Synology NAS for other things.
A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me to also backup my photos to the NAS, because I have no idea how Apple is backing things up. I might be willing to pay for 3 copies for just my photos, but is Apple going to do that for all users of iCloud without advertising it? Probably not.
I’m not sure the best way to go about doing an initial backup to the NAS, or the ongoing changes. I think it also gets a bit messy with Live Photos… which is another reason why iCloud Photos is so appealing, if it can be fully trusted.
Luckily, Apple also provides a pretty easy backup path that lets you have a local copy, if you have a Mac and a NAS:
- setup your Mac’s photos app and iCloud to download everything locally
- setup Time Machine backups from your Mac to a NAS
That’s it. You get 3-2-1 (your Mac, iCloud, and your NAS) and can get a copy of your data even if your Apple ID gets locked out.
Standard disclaimer, only the Time Machine copy is a true backup (ex if you delete a file by mistake, only Time Machine can help you restore it; iCloud is a sync, not a backup). That said, for me personally, this scheme (local copy + cloud copy + NAS backup via Time Machine) takes basically 0 work to maintain once setup and gives me peace of mind.
For a long time, I had a Mac mini running 24/7, where each user was logged in (via Remote Desktop), and that would synchronize photos to an external drive, and the Mac would then make backups (via Arq) to my NAS as well as a remote location.
I don’t count the Mac copy in my 3-2-1 as it is basically sync (each side, iCloud and Mac, are sync), and without versioning, ie APFS snapshots, if one side goes bad, so does the other.
I’ve since switched to using Parachute for day to day backups, and every ~6 months I make a manual full export of the photo library in case Parachute missed something.
While not the biggest library, it’s approaching the point where I’d need to start buying upgraded storage on any new Mac I buy, or use external storage for my Photos library. One of the things I like about iCloud Photos is my computer doesn’t need much local storage, Photos will manage it, downloading full res images on demand and purging them as needed.
I’d want a backup solution that is optimized for this, to allow for backups of the originals, without having to have them all downloaded all the time.
The family one is somewhere around 759gb. Having this stored locally fills a decent size drive so it needs to be on network storage. Macs don’t love doing this, and somehow it’s difficult to keep a file share mounted 100% of the time on macOS (though it’s 100% reliable on an Ubuntu vm hosted on that same mac).
I concocted a vile script to download iCloud Photos and then save them to a Synology.
I’m looking hard at UGreen or Ubiquiti do my next NAS. The Synology thing where you can put same or larger drives in the array is probably the only bit I’d miss at this point.
It works on my LAN, but also over my site to site VPN from my summerhouse, as well as my road warrior wireguard VPN.
That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data center, but in multiple data centers, so that if one data center completely vanishes, your data will still be available.
That being said, it's always good to make a local backup. I use a tool called Parachute Backup (https://parachuteapps.com) on my Mac to automatically export photos from Apple Photos to my NAS. It also works on "iCloud optimized storage", so it won't just backup size optimized photos.
I've tested it against Photosync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home) as well as a manual export of unmodified originals, and in a library consisting of 180k photos and videos, I had 300 compare errors, most of which were Live Photos, that are not exported identically.
Both Parachute and Photosync offers the ability to export unmodified originals along with AAE files, so that if you need to rebuild your Apple Photos library, everything including undo history is preserved (AAE files contains edits).
Tools like Synology Photos and Immich (and more) only exports the "latest" version, whatever that may be, meaning if you have edited the photo on your phone, that edited version is exported, and if you later restore from your NAS backup, there is no undo history. In other words, they apply the edits in a destructive way.
For backing up from the NAS to another location I use Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com), which also supports backing up iCloud Drive files that are cloud only.
I do have my NAS backed up to Synology’s cloud backup service. I don’t love it, and it seems expensive, but it was easy to setup at the time and gave me some peace of mind for that data. The big issue I see is that I feel like I’d be stuck buying another Synology to restore of my current one fails.
Do you use iCloud optimized storage, or do you download originals to your machine ? Kopia only backs up what it can see, and in case of iCloud optimized storage, it only backs up size optimized miniatures and not the original files.
Second, I haven’t researched this, but iPhoto used resource forks and extended attributes quite extensively for its library, and if the same is true for Apple Photos, Kopia will not pick up those, but Arq will. That was the very feature that caused me to purchase Arq all those years ago.
So maybe don't fully trust it.
