I went to Synology HQ and Asked About Hard Drives…
During a recent visit to Taipei for Computex 2025, I took the opportunity to visit Synology’s headquarters and speak directly with company representatives about one of the most discussed and divisive topics in the NAS community today — the company’s increasingly strict stance on hard drive compatibility. With the rollout of Synology’s latest generation of hardware, users have been met with significant limitations on the use of third-party drives, prompting concern over reduced flexibility, potential e-waste, and the future direction of Synology’s hardware ecosystem. This article provides a can overview of that visit, beginning with the HQ tour, but mainly it is about putting several big questions users have about the brand’s change in support of Seagate, WD, etc on their 2025 devices.
Four core questions — based on direct community feedback — were put forward, addressing the motivation, risks, and future implications of Synology’s current drive support policy. Each answer is presented exactly as delivered. Note, this article is not sponsored by Synology and they have no control over the editorial stance and output! For users, partners, and industry observers alike, understanding these policy shifts is essential for making informed decisions about Synology systems moving forward.
Touring the Synology Headquarters
The Synology headquarters tour took place during a coordinated visit arranged alongside the Computex 2025 trade event. Approximately 30 to 40 individuals were in attendance, a mix that included official Synology partners, resellers, independent media, and technology commentators. The tour began with a structured company overview presentation outlining Synology’s operational history, business units, and market positioning.
While much of this information was familiar to long-term observers, it served to reinforce the company providing integrated storage and data management solutions. The presentation also included a brief overview of Synology’s global distribution and the evolving structure of its enterprise product lines.
Attendees were then guided through various areas of the facility, which covered several floors within a shared building. Synology does not occupy the entire structure, but the portions shown during the tour were substantial, comprising office sections, collaborative workspaces, logistics coordination areas, and support-related operations. Notably, many desks were temporarily unoccupied due to staff presence at Computex’s Nangang Exhibition Center.
Nonetheless, the offices remained populated with active terminals and systems undergoing live testing.
A significant portion of the tour focused on the environmental and durability testing facilities, including designated zones for acoustic profiling, thermal analysis, and dust resilience. The diversity of units being tested suggested coverage across multiple device classes, including both rackmount and desktop models.
The most extensive portion of the tour was the dedicated test and burn-in area. This floor was almost entirely devoted to long-term performance and diagnostic evaluations. Numerous Synology NAS units — some dating back to the early 2010s — were in continuous operation, either running synthetic workloads or undergoing compatibility assessments with the current DSM operating system.
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The presence of so many legacy devices in active testing underscored the company’s emphasis on software longevity and cross-generational hardware support.
However, it also provided a contrast to Synology’s new strict verification policies, especially given the mixed hardware environments visible during testing. The tour was led by ZP Kao, Sales Director at Synology, and Chad Chiang, Regional Manager for the UK and Germany, who offered clarification and responded to several direct inquiries during the walkthrough.
Why Has Synology Changed Its HDD Support Policy? Questions and Answers
Questions I put to Synology about their change in policy regarding verifying and supporting drive media being used on their 2025 and later series of NAS devices. I based these on the comments and suggestions from videos on the YouTube channel and comments on previous articles. I am under no illusions that these changes by Synology in their drive support policies have financial justifications (ranging from Support efficiency and it’s financial overhead, to the simple profitability of prioritizing their own labelled firmware optimized storage media choices over those of other brands), but I wanted to know if these were the only reasons for this? What other reasons could Synology provide to support this large and unpopular move. Thank you once again to Chad Chiang for taking the time to answer these questions.
Note – for a better understanding of the current DSM Support of Unverified media, as well as test scenarios detailing each setup and how DSM handles it, you can read it HERE in my Test Article.
How has the verification process changed for which drives you can use on Synology systems moving forward? And are there drive options from WD and Seagate currently undergoing support verification?
Answer – At Synology, we constantly reflect on a core question: Why do people choose a NAS? We believe the answer lies in the need for secure, reliable, and hassle-free data storage. This belief has guided our mission for over a decade. When analyzing our support history, the data clearly shows that systems using Synology-branded drives experience 40% fewer issues compared to those with third-party HDDs. This insight underscores the importance of using thoroughly tested drives. As for which third-party vendors are currently undergoing drive verification, we’re unable to disclose details. For the most accurate and up-to-date information, we recommend reaching out directly to the respective manufacturers.
The response positions Synology’s verification changes as a reliability-focused initiative and smooth platform running as the chief reasoning for them, referencing internal data that suggests a 40% reduction in support issues when Synology-branded drives are used. However, as mentioned previously, the statement does not provide supporting metrics such as sample size, timeframes, or specific failure modes, making it difficult to assess the scope or significance of this claim. I do not doubt that it is true, but without the X/Y and details of how this result was achieved, we are only getting half the story here. The policy shift is framed as a precautionary measure aimed at minimizing user disruption, but the absence of transparency regarding ongoing verifications with WD or Seagate limits clarity for users seeking alternatives – which is why users are seeing this more as a means for the brand to increase profitability in the 2025 series as a bundled utility purchase – not as a means of system stability.
Ultimately, discussing the technical standards or benchmarks involved in the verification process in paramount here. It largely confirms that responsibility for future third-party compatibility lies with the drive manufacturers themselves, effectively shifting the onus of transparency to them. While it is understandable that Synology might want to mitigate support complexity, the lack of specificity about how the verification criteria have evolved or what steps vendors must follow leaves key questions unanswered for both users and third-party storage providers. I reached out to representatives from Seagate and WD to see if they could elaborate further on this new media side verification process with their respective NAS/Server class media – neither was able to provide further details at this time.
UPDATED 07-05-25 = Added Unverified HDD and SSD (Migrated) Storage Pool RAID Repair, RAID POOL Expansion and Hot Spare Tests. Right now, the following is what works and what does not (between pre-2025 Series and the 2025 Series that is releasing now):
| Feature / Function | Pre-2025 Synology NAS<br>(e.g., DS1821+, DS920+, DS923+) | 2025 Synology NAS<br>(e.g., DS1825+, DS925+, DS1525+) |
|---|---|---|
| DSM Installation – Verified Drives | ✅ Full support | ✅ Full support |
| DSM Installation – Non-Verified Drives | ✅ Allowed (with warnings) | ❌ Blocked completely |
| Drive Migration (Non-Verified Drives) | ✅ Fully functional, minor alerts | ✅ Works, but shows persistent warnings |
| Storage Pool Creation – Verified Drives | ✅ Fully supported | ✅ Fully supported |
| Storage Pool Creation – Non-Verified Drives | ✅ Allowed (with warnings) | ❌ Blocked |
| Storage Pool Expansion – Verified Drives | ✅ Fully supported | ✅ Fully supported |
| Storage Pool Expansion – Non-Verified Drives | ✅ Allowed (mixed arrays supported) | ❌ Blocked – drives flagged as incompatible |
| Hot Spare Assignment – Verified Drives | ✅ Fully supported | ✅ Fully supported |
| Hot Spare Assignment – Non-Verified Drives | ✅ Allowed | ❌ Blocked |
| RAID Recovery – Verified Drives | ✅ Supported | ✅ Supported |
| RAID Recovery – Non-Verified Drives | ✅ Supported | ❌ Blocked – system will not rebuild with unverified media |
| M.2 NVMe Cache – Synology SSDs | ✅ Supported | ✅ Supported |
| M.2 NVMe Cache – 3rd Party SSDs | ✅ Supported | ❌ Blocked |
| M.2 NVMe Storage Pools – Synology SSDs | ❌ Not supported | ✅ Supported |
| M.2 NVMe Storage Pools – 3rd Party SSDs | ❌ Not supported | ❌ Blocked |
| SMART Monitoring – Verified Drives | ✅ Full support | ✅ Full support |
| SMART Monitoring – Non-Verified Drives | ✅ Full support | ⚠️ Limited or blocked (TBC) |
| Storage Manager Alerts – Non-Verified Drives | ⚠️ Warnings, dismissible | 🔴 Persistent, cannot be cleared |
| Overall Compatibility Flexibility | ✅ High – mix-and-match drives allowed | ❌ Low – walled-garden enforcement |
Users are able to migrate existing storage arrays that feature Unverified/unsupported drive media in previous Synology systems into 2025 Plus series devices and still use DSM services – however once they do so, they are unable to use the same model ID of drives to perform RAID recovery, RAID expansion or introduced a hot spare, unless that drive is on the verified drive list. Why is this?
