Synology 2025 NAS Hard Drive and SSD Lock In Confirmed – Bye, Bye Seagate and WD

Synology is closing the gap on third-party hard drive support further in 2025

UPDATE 3 – Synology has now made the DS925+ NAS NAS Product Page live in several of the Eastern regions (China, Australia, Japan – not the Taiwan page yet however). With it, we can now see the official compatibility pages. On the hard drive page there is now only Synology Drive media, and the option to select supported 3rd party HDD choices is removed. For all we know, this will return if/when 3rd party drives from WD and Seagate are verified. But at least for now, it seems the brand is serious about only recommending its own storage media in their 2025 systems at launch:

The full list of drives includes the Synology Plus series of HDDs, the Enterprise class drives and the enterprise class SATA SSDs. However, there are currently no Surveillance class drives listed (WD Purple/Seagate Skyhawk, etc):

In terms of M.2 NVMe SSD support, the brand has also removed any selection of 3rd party SSDs from Samsung, WD, Seagate, etc. I am particularly surprised about this, as their own M.2 drives are good for durability, but performance-wise are much lower than most in the market and whether it is as caching drives or as storage pools, there are definitely a lot of good options in the market. I hope Synology roll out some performance class SSDs to compensate for this very soon.

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UPDATE 2 (22/04) – I have been in communication with several representatives from Synology regarding this matter to get further clarification on this from them. The following statement was provided by a senior Synology representative and provided publicly with their consent :   “Synology’s storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model. Starting with the 25-series, DSM will implement a new HDD compatibility policy in accordance with the published Product Compatibility List. Only listed HDDs are supported for new system installations. This policy is not retroactive and will not affect existing systems and new installations of already released models. Drive migrations from older systems are supported with certain limitations. As of April 2025, the list will consist of Synology drives. Synology intends to constantly update the Product Compatibility List and will introduce a revamped 3rd-party drive validation program.” Reason for the new Synology HCL Policy: Each component in a Synology storage solution is carefully engineered and tested to maintain data security and reliability. Based on customer support statistics over the past few years, the use of validated drives results in nearly 40% fewer storage-related issues and faster issue diagnostics and resolution. Each validated hard drive on the compatibility list undergoes over 7,000 hours of comprehensive compatibility testing across platforms to ensure operational reliability. Technical support data shows that validated drives result in a 40% lower chance of encountering critical disk issues. For models that have adopted the new hard drive compatibility policy, severe storage anomalies have decreased by up to 88% compared to previous models. By adhering to the Product Compatibility List, we can significantly reduce the variances introduced by unannounced manufacturing changes, firmware modifications, and other variations that are difficult for end-users and Synology to identify, much less track. Over the past few years, Synology has steadily expanded its storage drive ecosystem, collaborating with manufacturing partners to ensure a stable and consistent lineup of drives with varying capacities and competitive price points. Synology intends to expand its offerings and is committed to maintaining long-term availability, which is not available with off-the-shelf options. We understand that this may be a significant change for some of our customers and are working on ways to ease the transition. Synology is already collaborating with our partners to develop a more seamless purchasing experience, while maintaining the initial sizing and post-install upgrade flexibility that DSM platforms are renowned for.” – Senior Synology Representative on the record.

 

Original Article:

Over the last few years, Synology have not been exact about being forward in supporting. Back in 2021, we started to see the brand reduce the number of third-party hard drives and SSDs on their systems. This diminishing support has manifested itself in two main ways. The first is that drives that are listed on the official support and compatibility pages have significantly reduced, favouring the utilisation of their own growing range of hard drives and SSD media. The second way this has presented itself drew significant criticism in 2022/2023, when utilising third-party hardware resulted in the system presenting warning messages and even service limitations being suggested. It appears that this is something they are putting into force for their new 2025 series of devices. Numerous websites in Germany have today reported that Synology plans to go full first-party drive priority on all systems released from the 2025 generation and onwards. An official statement from Synology via an official source has not been released, but it appears that the brand is going to go hard on pushing their own drives when using their own systems – at least at launch. So, what are the intended limitations for those who want to use non-Synology branded drives from Seagate and Western Digital? And why would Synology do this with their systems that have been open for over 25 years? Let’s discuss.