The second top level comment also suggests that this the cameras manual suggests the camera itself might be corrupting things.
Looking at it further though, you're right, this probably wasn't apple's fault.
They need to do something about it urgently.
The base software is modified Debian Bookworm and it's been stable and pleasant to use.
They have things with two slots, which I guess is good enough for raid 1, but those models also have HDD bays, which wastes space in network closets.
I’d expect them to have something with 4-8 incredibly well-cooled m.2 slots by now. The nic is only 2.5G, so the slots wouldn’t need to be full speed.
I’m happy with my ancient 2TB synology NAS, but it’s bigger, slower, noisier and hotter than my mini-pc, which also has two (toasty) nvme slots.
I suppose they have plenty of corporate customers still, companies that are too small for their own proper servers (self managed or hosted) but who do want some central storage and more importantly the tech support that comes with it. But those would just as likely go to Dell for all their requirements.
Totally. Whenever a company runs out of ideas they pull BS like this to increase profits.
Sure I can't run apps on it, but how much do people really run apps on their synology vs just use it as a basic NAS to begin with? I never found any of the apps really all that great to begin with. The only one I kinda liked was synology sync but really don't need something like that with freesync.
You can get basic network storage more or less anywhere, for much cheaper, so in my mind apps and the polished GUI + integration are the only reason you would even consider Synology unless you're already locked in. Maybe technical support contracts at the higher end, but you can get that, done better, from other vendors too.
It's a NAS. It just needs to be reliable.
Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.
In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.
Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).
And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.
If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).
Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.
The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.
Well, Jellyfin. Plex pulled a Slymology long ago.
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?
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.
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 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.
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 I'm with you. The rest is fine, not great, but rather working well enough.
But my “NAS” is ex-lease enterprise server.
Ugreen, aoostar and terramaster are also good alternatives.
I have had terrible luck with Drobo.
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.
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 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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
I agree with the rest, though.
My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.
https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
Edit: Updated KB article is here: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...
Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series
Details
FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
In particular: “At the same time, with the introduction of DSM 7.3, 2025 DiskStation Plus series models offer more flexibility for installing third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs when creating storage pools. While Synology recommends using drives from the compatibility list for optimal performance and reliability, users retain the flexibility to install other drives at their own discretion.”
NASCompares confirms that no warnings are shown: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1o1a32m/testing_s...
I agree that the information is still a bit muddled right now.
I can confirm that if I change my Accept-Language headers in my browser from "en" to "en-US" I get the other version of that page. Actually, for everything else I tried other than "en-US" I get the evil version.
Synology press team Achievement unlocked: Confuse all global IT press outside of the United States.
If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:
AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.
So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.
The only change is that they now allow you to use any 2.5" SATA SSD. Everything else, meaning: 2.5" SATA HDDs (the by far most common thing you would want to use) and NVME SSDs: Still a no-no.
No, there was no lesson learned here by them at all.
The liked article specifically is wrong here:
"Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs"
No, not hard drives. 2.5" SSDs only.
Very sorry to spoil the party, but sadly Synology STILL hasn't learned the lesson. :(
Let's check again after they have lost 95% of their customers...
This is the main change. Other series (not Plus) are still locked down.
> At the same time, with the introduction of DSM 7.3, 2025 DiskStation Plus series models offer more flexibility for installing third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs when creating storage pools.
Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) Series:
FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.
If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don’t blame Toyota. But if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase wouldn’t have that same limitation.
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. Whenever you insert a drive that isn't on their compatibility list, it prompts you with a message to make sure you want to proceed. They could very easily make that popup say something like "WARNING: THIS HARD DRIVE MODEL IS DEFECTIVE. WE STRONGLY URGE YOU TO REMOVE IT AND REPLACE IT WITH A DRIVE ON OUR COMPATIBILITY LIST."
But in any case, dealing with those support requests has to be way cheaper than the enormous financial and reputational loss they seem to be taking from this boneheaded move.
I don't know how to reply to the rest. If you think it's a good idea for Synology to make their systems not work with even known-good drives from reputable manufacturers, I don't think there's likely to be a common ground we can find to discuss it further.
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.
That's all they had to do.
Customers should have absolute control over what drives they want, it's their choice to put crappy tires on their car or not.
Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models, putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers identical NAS drive model is then listed as incompatible.
There is nothing remotely connected to actual technology involved in this story at all. This is a sales-strategy-only subject.