Answer- Advanced operations such as RAID recovery, expansion, or hot spare assignment are technically intensive and carry a higher risk of data loss if inconsistencies arise. Drives that haven’t been validated through Synology’s verification process may behave unpredictably under stress, impacting array stability or performance. For this reason, support for these functions is limited to verified drives—a precaution designed to safeguard user data and maintain long-term system reliability.
So, this answer outlines Synology’s rationale for restricting critical RAID operations on unverified drives and It emphasizes the increased risk associated with advanced storage operations, particularly when performed on drives that may not have been tested under stress or fault conditions. The justification focuses on data integrity and system reliability, suggesting that verified drives have undergone stress testing scenarios that others have not. However, the lack of granularity in what defines “unpredictable behavior” makes it difficult to independently evaluate the severity or frequency of these issues. Much like the statistics point earlier, this seems a remarkable stretch in terms of reaction to what many users would consider a very, very low % risk factor. Equally, though there is an argument that some drive media is less suitable for NAS usage (eg the WD Red SMR drives, desktop single drive use media like Seagate Barracuda and high power draw HDDs/SSDs in some cases), these make up a very small % of drive media in the market and using this as a reasoning to effectively bar the continued support of drive media that has been supported/used in Synology server use over the last 2 decades to prevent RAID recovery and Expansion in the latest gen for those carrying them over seems insane overkill.
The policy effectively limits upgradability and flexibility in mixed-drive environments. While it is technically reasonable to restrict risky operations on unvalidated components, the ability to migrate but not expand or rebuild a RAID introduces a half-measure — allowing users to enter unsupported configurations while restricting them mid-cycle. The result is a system state that may appear functional at first but ultimately lacks key functionality unless users conform to the verified list. For long-term users upgrading from older systems, this shift can lead to unexpected limitations without adequate warning, particularly in small or home office deployments. The messaging has been poor and though I made a video about these limitations (embedded above), there is practically no other clear and transparent information about this online (with incongruous detailson the Synology Knowledge base that could stand to be a lot clearer and louder).
HOT TAKE, and hear me out – If Synology do not allow support of RAID repair/Expansion on drives that have been migrated over from older NAS systems where the drives WERE originally supported (unless they use 2025 verified drives) because of reasons of stability, I have a somewhat extreme suggestion. As unpopular as it might have been, Synology should have just BARRED the support of migration from older generation Synology NAS devices with unverified drives entirely. I personally think they should have allowed for RAID repair/Expansion of unverified drives, but if they are going to pursue this for reasons of system stability, they should have committed to this fully and not allowed this grey area with migration. As it just looks bad for the brand, as means of ensuring people can upgrade/remain in the ecosystem, but then have limited scalability when those older drives require replacement/growth.
Were pre-populated Synology NAS devices considered, given the strict verified support stance that this new Synology hardware generation contains?
Answer – Regarding pre-populated NAS solutions, there hasn’t been significant internal discussion or a formal strategy around this model. As such, I don’t have a concrete answer at this time. The focus remains on ensuring that any storage media used—whether user-installed or bundled—is fully verified to meet Synology’s reliability standards.
Not much to unpack here. It makes sense. I imagine they DID discuss this as an option (as they are already engaging with this with systems like the Beestation), but at least for now, it seems off the table. As unpopular as this might have been, in some ways it could have solved a lot of this friction for some users. Provide the 2025 PLUS series as an empty/enclosure-only solution with similar compatibility as the 2024 and earlier generation – but then also supply several pre-populated options that feature Synology drive media as standard. However, that would be a different discussion entirely (eg logistics, SKUs, viability, ROI by offering this alongside flexible options).
Can you provide example(s) of critical system issues that using unverified drives caused, that were the tipping point for this new strict HDD support policy?
Examples of what stepped up our verification process moving forward:
Performance Issues: Unverified drives may function under light workloads but can suffer serious performance drops (e.g., IOPS decline) under multi-user access or when running demanding services like virtualization, backup, or databases. This can lead to poor user experience or service disruptions (e.g., iSCSI timeouts).
Stability Risks: Without thorough testing, unverified drives are more prone to failures under stress conditions such as unexpected power loss or long-duration file transfers—leading to timeouts, reboot failures, or data integrity issues in high-load or long-term operations.
Compatibility Problems: Drives not validated for compatibility may show unstable behavior with certain NAS controllers, resulting in drive drops, RAID instability, or data access interruptions over time.
Advanced Feature Failures: Unverified drives may fail during operations like SMART testing or Secure Erase, especially after unexpected power outages. Some drives may not respond properly under frequent access or specific command sets, affecting system stability.
Drive Failures Under High Load or Density: Some drives may become unresponsive under high data density or I/O intensity, with issues persisting even after a reset.
The examples provided by Synology highlight a variety of operational issues associated with unverified drives, most of which relate to performance degradation, system instability, or failure of advanced features under stress. These scenarios focus on workloads involving sustained I/O, power fluctuations, and controller-level interactions. In isolation, many of the issues described are plausible for lower-tier or unsuitable drive models, particularly in demanding or enterprise-like environments. That said, that are very low margins (eg 0.01% or lower) when you look at the traditional deployment of many Synology NAS solution in the Plus series. Again though, the scale and frequency of these issues remain unclear. There is no indication of how widespread such failures are across Synology’s user base, nor whether they represent rare edge cases or common occurrences. The examples also apply more logically to enterprise or high-density configurations, whereas the same strict policies now affect all tiers — including two-bay and four-bay systems used by home and prosumer users. Without concrete statistics or clearer thresholds, it is difficult to assess whether these issues justify the breadth of the policy. The policy appears to target potential worst-case scenarios, but may have broader consequences for user flexibility than the risk profile necessarily warrants.
Additional Information and Details from the MyBroadband Article
Further context on Synology’s new drive compatibility policy was provided in an interview between MyBroadband journalist Daniel Puchert (click to read) and Michael Chang, Synology’s Regional Sales Manager. The discussion reinforced many of the points raised during the HQ visit, while also offering additional information into the motivations behind Synology’s stricter approach to drive support in their latest generation of NAS systems. Chang explained that Synology’s primary objective was to ensure product reliability and reduce system-level faults that were increasingly traced back to third-party hard drives. According to Chang, complaints received by Synology often involved third-party drive issues, yet Synology would still be held accountable by users due to their role as the NAS provider. This prompted the company to centralize responsibility and tighten control over supported hardware configurations. While Synology-branded drives are currently the only models certified, Chang noted that other vendors are being invited to participate in the compatibility validation program — provided they meet the same testing standards.
(In the case of the NAS drives) “..because Synology’s product would typically facilitate the usage of third-party hard drives, it would also be the scapegoat for any faults with the entire system.”
“..complaints received by Synology regarding issues relating to its NAS devices were most often caused by faulty hard drives.
“severe storage anomalies have decreased by up to 88%” for hard drive models that have adopted its hard drive compatibility policy, compared to older models.”
“We still welcome third parties to join Synology’s ecosystem and have invited vendors to join our validation program,”
Michael Chang, Synology Regional Sales Manager – full article HERE
The article also mentioned that Synology-certified drives undergo over 7,000 hours of testing, and systems using those drives reportedly experience 40% fewer failures than those using uncertified media. Additionally, Synology claims that severe storage anomalies have dropped by up to 88% in systems following its compatibility policy. Although Chang confirmed that third-party compatibility may expand in the future, it will only do so under strict adherence to Synology’s internal benchmarks. These statements align with Synology’s position during the HQ tour, further emphasizing a shift toward a closed, highly controlled ecosystem that prioritizes consistent performance over hardware flexibility.
Synology and HDD Support and Verification – Conclusion and the Long Term
My biggest issue with all this is that, almost certainly, we are going to see Seagate, WD, Toshiba and more slow (slooooooooowly) appear on the compatibility lists for a number of the 2025 generation of devices over the coming months. So, what was all this for? The PR damage and likely early sales damage of the Synolgoy 2025 Series because of this change of support I would estimate is going to be pretty substantial – and all the reports and reactions to this online are not going to go away as soon as a Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red drive appears on the support lists. Also, Synology work on these devices for a very, very long time before launch – why is all this happening now – and not before launch. The cynic in me wants to just assume it was pure profitability and that Synology want to maximize profits, and if when this does begin to U-Trun ,that the brand can say that it was the plan all along. But whether that is true or not, the damage to the brand in the eyes of a substantial % of their long term fans is notable, and with many more players in the market (UniFi, QNAP, UGREEN and more) launching new products in Q3 and Q4 – is this all going to be a gamble by the brand that ends up costing them more than just leaving the support status quo where it was? Only time will tell.