UPDATE #2 – There is now an official press release by Synology on this, available from Synology.de:

Synology is increasingly relying on its own ecosystem for upcoming Plus models Germany, Düsseldorf – April 16, 2025 – Following the success of the High-Performance series, the company is now increasingly relying on Synology’s own storage media for the Plus series models, which will be released starting in 2025. Users will thus benefit from higher performance, increased reliability, and more efficient support.  “With our proprietary hard drive solution, we have already seen significant benefits for our customers in a variety of deployment scenarios,” said Chad Chiang, Managing Director of Synology GmbH and Synology UK. “By expanding our integrated ecosystem to the Plus series, we aim to provide all users—from home users to small businesses—with the highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support.”  For users, this means that starting with the Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology’s own hard drives and third-party hard drives certified according to Synology’s specifications will be compatible and offer the full range of functions and support.

There will be no changes for Plus models released up to and including 2024 (excluding the XS Plus series and rack models). Furthermore, migrating hard drives from existing Synology NAS to a new Plus model will continue to be possible without restrictions.  The use of compatible and unlisted hard drives will be subject to certain restrictions in the future, such as pool creation and support for issues and failures caused by the use of incompatible storage media. Volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic hard drive firmware updates will only be available for Synology hard drives in the future.  Tight integration of Synology NAS systems and hard drives reduces compatibility issues and increases system reliability and performance. At the same time, firmware updates and security patches can be deployed more efficiently, ensuring a high level of data security and more efficient support for Synology customers.

TL;DR: Synology to Restrict Third-Party Drive Functionality on 2025+ NAS Models

Starting with the 2025 generation of Synology Plus series NAS devices, the company appears to be tightening restrictions on third-party hard drives. While you’ll still be able to use non-Synology drives (like those from Seagate or WD), early reports suggest that certain features may be limited or disabled unless you’re using Synology-branded or Synology-certified drives. According to preliminary reporting (not yet officially confirmed by Synology), using third-party drives may restrict (i.e several news reports indicate this, but no official statement/confirmation yet):

• Creation of storage pools

• Access to health monitoring tools

• Volume-wide deduplication support

• Drive lifespan analysis

• Automatic firmware updates

• Access to official Synology support

Older NAS models (up to and including 2024, excluding XS+ and rackmount units) are not affected. Drive migration from existing systems to new ones should remain possible — but full functionality may require Synology drives.

Source – HERE (or click below)

What are the proposed limitations of using third-party hard drives in the Synology 2025 lineup?

Although the brand themselves, at the time of writing, has not officially stated that devices after the 2025 series will only support their drives, sources highlighted on numerous news outlets have detailed that a number of key storage features and functionality are going to be limited. These include health monitoring tools, deduplication features built into DSM, official support from the brand in some cases, and (most worrying of all if it’s true) storage pool support. I’m still waiting for further clarification if this storage pool support limitation to first-party drives is only referring to the use of M.2 NVMEs in storage pools (something we are already aware of from the 2023 series), or whether people are not going to be able to use third-party hard drives in storage pools moving forward in 2025 series releases. But it would seemingly very much indicate the latter. It’s also worth highlighting that this limitation seems to be a ‘launch’ choice and may also mean that drives are granularly added to the supported pages as the likes of WD and Seagate submit compatibility reports. But the message seems to be that Synology themselves will not be the ones who verify the drive compatibility.

It should also be worth highlighting that users who have purchased devices before the 2025 lineup will not be currently affected by this change and will continue to have broader support of third-party hard drives, although even that has diminished since 2021–2022 as it stands. This does bring into question for some whether this broader policy is something that would be applied in a large-scale DSM update down the road, i.e. DSM 7.3 or DSM 8. For now, until we have an official statement from the brand or access to compatibility lists for the intended new products, we need to reserve our full judgement.

Why would Synology reduce compatibility with the majority of third-party hard drives (Seagate and WD)?

There are plenty of reasons why Synology would consider a move like this, for good and for bad. So in the interest of balance, let’s start positive. What are the good reasons why Synology would endeavour to only support the use of their own storage media in their systems?