They deserve the result of their decision and not understanding their customers - they could just start a separate enterprise line if they didn't have one already for whatever they wanted to force.
Enterprise brands like HP, etc, to my last experience, do sell white-labelled drives, but don't bar you from using those same drives yourself.
My lack of trust remains with the parts that will fail the most - hard drives.
Hard Drive manufacturers don't have the best history, whether it was Western Digital lying to their customers about CMR when it was actually SMR. That would be my reason for never accepting a forced labelling of a drive.
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.
Installed unraid on it and it's been working great. So long, Synology.
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.
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.
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.
Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.
The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your device if you catch it in time").
For the second, Synology has an option to apply important updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret the new option to mean something like still installing the updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with stories of bricked machines.
How is sneaking in a fix and hoping people notice going to help sales?
Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we could not put in any harddisk we'd wanted, but most of our customers did not really care, so we didn't as well. If you absolutely need superb storage you should stop using NASes anyway and get a far better (but more expensive) solution.
Then again if i myself want some NAS functionality, i'd fire up a Debian with Samba using any hardware i want.
Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-removes...
Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
They can only make a profit if people are willing to buy what they're selling
> Their business is selling hard drives.
Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives. The drives are interchangeable and upgradable, that's the whole point of a hot-swap NAS system.
> I bet a large portion of profits come from that
I think they wanted a large portion of profits to come from that, but most NAS purchasers know that hard drives are a commodity/standardized and won't pay a premium for ... no benefit.
Also, some will deliberately mix drives from various manufacturers to reduce exposure to potential “bad batch” problems where multiple drives fail in a short space of time (possibly extra failures while rebuilding an array after the first failure, rendering the whole array untrustworthy or entirely broken). This is not possible if you can only purchase from one manufacturer.
> Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives.
No you are. You don't have to make something in order to sell it. Composing materials is a business. Selling packages is a business.
You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so.
You're acting like this isn't normal business administration: companies push products, companies adjust offerings depending on demand. Ask Oracle how they're still in business and raking in billions.
Well clearly enough of Synologys customers decided they did have the time to buy commodity HDDs and slap them into a competitors product, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
As GP said, Synology may want to believe they’re in the business of selling premium priced HDDs, with a side salad of NASs. But it turns out that isn’t a very sustainable business, otherwise there would be no reason for them change their policies.
Correct. I never said that it was the right choice, I just said that it was a valid choice for them to make. Lots of companies substantially raise prices and still come up winning.
Netflix doubled their subscription cost since 2008, but market cap did 100x and subscribers are 30x. They even offer fewer good movies than they used to. You may still hate them, but their wallets don't care about your feelings.
Valid means well grounded - read this thread, it was not a well-grounded decision
Valid means producing the desired outcome or effective - if this was the case, they would not be rolling it back
What Synology did was trying to significantly increase the fraction of value they captured, at the cost of their customers, who would have to pay that, and without providing extra value for their customers.
This is not only a a bad deal for customers, it also triggers our sense of injustice.
The best companies create value, and capture only a part of it, and leave other parts of the value for both customers and partners/suppliers.
For example, Kodak thought they were in the business of selling film. Their customers thought they were a company that sold ways to take photos. Kodak ignored what their customers wanted, the ability to take photos easily, in favor of their desire to sell more film. That cost them dearly when digital cameras took over.
If you want to get technical, their business is dogshit, and I'll be glad to never buy from them.
Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a disk should be replaced, or the user warned about possible impending doom, to simple things like how one sets cache WT/WB and flushes the caches (range based flushing is a thing, doesn't always work, etc) for persistence.
OTOH, much of this is just 'product maturity' because it is possible to have a blessed set of SMART/etc attributes that are understood a certain way and test to see if they exist/behave as expected and warn the user with something like "this drive doesn't appear to report corrected read errors in a way that our predictive failure algorithm can use". Or "This drive appears to be a model that doesn't persist data with FUA when the caches are set to write back, putting your data at risk during a power failure, would you still like to enable writeback?"
And these days with the HD vendors obfuscating shingled drives or even mixing/matching the behavior in differing zones its probably even worse.
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 other drives might not have the requisite SMART attributes or some other function that's required is one thing. But halving the drive speed just because it's not a Synology drive is another. This knowledge would put me in a better position to know if I should harshly judge them or not.