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Q3 and Q4 = More of the same! They are giving enterprise excuses for private “home” units!
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Q2 = Same BS! Same reason of Q1.
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Q1 = Bull shit! Isn’t that the hole point for RAID!
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Some call me crazy! Others say I am a prophet! Sinology will lose private “home” users. The HD manufacturer deal better be worth it!
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I’m due to replace my NAS, I’ve been putting the project on hold because of all of this.
There is no way I’m gonna buy Synology’s drive, because of the price tag, and there is a complete lack of transparency regarding third party support.
Therefore I’ve been more and more interested into UGREEN (good timing for them), but I would like them to support ECC. I notably like the fact they allow to use the NAS as a DAS with the thunderbolt connectivity.
QNAP maybe… but I really find them ugly.
I’ve heard of MiniForum N5, but for some reason (most likely marketing) I’m having a hard time trusting the brand.
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It’s just another company going after enterprise customers and throwing the little guy to the side. They don’t care. With AI growing exponentially, they know the need for enterprise data storage is going to grow with it.
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It’s just another company going after enterprise customers and throwing the little guy to the side. They don’t care. With AI growing exponentially, they know the need for enterprise data storage is going to grow with it.
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It’s just another company going after enterprise customers and throwing the little guy to the side. They don’t care. With AI growing exponentially, they know the need for enterprise data storage is going to grow with it.
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It’s just another company going after enterprise customers and throwing the little guy to the side. They don’t care. With AI growing exponentially, they know the need for enterprise data storage is going to grow with it.
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It’s just another company going after enterprise customers and throwing the little guy to the side. They don’t care. With AI growing exponentially, they know the need for enterprise data storage is going to grow with it.
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I had several WD drives with DOA. Used some Seagate drives then. Now we switched to refurbished server drives with 15k hours and like 5 times booted. No problem. I will switch to UGREEN maybe, but there backups are crap. We use several Synologys and Active Backup for Business and this is very nice and secure because the backup process is initiated from outside the Synology and can’t be attacked really. Versioned bare metal backups and restore is as simple as possible… That’s the only reason using Synology…
I thing you forgot question 5. It’s a special kind of question with an ! at the end. It starts with “F”, then “uck” and after that a “you!”.
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I had several WD drives with DOA. Used some Seagate drives then. Now we switched to refurbished server drives with 15k hours and like 5 times booted. No problem. I will switch to UGREEN maybe, but there backups are crap. We use several Synologys and Active Backup for Business and this is very nice and secure because the backup process is initiated from outside the Synology and can’t be attacked really. Versioned bare metal backups and restore is as simple as possible… That’s the only reason using Synology…
I thing you forgot question 5. It’s a special kind of question with an ! at the end. It starts with “F”, then “uck” and after that a “you!”.
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I had several WD drives with DOA. Used some Seagate drives then. Now we switched to refurbished server drives with 15k hours and like 5 times booted. No problem. I will switch to UGREEN maybe, but there backups are crap. We use several Synologys and Active Backup for Business and this is very nice and secure because the backup process is initiated from outside the Synology and can’t be attacked really. Versioned bare metal backups and restore is as simple as possible… That’s the only reason using Synology…
I thing you forgot question 5. It’s a special kind of question with an ! at the end. It starts with “F”, then “uck” and after that a “you!”.
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I had several WD drives with DOA. Used some Seagate drives then. Now we switched to refurbished server drives with 15k hours and like 5 times booted. No problem. I will switch to UGREEN maybe, but there backups are crap. We use several Synologys and Active Backup for Business and this is very nice and secure because the backup process is initiated from outside the Synology and can’t be attacked really. Versioned bare metal backups and restore is as simple as possible… That’s the only reason using Synology…
I thing you forgot question 5. It’s a special kind of question with an ! at the end. It starts with “F”, then “uck” and after that a “you!”.
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I had several WD drives with DOA. Used some Seagate drives then. Now we switched to refurbished server drives with 15k hours and like 5 times booted. No problem. I will switch to UGREEN maybe, but there backups are crap. We use several Synologys and Active Backup for Business and this is very nice and secure because the backup process is initiated from outside the Synology and can’t be attacked really. Versioned bare metal backups and restore is as simple as possible… That’s the only reason using Synology…
I thing you forgot question 5. It’s a special kind of question with an ! at the end. It starts with “F”, then “uck” and after that a “you!”.
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Time to play them at their own game, how do they check it’s a Synology drive? Edit the drive data to show a Synology Model Number?
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It’s all BS… MAY MAY MAY… Every answer is it MAY but zero evidence of something actually recorded as a known issue. They must have a list of drives that have caused issues that either needed a code change or warning users that drive model xx has been known to cause a specific issue.
Do I get the DS1821+ now or so I ditch Synology forever?
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This whole situation is kind of funny to me. We have a manufacturer that clearly made a decision to increase profitability. They create these excuses that they know are b.s., customers know they are b.s., but the dance continues. If this was all about reliability and performance, they would publish test results showing their drives and faster, more reliable, etc. etc. They could mark up those drives with the justification that they are faster, more reliable, and would receive product support. They could then tell the customers if they choose to install other drives, do not call Synology and ask for help. End of story. The customer can choose whether then want to pay the markup for the ability to receive support. Given they did none of this, I am left to assume that they are simply putting their stickers on another manufacturers drive, with custom firmware to support the lockout. I don’t take this personally or get emotional about it. They have the right to run their business however they want to run it. However, while I have been a customer for 11 years, I will not buy into this “upcharge for nothing” model. The good news is that competition is heating up and I can just move on.
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If I buy an SMR NAS drive (WD Red, Iron wolf, Seagate Exos, Toshiba AL/MG, Kioxia , etc.) then I expect it to just work! Each of these enterprise class/brands should get Cart Blanch! This gate keeping of the worst degree in a SOHO class of device. I hope they lose significant market share over this practice and has to loosen the reins!
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Synology is assuming too much “power” regarding user’s own responsibilities, thus trying to create user dependency a la Apple Co. Ten thumbs down.
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Bullshit
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QNAP can expect a significant rise in sales this year
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There is only one way, don’t buy Synology NAS systems in 2025 and beyond. If customers refuse to buy these systems Synology will change their behavior or discontinue the consumer line. All answers they gave are corporate BS talk.
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Bye Synology.
Hi Ugreen.
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Have a DS923+ built a diy unraid server couldn’t be more happier. Got 6x 24tb drives Toshiba MG series as they are the cheapest in the UK for me per tb.
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Synology: providing a response without answering.
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Synology has gone full VMware, killing off SMB and HomeLab users.
Time for Qnap, Ugreen and others to step up their game!
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I think Synology should consider the acronym that is at the core of their product line: RAID redundant array of _inexpensive_ discs… That does not really lend itself well to the idea of quality requirements on the discs! That is the main reason you use redundancy
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In terms of data, I mean it makes sense that Synology drives have fewer issues than non-synology. Synology drives are sold primarily to enterprises because enterprises are forced to buy them. Non-synology drives will be a mix of SMB and consumer users. If Synology doesn’t provide additional data required to understand their statistics, I’ll assume that this is either a price hike on the consumer segment or they want to get out of the consumer segment. And I say this as a consumer who, when my NAS stops working, will evaluate both synology and non-synology alternatives, whereas before I would have stuck directly with the synology universe without a second thought. Also, to me it’s pretty rich for them to blame reliability of non-synology components, while my one and only Synology NAS has in its short 3 year (so far) lifespan suffered from both a broken power supply (synology replaced under warranty) and a broken RAM slot (synology RMA’d that unit and sent me a new one). I’ve had more issues with the hardware from Synology than I have had from any of my corporate laptops (on 2-3 year refresh cycles over the past couple of decades) and personal computers (on 4-5 year refresh cycles) over the past few decades. So far, Synology is probably the lowest reliability brand that I’ve used. So for them to call out third party drive manufacturers is, to me, a bridge too far.