• To a much smaller group, it allows them to tailor performance and system deployment expectations a great deal more realistically and could result in improved overall performance for all users, as it allows the development of future solutions to be significantly more targeted.
• If Synology solutions only support Synology drives, it allows the brand to be a great deal more effective at reducing the TCO of the system to buyers, as it will be an all-in-one party solution and even opens the door to the brand rolling out bundled systems that will further reduce the total cost of ownership.

• Export costs in the US — Synology centralising the full component list of their products to the end user can also allow them to better absorb any potential costs efficiently and hopefully pass those cost savings onto the consumer, reducing reservations on purchasing the product in light of potential price hikes.
• Support will be a great deal more specialised if end user deployments have fewer variables to consider, resulting in reduced support resolution times and potentially improved support services as an end result for all users.

Beyond the other potential benefits, they will be considering this proposition to drastically reduce third-party hard drive compatibility and utilisation in the 2025 lineup:

• In a word, profit. Having their own storage hard drives as the main — and potentially only — storage option alongside their systems will allow the brand to make profit vertically across the product deployment. For a long time, the brand was only really monetizing the core system itself, which is really only going to be replaced every 7 to 10 years for most users. Storage media, given the escalating growth rate of people’s data, will require a great deal more regular replacement.

• If Synology storage media is largely the only option to buyers, the brand has a greater degree of control over which products are available. So, for example, currently Synology has fewer different capacity tiers and drive variation tiers compared with other brands (i.e. 24TB drives, surveillance-optimized drives, M.2 NVMEs built for performance, etc.), so in some cases a user may have to opt for a larger capacity or a more enterprise-class drive when they might not need to.

• Eliminates smaller-scale purchases. This is a particularly cynical point of view, I know, but a move like this will almost certainly push value series devices significantly more towards the likes of the BeeStation (which are already pre-populated and fixed with Synology storage media) and away from the Plus series, as a divide begins to appear in terms of the overall total purchase price for many users. Alongside upselling their value series to that buyer tier, it will also move only more serious buyers towards the Plus series and higher from 2025 onwards.

All of the above reasoning towards why Synology would prioritise their own drives over that of third parties are my own points of view, but I do think there’s a ring of truth in some of them.7

What are the potential problems surrounding Synology’s push toward its own storage media over third-party drives?

There are several small issues that are worth highlighting in this broader plan of Synology hard drive prioritisation that we should probably touch on — and hopefully ones that Synology themselves will resolve quickly if this is something they’re going to push hard on. Such as:

• The brand inadvertently revealed earlier this year that they are working on a 6 x 2.5-inch SATA SSD system called the DS-625 Slim. However, the only 2.5-inch SATA SSD media the brand has are way too enterprise — the SAT5200 series — and would be like putting a Ferrari engine into a Ford Focus in terms of the disparity in the hardware being used and the price point!

• Synology has still yet to introduce higher-performing M.2 NVMe storage media, and although several of the new 2025 series of devices arrive with M.2 NVMe support, Synology’s own M.2 SSDs prioritise durability over performance. That is a good thing, but users who are not going to be able to use third-party SSDs for caching or storage pools face being restricted to much lower-performing SSDs in these bays.

• How will the system identify the use of third-party drives, and to what extent are these drives going to be limited? Although lots of details have been revealed in the news reports today, we’re still yet to see a full detailing from Synology themselves on an official platform.
• Surveillance utilisation. Synology has an impressive range of surveillance solutions in the NVR and DVA series, as well as support for Surveillance Station on the majority of their systems, but to date, the brand still does not have surveillance-optimised hard drives in its lineup. Surveillance-optimised hard drive media like WD Purple are designed to have much higher write performance leveraging rather than read, and surveillance drives are generally only accessed for a very small percentage of the time when in use. Will third-party drive limitations extend to these systems as well?

I’m still waiting on an official Synology response on this matter, as there have been early indications (such as the Synology DS925+ Amazon.co.uk link 2 days ago) that indicate some of these systems may be arriving in May 2025 — not that far away! So, until we have full and officially backed confirmation on this, still treat it with a grain of salt. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disheartened by this move by the brand, as although their software is still absolutely the king of the hill in the world of NAS, further restrictions on their more modest hardware to only use their own range of hard drives — versus that of more widely available, globally distributed, and industry veteran–backed drives — seems a very odd move, and one that I think a lot of home/prosumer/enthusiast/SMB users might take issue with.

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