I think it's totally fair to raise a warning that a particular drive has not been tested/validated and therefore certain guarantees cannot be met. I can fully respect how challenging it must be to validate your product against a basically infinite combinatorial collection of hardware parts. I've learnt long ago that just because a part fits does not mean it works.
The other take though, was that it was just a $ grab by rebranding and charging more for drives that were functionally the same. Which for logical people made sense because otherwise, why not say why their drives were better. But sometimes the lawyers get involved and saying "our rebranded drives are the only ones on the market that work right when we do X, Y, Z" is frowned on.
Hard to really know without some engineer actually clarifying.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Next time I upgrade I'm just buying mikrotik again...
You can't run Plex directly off the device like a DS224+ would.
That + a Jonsbo N2 is a great option, it's what I run.
For that matter, in the 4-6 drive SOHO range, there are a LOT of NAS products with decent consumer upgrade options and alternative OS support with okay compute power. Not to mention the prosumer options for software that support these devices as well as DIY options are pretty good as well, less than the premium that Synology charges for their hardware.
I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.
I just settled for a budget QNAP unit. Been great tbh
But that’s exactly what they did. Just in software.
Desktop NAS market is very different.
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.
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.
So, thanks, guys, I guess.
I’m just glad the NAS scene saw the opening left by Synology’s boneheaded decision-making and capitalized on it. Unraid and TrueNAS have stormed the battlefield and shown Synology’s typical plus-line customers that they can get more for less with a bit of DIY, and NUC vendors have capitalized on this misstep with NAS hardware platforms that just require your preferred software/OS to operate.
This singular decision is going to take a decade of good will to undo. Astonishing that they footgunned themselves so bad, so willingly.
I moved to a second hand beefed-up laptop and a terramaster disk pack connected vi USB. Same wattage.
It does take some effort, but now it is done. I like to tinker anyway. I pulled up Proxmox with a bunch of containers doing SMB/SNF per share.
Just like with Synology, I just look a regular emails with successful backups. edit: typos
It complained it wasn't compatible.
If that drive isn't compatible than I don't know what legitimate criteria possibly could be.
(Yes, I get the criteria is "what we prioritized to test" but my point stands,it's the high end of consumer-available NAS drives, not a compute model or a shucked SMR drive:)
I switched a year ago to Ugreen UNAS just given the generational leap of their hardware and reasonable per-disk pricing over synology.
I didn’t trust you agree with OS, but that ended up being incredibly easily remedy by just shoving true Nas on the system.
All that sad if I had waited another half-year, I wouldn’t have gone down that path but instead would’ve picked up a UniFi NAS, which is even more optimal from a cost and integration into my ecosystem. Since that really is just network attack storage - I could just let my old Home lap server act like a server on top of a NAS.
The lessons from this are many. First is that hardware is not a moat. Thanks to china that’s no longer a factor. The second is that software isn’t a moat anymore either. Synology leveraged Linux and then walled garden their solution and decided to not innovate. Now open source and in the future AI have made it so software is significantly cheaper to work with.
That means we are back to loyalty and brand awareness. Both are things that synology has squandered with this adventure.
In the meantime, I became enamored with the Jonbo cases and started seeing white label N100 ITX mobos pop up with a bunch of SATA ports. Eventually figured out they were Topton when Brian Moses included them (and a Jonbo case!) in this year's NAS build.
So my parts are arriving in a few days and Synology has lost one potential new customer.
I run [almost all of] my home's network services on my present-day desktop rig, which... these days, runs Linux[1].
ZFS with RAID and snapshots? Backups for intermittently-connected stuff like my laptop? Plex and friends? Containers (oh my!)? Desktop stuff? Samba stuff? Yep. And other than GTA:V Online, it seems able to play everything I try in my Steam library with no particular effort on my part.
I don't notice when backups are happening. I don't notice when people are using Plex, and they don't notice when I'm gaming. It performs fine for absolutely everything that gets thrown at it -- concurrently.
I've got an inkling to upgrade the hardware soon. Unlike a "dedicated NAS appliance," I can accomplish this by buying bog-standard ATX hardware and stuffing it into the existing bog-standard ATX case -- just as people in DIY circles did for ~decades before PCs became more appliance-like (and/or fishtank-like).
Once that's done, I may think about doing some 10GbE stuff and turning the old hardware into a more-dedicated NAS. Separating the storage from the applications, in this way, sounds fun. But it won't improve performance -- it'll just be a homelab exercise that I'll live with and learn from (and may elect to reverse).