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Thank you for strongly highlighting the Raid support trap when migrating to new hardware. I’m upset this isn’t stated more clearly before purchasing. Loved my Synology drives. But until they support the Seagate Ironwolf drives, they’re blackballed.
On the plus side, if we blow enough smoke about this, more people will start choosing completing brands. That means more money formthem to develop their operating systems to match Synology.
Maybe down the line, Synology will revert this decision to recoup lost ground.
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I never followed that RAID recovery was going to be lost on unsupported third party drives. Not being able to recovermmy raid and no commitment for supporting of 3rd party brands like seagate ironwolf unfortunately takes them from being top consideration to being struck off my next build list. I’d rather be patient and go with a developing brand. Their hardware is loosing ground to its competition every year. There software is still first rate, but if they expect me to pay industry peak prices for sub par rebrsnded drives (and be stuck with them), it’s over mate. Most likely this strategy is designed to trap existing customers to their eco system to sell lower tier hardware at marked up prices. It’s clearly in response to their growing competition.
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I gonna make it super short: Synology is talking a whole lot of total bullshit.
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Switched from 10 years of using Synology to UGREEN 4800 PLUS and I havent looked back
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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As far as I’m concerned, the most effective way of getting them to listen is to simply stop buying Synology products. When their bottom line is hit, they’ll start singing a different tune.
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My current Synology will be the last Synology I ever buy, I will also never again advise any company I work with to buy one. Sadly there really is no other opinion I could possibly have.
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Hi Rob,
first of all – thank you for asking the tough questions and trying to be diplomatic. I know it’s tough.
To be perfectly honest, the answers (and recent actions) are a typical PR speak of a company that’s less and less interested in their customers. I’ve spent best part of decade with Synology, they just don’t care what you (we) think. They try to help within the remit of their customer service rules, but they’re tone deaf to anything that goes beyond their decided product specs. I understand why they’re doing it, but there’s a BIG scope for compromise that they’re just blatantly refusing to achieve. Saving face? Who knows.
They have an easy solutions in front of them – they can get users an option and if they really must, limit support for out of scope options. Provide warnings, cautions and support agreements. Heck they can make their drives cheaper. There are so many ways to compromise, earn respect and loyalty. But no – our way or a highway. Well they can perhaps now, but time is running out.
As for the individual non-answers. You’re right to demand technical details, but I don’t think you’d get any. If you did, it would mean the truth would out and with that another loss of face and that’s a big no-no. I seriously doubt any of the 3 major manufacturers would release a NAS specific drive that’s having consistent issues they describe under moderate to high loads normal for pro-sumer desktop NASes. The technology is mature. Synology managers are not.
Few points:
– how many users of Synology Desktop NASes lose their mind over iSCSI and IOPS performance. If we seriously cared about that, we’d go SSD cache at the minimum, ideally SSDs all around. The same goes for databases. Would I even consider traditional mechanical HDDs, RAID or not, for any kind of realtime access database? Of course not. Again, I’d go for SSDs as a bare minimum, scale it to HA / replicated / distributed storage. I’d consider object storage. There are many options available for HomeLabbers and Enterprise alike.
– Same goes for virtualisation. I love that they offer and support it, both VMs and Docker. Been there, done that, loved the excitement. It’s good for basic stuff, but sooner or later you start running into limitations, performance issues and paywalls, while there’s perfectly viable options right there like Proxmox. So if they’re saying my desktop NAS virtualisation suffers on my WDRed Pro hard drives, I’d say – yes of course it does, but it’s not because of the dodgy drive
– power outages. Have they heard of UPS? I had the same argument about using non Synology SSDs for cache – they of course require theirs, that have a “power outage DRAM dump functionality”. Great kit, peace of mind and all that. Thanks, but no thanks. I save my cash for a decent online UPS and protect my whole HomeLab with it.
They’re disingenuous, ignorant and they know it. Make better NASes and make money some other way than flogging overpriced HW with their logo on it and a big markup.
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Look, i can give Synology a chance if and only if:
1. All Synology branded drives have the same 3 and 5 years warranty as Seagate WD and Toshiba “unverified drives”
2. The verified Synology drives have all the available capacities as the unverified Seagate WD and Toshiba do: 1-26TB, not maxing out at 16TB like how they are today
3. The branded drives have the exact price/TB as the unverified drives do.
4. They push their drives on all markets on the globe, and have the same availability in the stores as Seagate and WD.
If they as a company are “man enough” to check all the conditions above, I promise I will be man enough to continue to buy their stupid units with their stupid drives.
But something tells me that i won’t need to keep my promise 🙂
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Shitology
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hogwash. I’ve purchased Synology NASes before, and I’ve seen them used in businesses and other contexts; the number of times I’ve seen anything else setup beyond slapping in some drives, doing the initial config, then adding a file share, is minimal. Me personally, I have a Synology at home, a small 2 bay unit, and I threw in a pair of 8TB WD Red Plus, I use Synology Drive to backup a small number of computers, and that’s it. I don’t even look at the unit unless the backups are not working for any reason. NASes are not servers. so all this talk about databases and whatnot, poppycock. If people want database performance, they can use a system built to provide that kind of performance. They make NAS units, literally Network Attached Storage. The only thing it really needs to do is take storage and make that storage available on the network. Now they’ve made a product that WILL NOT DO THAT, unless you buy their (very likely more expensive) fancy-pants “verified” drives.
I’m fine if they want to OFFER fancy-pants drives, so that people can get the most out of their NAS units, and even sell pre-populated units or bundles that include verified drives, but REQUIRING it for basic NAS features like RAID REBUILDING? nope. this is entirely unacceptable.
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I don’t need to hear about company culture from them. I’ve seen it in their actions.
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The honest answer is: We want to make more money. Much more.
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So they’re lying. They’re lying to a user who has been using their devices and quite a few of their drives for a decade. Well, I hope this business decision puts them out of business. I, for one, will never buy a Synology product again.
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Thanks to that policy I just left Synology as a long time customer. My DS918+ started failing and normally I would just have bought the next one. But thanks to their new policy I started looking for alternatives. There are amazing ones for me and I settled with the Aoostar WRT Pro. For 350€(around 400$) I got it including 1TB Nvme and 32GB ram. Would have cost me an arm and a leg at synology. Installed unraid and thanks to containers I got nearly all functionality back that I had before. I am only missing OneDrive sync but have to look into it when I have time
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“A: Unverified Drives Cause Instability, Poor Performance, IO Failures But: These Issues May Only Affect a Small Minority of Users”
I bet there are millions of Synology owners there who use unverified drives and had no issues. For those who are having issues, its as simple as a canned reply from support: “Unfortunately, you are using unverified drives and thus we cannot provide support moving forward.”
We’re not all born yesterday to drink this Kool-aid.
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I have had Synology since 2014. Unfortunately now I have to look at other brands. I have bought most of the 18+ series and have been very satisfied. The fact that they are now making a fool of themselves with this with their hard drives is low.
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I dont understand why Synology are still being talked about, they didn’t change their position, just printing out some explanations trying to address the issue is not doing anything good.
Also, feeling the user feedback, the brand is already dead for home usage, and it’s funny because they are not Enterprise either, so that seems like a big issue for them, well deserved for not thinking on “Costumer first”.
Nobody wants to buy a Synology now, nor hear about the brand, just stop beating the dead horse!
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Those answers were barely answers at all. This is NO GOOD Synology. After 15+ years of having Synology NAS’s, and currently sitting on 5 WD Reds in SHR in a broken Synology unit, I find myself looking at how I can get the data off my SHR array and into TrueNAS. I’ve discovered that SHR is actually just Linux’s mdadm … so you CAN get data of drives in SHR RAID apparently … sounds like a pain in the neck but better than investing in a NAS that I can’t use.
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I wonder what makes Synology NAS so fragile they can’t handle well proven drives from Seagate/WD, which work reliably and well from self built home NAS to 24/7 Servers and Hyperscalers.
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Just don’t buy Synology. Ugreen is way better.
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Synology is just following the standard capitalist greed arc. Nothing more.
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Synology is dead… the worst way possible to take!
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This went like this; ¨Dam so many new brands coming in to the market, how we supposed to compete with all this newcomers? , wait, I know, we take a HDDs manufacture, we stick ours Synology label on theirs drives and we add a markup. Is simple as that, this is already working on ours enterprise line up, let go for it “. SIMPLE as this.
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This went like this; ¨Dam so many new brands coming in to the market, how we supposed to compete with all this newcomers? , wait, I know, we take a HDDs manufacture, we stick ours Synology label on theirs drives and we add a markup. Is simple as that, this is already working on ours enterprise line up, let go for it “. SIMPLE as this.
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This went like this; ¨Dam so many new brands coming in to the market, how we supposed to compete with all this newcomers? , wait, I know, we take a HDDs manufacture, we stick ours Synology label on theirs drives and we add a markup. Is simple as that, this is already working on ours enterprise line up, let go for it “. SIMPLE as this.
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This went like this; ¨Dam so many new brands coming in to the market, how we supposed to compete with all this newcomers? , wait, I know, we take a HDDs manufacture, we stick ours Synology label on theirs drives and we add a markup. Is simple as that, this is already working on ours enterprise line up, let go for it “. SIMPLE as this.
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This went like this; ¨Dam so many new brands coming in to the market, how we supposed to compete with all this newcomers? , wait, I know, we take a HDDs manufacture, we stick ours Synology label on theirs drives and we add a markup. Is simple as that, this is already working on ours enterprise line up, let go for it “. SIMPLE as this.
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This went like this; ¨Dam so many new brands coming in to the market, how we supposed to compete with all this newcomers? , wait, I know, we take a HDDs manufacture, we stick ours Synology label on theirs drives and we add a markup. Is simple as that, this is already working on ours enterprise line up, let go for it “. SIMPLE as this.
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Synology published compatible drive lists with their products. I’m curious to know how many support issues stemmed from customers not using approved drives. Of course issues will be reduced if only their approved drives are used, but single sourcing drive media from themselves at excessively high prices does make them seem greedy. Particularly when you compare the high cost of the low-end hardware they put in their systems and their excessive pricing for supported memory upgrades. I’m sure there are many drive models from reputable vendors that meet or exceed Synology’s requirements.
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Synology published compatible drive lists with their products. I’m curious to know how many support issues stemmed from customers not using approved drives. Of course issues will be reduced if only their approved drives are used, but single sourcing drive media from themselves at excessively high prices does make them seem greedy. Particularly when you compare the high cost of the low-end hardware they put in their systems and their excessive pricing for supported memory upgrades. I’m sure there are many drive models from reputable vendors that meet or exceed Synology’s requirements.
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Synology published compatible drive lists with their products. I’m curious to know how many support issues stemmed from customers not using approved drives. Of course issues will be reduced if only their approved drives are used, but single sourcing drive media from themselves at excessively high prices does make them seem greedy. Particularly when you compare the high cost of the low-end hardware they put in their systems and their excessive pricing for supported memory upgrades. I’m sure there are many drive models from reputable vendors that meet or exceed Synology’s requirements.
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Synology published compatible drive lists with their products. I’m curious to know how many support issues stemmed from customers not using approved drives. Of course issues will be reduced if only their approved drives are used, but single sourcing drive media from themselves at excessively high prices does make them seem greedy. Particularly when you compare the high cost of the low-end hardware they put in their systems and their excessive pricing for supported memory upgrades. I’m sure there are many drive models from reputable vendors that meet or exceed Synology’s requirements.
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Synology published compatible drive lists with their products. I’m curious to know how many support issues stemmed from customers not using approved drives. Of course issues will be reduced if only their approved drives are used, but single sourcing drive media from themselves at excessively high prices does make them seem greedy. Particularly when you compare the high cost of the low-end hardware they put in their systems and their excessive pricing for supported memory upgrades. I’m sure there are many drive models from reputable vendors that meet or exceed Synology’s requirements.
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Synology published compatible drive lists with their products. I’m curious to know how many support issues stemmed from customers not using approved drives. Of course issues will be reduced if only their approved drives are used, but single sourcing drive media from themselves at excessively high prices does make them seem greedy. Particularly when you compare the high cost of the low-end hardware they put in their systems and their excessive pricing for supported memory upgrades. I’m sure there are many drive models from reputable vendors that meet or exceed Synology’s requirements.
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It]s just occurred to me that, if remembering correctly, this HDD policy only applies to the plus series of new models. Therefore, the standard, or non-plus, range wouldn’t impose this restriction.
To me, I’d imagine the bulk of DS units sold to consumers could be the non-plus series. They’re cheaper and lack only features most home users wouldn’t really need. If so, then surely imposing such HDD restrictions on a minority of units sold and permitting the use of third-party verified drives on non-plus units will see more support tickets on models that are more popular.
Of course, this policy might be applied to non-plus 25 models moving forward, so interesting to see how this pans out.
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It]s just occurred to me that, if remembering correctly, this HDD policy only applies to the plus series of new models. Therefore, the standard, or non-plus, range wouldn’t impose this restriction.
To me, I’d imagine the bulk of DS units sold to consumers could be the non-plus series. They’re cheaper and lack only features most home users wouldn’t really need. If so, then surely imposing such HDD restrictions on a minority of units sold and permitting the use of third-party verified drives on non-plus units will see more support tickets on models that are more popular.
Of course, this policy might be applied to non-plus 25 models moving forward, so interesting to see how this pans out.
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It]s just occurred to me that, if remembering correctly, this HDD policy only applies to the plus series of new models. Therefore, the standard, or non-plus, range wouldn’t impose this restriction.
To me, I’d imagine the bulk of DS units sold to consumers could be the non-plus series. They’re cheaper and lack only features most home users wouldn’t really need. If so, then surely imposing such HDD restrictions on a minority of units sold and permitting the use of third-party verified drives on non-plus units will see more support tickets on models that are more popular.
Of course, this policy might be applied to non-plus 25 models moving forward, so interesting to see how this pans out.
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It]s just occurred to me that, if remembering correctly, this HDD policy only applies to the plus series of new models. Therefore, the standard, or non-plus, range wouldn’t impose this restriction.
To me, I’d imagine the bulk of DS units sold to consumers could be the non-plus series. They’re cheaper and lack only features most home users wouldn’t really need. If so, then surely imposing such HDD restrictions on a minority of units sold and permitting the use of third-party verified drives on non-plus units will see more support tickets on models that are more popular.
Of course, this policy might be applied to non-plus 25 models moving forward, so interesting to see how this pans out.
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It]s just occurred to me that, if remembering correctly, this HDD policy only applies to the plus series of new models. Therefore, the standard, or non-plus, range wouldn’t impose this restriction.
To me, I’d imagine the bulk of DS units sold to consumers could be the non-plus series. They’re cheaper and lack only features most home users wouldn’t really need. If so, then surely imposing such HDD restrictions on a minority of units sold and permitting the use of third-party verified drives on non-plus units will see more support tickets on models that are more popular.
Of course, this policy might be applied to non-plus 25 models moving forward, so interesting to see how this pans out.
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It]s just occurred to me that, if remembering correctly, this HDD policy only applies to the plus series of new models. Therefore, the standard, or non-plus, range wouldn’t impose this restriction.
To me, I’d imagine the bulk of DS units sold to consumers could be the non-plus series. They’re cheaper and lack only features most home users wouldn’t really need. If so, then surely imposing such HDD restrictions on a minority of units sold and permitting the use of third-party verified drives on non-plus units will see more support tickets on models that are more popular.
Of course, this policy might be applied to non-plus 25 models moving forward, so interesting to see how this pans out.
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Could see this coming years ago. Even if they come clean and admit this has been bs data to sell crap, who really wants to deal with them anymore? This tells you everything you need to know. I predict they’ll never recover from this.
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Could see this coming years ago. Even if they come clean and admit this has been bs data to sell crap, who really wants to deal with them anymore? This tells you everything you need to know. I predict they’ll never recover from this.
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Could see this coming years ago. Even if they come clean and admit this has been bs data to sell crap, who really wants to deal with them anymore? This tells you everything you need to know. I predict they’ll never recover from this.
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Could see this coming years ago. Even if they come clean and admit this has been bs data to sell crap, who really wants to deal with them anymore? This tells you everything you need to know. I predict they’ll never recover from this.
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Could see this coming years ago. Even if they come clean and admit this has been bs data to sell crap, who really wants to deal with them anymore? This tells you everything you need to know. I predict they’ll never recover from this.