All those words, just to iterate that I have zero interest in buying a snaky-feeling Synology box. It doesn't give me anything that I want that I'm not already doing.
If your retired gaming PC is doing everything you want, then: Keep doing that (unless/until power consumption or something else becomes a concern).
[1]: For most of a decade before I decided to go back to using a Linux desktop, I still ran Linux -- but always with the desktop portion being Windows running in a VM (with its own dedicated GPU and USB adapter and...). That was fun, too, but I got tired of working primarily with Windows.
If they had insider leaks I would imagine they mentioned that aspect so it's possible that this part is derived from speculation.
I just went ahead and editorialized the title with the insertion of an "allegedly" since the sales drop part is unsubstantiated.
> if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it becomes poor journalism
Proof is a high ask. Evidence would be great. But here yeah, waving the premise of the article away with "some reports say" is hardly journalism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/d3cmq2/ds1512_tha...
Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at idle with no power save mode).
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 did you want them to do?
No, I wasn't expecting replacement hardware. I was expecting support for a product that they were still releasing software for.
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.
Though it looks like their SFF-8087 miniSAS chassis are EOL and soon replaced with SFF-8643 HD-miniSAS equivalents: https://istarusa.com/product/product-list/?brand=istarusa&se...
I’m looking at a NAS build myself and am leaning toward a consumer mobo and an older Intel, like maybe a 9th gen i5. 6 SATA ports is pretty standard, and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is a lot of storage for most folks. Boot drive could be a small NVME.
It will definitely consume a few hundred Watts, and when you pack it full of drives it will be more than that. But that's kind of logical. A Synology would not consume that much power but it would also be far slower and have less capacity.
From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.
The Synology End Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060920 - Aug 2025 (355 comments)
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706 - April 2025 (403 comments)
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.
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.
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..
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
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.
I've used Active Backup and never would have guessed it worked like that. Although, the MS365 security and permissions are so complex that I don't have a hope in hell of understanding them. The suggestions to do your own auditing in that post are moot because the target audience for something like a Synology doesn't have the resources or the ability to do that kind of assessment.
For me, I saw the permissions request along with the 'Synology Active Backup for MS365' app registration in my tenant and assumed everything was local to my tenant and NAS. The redirect back to the private LAN IP of the NAS also makes it seem like the communication is between the NAS and MS only.
I can't even tell if the issue has been fixed.
Ignoring the security stuff, my experience with Synology Active Backup for MS365 as a product hasn't been good for OneDrive backups. I have one setup where I reconcile the backup repo against a live (paused to get a consistent point in time) data set that's synced by the OneDrive client.
The Synology Active Backup for MS365 never reconciles correctly. Some files will randomly have things like '(1)' appended. Some files are simply missing. It seems to struggle with certain characters that Windows and OneDrive allow in filenames. For example, dots (.) appear to be problematic.
I monitor it and once it gets to the point where I think we'd suffer an intolerable amount of data loss if needing to restore, I delete it and restart it.
I would strongly encourage anyone relying on it to take the time to reconcile your OneDrive backups against a set of known good data. Pause your OneDrive syncing, restore the backup into a temporary folder, and use something like Beyond Compare [2] to compare the two directories. You can also map a network drive directly to storage location on the NAS which makes it very convenient to reconcile.
VEEAM used to have the same kind of issues with files missing for no reason, but they seem to be better lately if you ignore the way they append the version number to name of every (versioned) file restored (OMG why?). VEEAM has very slow restores and is much more difficult to reconcile due to the modified file names on restore.
Microsoft won't take responsibility for data loss "in the cloud" and the backup solutions all suck pretty bad IMO. Some of the blame for this kind of thing should fall to Microsoft. They've made everything too complex to be reliable.
As an owner and administrator of many Synology NASes I agree that Synology offerings are a bit underpowered compared to what is available in the market (from H/W point of view), but the ease of use and peace of mind within the Synology ecosystem (DSM software, apps) outweighs whatever drawbacks they have.
If Synology management takes the decision to refresh their H/W with new CPUs, NICs and more RAM, I'm sure they'll stay on the market ;-)
Talk about not knowing your customer.
I had heard about the Synology HD policy thing, but had forgotten when I ordered the drives. By the time they arrived, the need was pressing and I had no window to exchange the drives, so I had to just hack the damn system.
Now I have to go out of town to unhack the damn thing so I can be sure nothing I did interferes with future updates.