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Could see this coming years ago. Even if they come clean and admit this has been bs data to sell crap, who really wants to deal with them anymore? This tells you everything you need to know. I predict they’ll never recover from this.
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Drive requirements, testing procedures and firmware features/upgrade options should be published by Synology, for manufacturers to implement and comply to. Passing these, should white list these drives. Funny enough, the currently white listed drives Synology are OEMs from the same handfull of manufacturers of harddisks.
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These are vile tactics, possibly even illegal moves by this company. They violate user and property rights. When purchased, the device must work, without updates from the Internet! If products are sold without disks, the manufacturer must visually and in writing at all points of sale warn customers that this device only works with certain disks! Which will reduce their popularity and sales. If you have ever bought in Lidl or Aldi, you have products that are sold with or without batteries. If it is not marked, it is a scam of customers. PS. there is always enough batteries in stock. These batteries can be from previous devices of the same manufacturer and work with newly purchased devices and can also be used with other products if you use adapters. The only point of modification for disks is changing the driver “program code” and not the hardware. It is interesting that no one asked who makes their disks and what other disks are still produced in the same factory!
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40% fewer issues for the drives bought from them that they put their sticker on?? BUULLLLSHIIITTEEE
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reason is simple… money.. maybe a bad move though, my next NAS won’t be a Synology
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40% is a fabricated, plausible number. It’s company talk for FU, get your filthy fingers out of our business.
The effort made to slap their branding on OEM drives, and zero standard drives verified out of the gate is strategic. They really do want customers to purchase their storage through them, and making every effort to secure a captive audience.
What this company is doing is not good faith effort to put their customer’s needs first. You don’t need to look too closely to see the big picture.
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Thank you for such an informative video. I heard about the drive lock down a couple months ago when I was shopping for a NAS. This makes me very happy with my decision to go with a UGREEN NAS. I slapped a couple of 12TB recertified NAS server drives in it and they are working flawlessly. I am not running them in RAID but as one large drive. I back up all videos to separate removable drives so if one of the NAS drives does die it would only take a couple of days to restore all of the videos.
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Dumb decision. So the question now is TrueNAD or UnRAID?
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The verified drives for raid recovery or rebuild their answer is bullshit. I have an OLD Synology (DS1512+ plus expansion) and have had 3 TB and 4 TB drives in this thing and have all the drives rebuild from 3 to 4 TB drives. It is a money grab. Otherwise show us the data.
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Wow, what a bunch of corporate speak gobbly-gook. I just bought my first NAS for my studio (DS1821+) four months ago and I absolutely love it. Based on what I’m hearing here and elsewhere about the company though, I’m already planning it’s retirement. I refuse to waste my time and energy on a vendor with this kind of bad attitude toward their customers. I’ve seen this before, companies with excellent engineering and horrible management. Corporate won’t admit a mistake even if it turns out to be really bad for the company’s bottom line, and then the problems will get worse and worse for customers locked into their ecosystem. It’s such a shame. It’s really a nice system…
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Thank you for the coverage. I have 5 synology units in 5,6 and 8 bay configurations. All are now running WD Gold Drives and will continue to do so. If I can’t in the future I will go with another vendor.
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Oh hey ugreen for an additional 20% off. *click*
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Oh hey ugreen for an additional 20% off. *click*
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Oh hey ugreen for an additional 20% off. *click*
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Oh hey ugreen for an additional 20% off. *click*
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They AI answered us!? Lmao!
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They AI answered us!? Lmao!
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They AI answered us!? Lmao!
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They AI answered us!? Lmao!
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I have to share the view of those that say “goodbye” to Synology. I have been happy with my 1821+ for my home but honestly I don’t trust them now based on these imaginative BS answers. I’m a home prosumer and they come across to me as telling us to leave their future market and I now fear a future DSM release will cinch that position. Happy to stay with them, but they have to do a major posture and messaging change, which I don’t anticipate happening.
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I have to share the view of those that say “goodbye” to Synology. I have been happy with my 1821+ for my home but honestly I don’t trust them now based on these imaginative BS answers. I’m a home prosumer and they come across to me as telling us to leave their future market and I now fear a future DSM release will cinch that position. Happy to stay with them, but they have to do a major posture and messaging change, which I don’t anticipate happening.
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I have to share the view of those that say “goodbye” to Synology. I have been happy with my 1821+ for my home but honestly I don’t trust them now based on these imaginative BS answers. I’m a home prosumer and they come across to me as telling us to leave their future market and I now fear a future DSM release will cinch that position. Happy to stay with them, but they have to do a major posture and messaging change, which I don’t anticipate happening.
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I have to share the view of those that say “goodbye” to Synology. I have been happy with my 1821+ for my home but honestly I don’t trust them now based on these imaginative BS answers. I’m a home prosumer and they come across to me as telling us to leave their future market and I now fear a future DSM release will cinch that position. Happy to stay with them, but they have to do a major posture and messaging change, which I don’t anticipate happening.
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I use Synology but once the products die, and it’s not worth the money fixing I will be moving to another ecosystem, as I believe it should be the user’s choice, by all means let the user know the problems and downsides to choosing what they want but do not stop it.
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Great line of questioning for Synology! Even if I accept their 40% drive support issues difference statistic, clearly it was that was gained by the policy on enterprise NAS drive requirements. We all agreed that enterprises legitimately needed the highly reliable solution because down time equates to a lot of money in the enterprise. That said, it cannot be said that translates directly to consumer, prosumer, and small businesses in terms of impact. I’ve said before and say again I have used the riskiest drives out there, 18 white label WD Red shucked drives in 3 Synology NAS’s for 5 years without a single issue. So, I’m not convinced. In addition, if they wanted to force this transition they could have made it more palatable by reducing Synology drives below market. I mean they are saving a whole lite on support calls with a 40% reduction. Folks might have seen this as a gesture on their part. My only disagreement with you is the clean cut and not allowing drive migrations. I look at it as opportunity for those who have fairly new drives in pre 2025 models that have a lot of life in them. I could have a 2018 model with 2024 drives in it. Allowing migration eliminates losing that investment and having to spend a lot of money on new more expensive drives again. By allowing migration eliminates losing, you can replace drives with Synology through attrition, allowing you to gain the full value of existing drives and spread the cost of new Synology drives over time. Unless I’m getting this wrong based upon confusing Synology communication, it seems reasonable. Anyway, I have 5-10 years to worry about it. ???????? I only hope they do not degrade DSM or remove valuable software that folks loved about Synology in the first place.
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I got it. Synology hdd problem caused by BTRFS file system. Everything they said listed in BTRFS disadvantages. !!!!!
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Wanted a Synology NAS for years, not anymore. Hello Ugreen.
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Synology, show the data, prove the numbers or GTFO. Anything else is just BS and obvious greed to artificially push their own drive sales.
This whole debacle + their shoddy hardware (in comparison) pushed me towards the competition.
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Why did no one at Synology went on camera to answers these questions. Also, it clearly looks like they used AI to generate those answers.
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You are never going to get the real independent statistics they are using to justify this B/S because there aren’t any. It’s Synology doing an “Apple” and keeping all the profitable items including the forced-use Synology drives under their roof. Imagine the millions of extra dollars this is going to bring them in if Corp Enterprise falls into line. They will have bodgied up the reverse-engineered statistics to suit their argument like a Government justifies expenditure or cuts. You aren’t going to ever see the details. I have had a look at the new Synology certified drives and they are a whole lot more expensive than a standard NAS drive. I will not be buying any more Synology once my current NAS dies…
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We are sticking with Synology for now because of the reliability, and the use of Synology’s software across our customer’s networks and to our cloud. These NAS are all fairly new 22-23, so it makes sense to wait and see, but we are definitely looking very closely at QNAP. In the end your future purchases will have the most impact on Synology’s choices. Best Regards
I would have only asked one question: Do you realise you f**ked up yet?
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Its just a money grab by synology, too bad. Sales will drop, we are not recommending these to our customers now.
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They wanted to make more money on drives and now they will lose even more on customers never buying their NAS systems again. Brain dead company.
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if Synology’s justification for using hard-drive that are 2x more expensive than their competitors why are they only use this requirement on the one piece of hardware that is require to use the NAS, they don’t use it on the SSD to increase the read/write cache or the system RAM only the HHD. Why?
$$$$$$$$$$
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“40% more issues with 3rd party drives”
So… They just decided to straight up lie? There is no way that’s true considering there is nothing that makes Synology rebranded drives special, and even implying there are actually some unbranded model skews statistics that much they should simply exclude those from certification and accept the good drives immediately, because there is no way they don’t have statistical data to know which one they are.
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bro just went head on to the enemy base
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Hey Robbie, Have you or anyone else in the NAS industry contacted or had a word at an event to WD or Seagate about any of this, See if maybe they can give us all an answer as to WTF is going on?
Maybe someone needs to be chatting with them, I’d hate to think the entire thing is blown out of proportion and we are all raging for nothing when all it was is just a waiting game for the slow process of testing and verification.
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I’ll give you some stats. I have 3 NAS’ and 46 drives. The Synology (chassis) died 3 times. Out of all the drives, I had a single HDD die, compared to 2 of the 4 Synology HDDs, and one of their NVMe cache drives failed. At least anecdotally, their gear has been garbage and it pushed me to build my own, not to mention at the time I bought the drives they were exactly twice as expensive (over $600 for a 16TB drive at the time).
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Yeah I would openly state their stats are totally fabricated ….they are looking to enclose because they see other tech companies enclosing but …they forget …they simply are not big enough and despite their delusions they really don’t have A enterprise business at all …. If for example I am in St Louis and want to see a Synology sales person for a site storage upgrade project …. well there isn’t ANYONE in the State …not in Chicago…not in Miami…not in Dallas, Houston, Seattle …. San Diego, Los Angeles ….how about I’m in little Casper Wyoming …well a dedicated Dell EMC rep would often be there the SAME day …. Synology don’t know what Enterprise even IS …..
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Gaslighting response. Are all the old units really that terrible and about to lose your data? Need to compare the old hnits to their claims. I call BS $ynology …
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I can’t help wondering if there’s a bigger picture here. Are there predator companies who might be about to take over Synology, or vice versa? The corporate speak makes me want to investigate the stock holdings of the directors.
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you should have worn a Pooh shirt
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I kept hearing “some drives … [might fail]’. So I suppose in the absence of any figures I can assume that their own (or approved drives) won’t ever fail. Maybe they’ve convinced me to buy a Synology NAS, or maybe I’m not that stupid.
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They want access to your data via the malware firmware on their HDD in-case you move them to another drive… Move along.
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So, down the price of Drives, Memory and NMV’s and I buy all Synology branded.
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Synology answer #1: go eff* yourself
Synology answer #2: go eff* yourself
Synology answer #3: go eff* yourself
Synology answer #4: go eff* yourself
NAScompares conclusion: Thank you very much. You are right.
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Synology is dead to me and what i have heard from collegues litterally everybody feels the same way. They are going to be losing serious money going forward. If you look at their answers it’s all bullshit and you know it. There is no real difference between their validated and regular drives. And people are completely stupid for not understandig what Synology is actually doing. Their so called storage technology is based on linux MDADM with a bunch of tweaks and a very nice interface. Their products are aimed at consumers, prosumers and small businesses. Within the real enterprise space there products are not even considered and that is because they are not enterprise grade, yes they have rackmounted units but the feature set is not comparable.. Just stop making video’s about them, they don’t deserve the attention anymore.
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Those are some very disappointing “answers.” It’s pretty clear that profits drove these decisions over any other concerns. They have no good answers because there aren’t any good answers to explain their behavior. Oh well. Synology became and remains dead to me.
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I had enough of Synology. Waited for the last 4yrs to upgrade my old Synology NAS. This HDD restriction is a killer. I’m moving on from Synology.
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If they continue down this road, the USA may not defend Taiwan from China. Sad state of affairs.
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After reading $ynology claims, I need to switch to fnos
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I have already started exploring uGreen alternative.
Time is up Synology!
No time to wait and just debate bla bla
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China says Taiwan is unverified! Synology is based in Taiwan. Synology is unverified until reunification with China is complete! lol ????
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Looking at their list of issues, I would bet that the “unverified problem drives” Synology is referencing are SMR drives.
13:23 Failure during long-duration file transfers, data integrity in high-load operations, RAID instability, Secure Erase failure, frequent access failure, etc. ALL sound like specific SMR issues.
Is there an estimate of users that employ SMR or non-NAS-compliant any-old drive? Using Youtube as a data point, I would gather it’s about thirty percent. I have personally watched a few youtube creators who employ “shucked” drives or had their array decimated by the SMR issue.
Still a bad, BAD policy.
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We’re really looking forward to the new video!
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So, after many years of me using third party drives without a single issue, all of a sudden it’s a problem? The real problem is they want to maximize profit. They should have certified other drives before switching to this model.
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XDA wrote an interesting article recently about all the features Synology has removed from their NAS offerings in the past few years, besides the hard drive support, including:
2024 – completely removed the Video Station app.
2024 – removed the handling of essential video codecs from Media Server.
2021 – removed the iTunes Server from the package center.
2023 – discontinued server-side AAC transcoding.
2021 – removed support for many open source packages like GitLab, Redmine and early versions of Node.js, Ruby, Java, etc.
2021 – removed support for many USB peripherals such as WiFi dongles, Bluetooth adapters, DACs and digital TV tuners.
2021 – reduced or removed metadata editing for Photos.
From my own experience, I tried to install their mobile app recently but it needs a Drive Server package to be installed and that’s only on DSM 7.x which is when I found out that my DS413 is limited to DSM 6.x only. So much for always getting software updates. I understand it’s because they changed the CPUs but surely an app to access my NAS remotely shouldn’t be hardware dependent.
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so synology know hard drives better than Hitachi/IBM, seagate and those other guys?
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So WD/seagate were on the verification list but suddenly they are no longer verified. Unable to give details what a standard company avoiding crap answer. I have had WD reds running 24/7 for nearly 6 years in my 8 bay 1819 with no issues. Even recently upgraded 4 hard drives to larger size and to go through days of a raid rebuild and still no issues. It’s just synology’s way of tying us into their eco system and making more money. It’s b***s**t
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Sh.tnology is just spreading more manure and being consistently unclear what they exactly mean.
Sh.tnology sort of treats it’s customers like mushrooms – feed us BS and keep us in the dark.
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The only correct answer to all those questions would have been: „we don’t only want to earn money selling NASes, we want to rake it in with huge margins selling rebadged Toshiba drives.“
That would have been at least honest. But no, they hide behind „stability, reliability, blabla…“.
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Well now that I heard those answers I am very happy I upgraded all my customers with x23+ units over the past two years.
By the time they will need an upgrade chances are very high, one of the competitors will offer a decent active backup for business / m365 alternative to switch to.
Bye Synology, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
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In the market for my first NAS, and will be avoiding Synology because of this. I agrea the 40% stat is lacking context. Can anyone even confirm something similar? Are 40% of issues in forums or reddit drive brand associated?
Im curious to know if drive manufacturers have to pay Synopogy to have their drives certified, and if so are they required to sign an NDA in the process?
If this is truly an issue they could have taken a more consumer friendly approach. They could have replicated motherboard manufacturers when it comes to RAM. Have a certified list of compatible drives that have been tested and confirmed to work as advertised, but in the end let the consumer use what they want.
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If I can’t use the drives of my choosing, then I DO NOT OWN IT, do I?
Your use of the AI voice makes sense. Maybe use an on-screen disclaimer next time to avoid confusing people about your intent, I guess.
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Their answers bode exceptionally badly for existing users and DSM8, if/when it arrives. If you upgrade to it, you can’t repair your array if a disk fails.
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I really don’t understand what this benefits them for home users, it would’ve been way “easier” to just say: “Guys, starting with these 25+ models, using any other type of drive than our own you won’t have any Support from our side.” But nope, they decided to go on a route of “analyzing” data from over a decade and locking to their “own HDD” and the 40% less issues with Synology drives sounds to me like straight lie, what’s the difference from a Synology HDD to a WD HDD or a Seagate HDD? Especially since also WD and Seagate are on the market for a super long time. It doesn’t make any sense at all and this is only a way to cash more money. This was just a big smack on the face of everyone that was loyal to the brand. Congrats on that Synology, greed really consumed you guys. PS. Nice vid @NASCompares
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We simply don’t care. Bye, Synology.
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Synology can die…their own hd because blaming the users can’t handle and work with WD and seagate drives..crapola
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I’d bet that purchasers of Synology branded drives are far more likely to be businesses who have employees with IT knowledge running their deployment. They’re able to troubleshoot mundane deployments with mundane issues without contacting Synology support much better than enthusiast home users who may have more adventurous use cases.