This is the polar opposite of the experience I was expecting. This foolishness cost me a lot of time and is about to cost more.
Many were already in the boat of "sure I'll pay it, if it works and doesn't give me any BS, otherwise there are many options at better prices"
To change a company culture, you change the CEO. My view of Synology today is that they will pull the rug for their own benefit, at my expense. There is no way I trust this Synology ever again. Now I'm on TrueNAS, so I'm already lost to them, but I also tell everybody not to trust Synology. And that won't change if they don't show me that the company has changed.
Similar to Sonos, I feel.
My "NAS" is a 4U short network racked unit. Pretty large by comparison, but its also mostly empty space.
So who's the one holding the towel? Is it Synology, or could it be WD/Seagate?
I’ve gone through a couple iterations of home server. First I upcycled an obsolete Dell Power edge. Then a N100 mini PC. Neither was as reliable as I wanted.
Now I’m running persistent apps on Railway and compute hungry stuff on my MacStudio. Pretty good so far.
This doesn't seem permanent.
It takes decades to build consumer trust, and one stupid MBA driven idea to ruin it.
What did NAS customers purchase instead?
You can get something similar if you download and set up 50 Docker images, but that's not easy. Just look up how you do HDD image backups of your computers to your Synology and to your TrueNAS for example, it's way more complicated.
What a wild unforced error...
Maybe open source your code or do something that is the exact opposite to vendor lock in in addition to the decision reversal.
Pretty sure that email single-handedly push the needle on their decision. Hah!
Shocking that it took them this long to reverse course on this strongly negatively-received move. The leadership should go.
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.
And part of the magic of a NAS is not necessarily having to have matching hardware. In addition to other design basics like using drives from different batches to minimise the likelihood of multiple failures within data-fatally small time frames.
Monoculture is inherently more fragile; it's antithetical to good storage design.
Correct. They were, and they did. The goal was profit - the rebranded drives cost more. Just like printer ink.
I recommend everybody to do the same. Companies shouldn't just reverse feret their way out of trouble. Make stupid decisions have consequences.
Always works.
Granted that there might be some bias at work as a Synology customer, but I heard a lot more about Synology's lockdown efforts than I heard of QNAP's ransomware troubles.
I will not spend money on Synology which can make pay me more for nothing any time when their management wants some more money next time from users.
So now they will make less money and not more users.
Even now, after the reversal, it's really not an option. I mean, I have no assurance it won't get reversed again, and I don't want to invest into something that won't necessarily work long term.
Basically, I want to be sure I can access my data and get updates, and right now, Synology is not that from what I see. I'm just looking at this as a home user, but unless there is some guarantee, Synology just seems to be waiting to pull the rug out from you regarding your data.
This smelled like "smart" printer cartridges all over again. No thank you.
This is disrespectful itself. If you realize how stupid your decision was, with such bad results and bad sentiment among customers, you publicly admit the mistake not quietly. This also raises doubt how committed they are to reversing it if they don't want to talk about it.
You can't ever buy a NAS without having complete flexibility in drives, both in the short and long term, because the claims of hard drive manufacturers can't ever be trusted until verified individually, per drive model..
Western Digital lied about their drives having SMR instead of CMR as their RED drives were marketed for NAS usage: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-class-action-lawsuit-sm...
Add to that how one model of a hard drive from a manufacturer will be invincible, while another model next to it will have huge issues.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...
I hear Synology has nice gear, it has always been pretty nice when I interacted with it. I own a different brand just through deciding to have a NAS with more flexibility that I could grow into if I wanted.
And if you did it to us once, you're capable of doing it again. To me personally, the "Synology" brand is permanently tarnished. For them to do what they did signals serious moral problems with their decision makers, and the entire move sounded desperate for profit. Just type "alternative to synology nas" and you'll get a whole bunch of options.
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...
So you can't buy 3rd party HDDs --- but Synology can?
Looks likes a blatant FU to the customer was returned in kind.
The differences here are that they actually implemented software checks, for devices bought at MSRP. And so harm is felt.
And now I won't buy Synology for the same reason I won't buy ink jet.
You can find the compatible drives here https://www.synology.com/en-uk/compatibility
"You have connected additional HDD. Please select which bay you want to use or try our 'Synology Super Subscription' to use both drives at the same time".
I hope they go out of business even though I used to like their product.
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.
Prodigal son rules on this one.