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I regret the lack of communication from major HDD manufacturers on this topic. No one seems to address the fact that, despite being a much smaller company compared to WD or Seagate, Synology appears to position itself as the authority on HDD reliability, even though they don’t manufacture the drives themselves. Meanwhile, the storage giants have years of experience in the field. I’d love to hear what a WD representative would say if someone told them, “Sorry, your Ultrastar isn’t reliable enough for our little DS925+.” ????
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I believe a lot of issues and suppport tickets were caused by WD Red SRM/CRM scandal… I can see why they were p*ssed off.
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I think the only reason they allow unsupported drive migration is in case a NAS failed and they wanted to retain those customers. I think they should allow unsupported drives but just say you are not entitled to their support and that’s it.
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I used Synology for years, I moved to QNAP because of this.
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IMHO the matter of “3rd party” verification is a **MONEY GRAB** … they just want to bank franklins from those vendors to “allow” their disks to be used. Also, notice how general that answer is. For example, if WD and Seagate drives represent 60% of 3rd party drives, then what is the percent OF THOSE brands on support calls. As someone who was a Director of an advanced IT support call center for 20+ years, they must have that data!!! The other reason is **LAWSUIT AVOIDANCE** … if they have experienced or fear being sued over data loss or corruption when non-verified drives are being deployed.
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Hey Synology, your Broadcom is showing. ????
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Remember guys: Don’t shoot the messenger. The video is great, it’s synology that’s shit.
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I’ve had a Synology Plus series NAS fail and I’ve never had a hard drive fail. This is nonsense from Synology!
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It speaks volumes that neither Synology or partners are able to elaborate on the certification process.
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This policy change just motivated me to look at different brands. They were my go-to brand—but not anymore.
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so, no answers, at all
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RIP Synology 2000-2025
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After removing H265 codec from the Photos app, the ridiculous hardware to price ratio, no 2.5Gbit Ethernet up until 2025, and now this fck up with HDDs, I’m not considering them anymore
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I just bought an QNAP TS 673A. Sadly one less customer for Synology.
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My next nas will be a ugreen ….
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From the comments, I don’t see a need to watch the video. Either Synology starts verifying a range of drives from a range of manufacturers or they don’t want my money.
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So, first, Synology does not design or manufacture their own disks. They have agreements with one or more of the major disk manufacturers (there are not so many of them), re-brand such and maybe do some (significant?) firmware adjustments.
I’m not so sure if Synology has a major business with B2B customers which would require a very high level of reliability, for sure. For B2C such a level would certainly be a bit lower.
The company’s answers to your questions are perfectly from a marketing guide. Hard to say if the core arguments are really from a technical side or rather from a business idea. But it certainly throws some fear on customers who want to use genuine third party drives.
And listen carefully, they always say “for _unverified_ drives”… So they don’t want to verify third party drives which they use anyway…?
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Thanks for your work on this subject. But this obviously complete BS. No one believes high quality drives are failing more than certified drives. That number is almost certainly skewed by refurbed drives or Chinese grey market crap.
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Synology shot themselves in the foot
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Robbie, you missed a vital part of this whole debacle with Synology. It would’ve been very useful for you to make it known to Synology the sheer amount of negative feedback on their HDD policy. Had you and others there gotten around a table and actually told them to their faces how badly this change of policy is going down and how many comments you’ve seen from current Synology users who will never buy another NAS from them again, I’d pay money to see their reaction.
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It‘s all BS. We sold tons of Synology 920 and 923, we used drives from the compatibility list and never had an issue except the usual failing drives here and there, which has nothing to do with Synology, and it‘s why we do RAID in the first place. Now Synology‘s own branded drives are all that‘s on that list and they cost around twice as much. It‘s greed. Pure greed. Nothing more. I hope they fail badly with this approach.
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I have a 4 bay Synology and I’m happy I have a Ubiqiti UNAS Pro. Yeah the UNAS Pro doesn’t run apps, but honestly, an old PC will do everything that my Synology does. Best of all, one is an American company and one is China … oh, and one allows me to run ANY hard drive and not locked drives (not to mention 7 drive bays and 10 GbE for under $500).
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“We all seen your video, he said arrogantly” says EVERYTHING. Our post facility has 5 Synology setups and NAS’. (Just one DS1821 has Syn HDDs) We are stuck with all of these and moving ahead will be using a different company. They work great, tbh, but forcing the Syn HDDs is enough to not buy anymore. Wen’t from loving Synology to full middle fingers. F-Synology!
BTW: I was told by someone 2 years ago at Synology support that their HDDs and Seagate’s are manufactured by the exact same company. The only difference is the sticker on them. I would have loved to ask about that.
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Thank you for sharing the answer Synology gave you. There is another question worth asking, I don’t know if anyone did: who is actually making Synology HDDs ? Do they have their own factory of do they rely on another manufacturer ? And if so, which one ?
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I have old good DS413j serving without problems with 3 2TB WD Red , for over 10 years. I was starting to Look for new generation. It Look that i will be looking into UGREEN solution instead. Tough Łuck Synology, you are not Apple yet
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Wanted a Synology, but bought a Ugreen. It’s a massive mistake by the company. Many entry level NAS devices are bought by people in the IT industry. When they all end up with experience with other vendors guess which vendor they are unlikely to be recommending to customers or their employer. Broadcom did the same crap with VMWare when they got rid of the free products for personal use. A few months later they had to do a U-Turn.
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HDD IOPS will be poor in higher workloads, it is their limitation. They could specify whether the issue is only with SMR drives or with CMR NAS/Enterprise drives. Talking about it half way doesn’t yield much trust.
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I’ve been using 4 x 14tb Seagate Exos Hdds in my DS 920+ for 5 years now without a glitch. Synology is just in money grab mode, as Exos is an enterprise drive and widely used. An Exos 14TB sells for $229. A Synology 12tb sels for $450 and 16TB sells for $580. I will not buy another Syno NAS unless this Syno only requirement HDD changes. It’ll cost me $1144 more to replace my drives using Syno drives instead of Exos.
Synology should just abandon their consumer line of NAS and license their OS to other NAS producers which could end up making more net profit with the reduced costs of not being in the consumer hardware NAS business with all their engineering, sales and support overhead.
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I’m disappointed they’re still sticking with these blanket answers that don’t actually tell us anything. They know there’s alot of unhappy people that want to know details and they keep feeding us these nonsense responses. I’m probably a few years out from needing another nas, but I’m pretty heavily invested in the Synology ecosystem including their mesh network routers. I run my entire business and home off it. Not knowing if I’ll be able to transfer my drives to a new unit down the road is unsettling.
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If there ever have been perfectly stupid corporate lingo, these answers are very close. It’s utter BS and an attempt on cashing in on the brand name recognition and use in office environments that are often unwilling to use to another brand, just because they have worked out all the issues with the one they are using at the time.
Overall, this move has probably driven away about 90% of the “enthusiast users”, those who try to get the most for their money, being that features, performance, or capacity. Synology has been lagging behind these for years now and probably thought they’d lose this particular group of people anyways. They are often the loudest, but not necessarily the most lucrative group of people, so my take is that they thought it would make less of a dent than people “like us” think. Whether that’s true or not will show in the not too distant future when either sales go down beyond sustainable levels and Synology reverts their approach or they can sustain it. And a few years down we’ll see whether Synology survived.
Personally, I believe they’ll find a middle ground by certifying a whole bunch of common drives and living with the fallout of potential higher support cost since they will be too proud to admit that this was a complete and utter clusterfuck.
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I was in the market for a nas just last month. then I found out about this. b******* from Synology and now I’m building my own home server from an old laptop and I couldn’t be happier. thank you Synology for making me think twice ????
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Regardless of what they think and what they say, the revenue will tell the truth. Just give it 6 months ????
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Yeah stats from Mars say that people who avoided synology are 40% more happier.
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Higher margins, less support costs and less budget conscious customers. Master class from Synology.
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These answers are such BS from Synology. I have 1 Syn running 12TB Ironwolfs. Never had issue when I expanded the array drive by drive to go from 10TB to 12TB per drive. It jsut chewed away with no issues (granted it was for days by the last one).
My other Syn is using Seagate EXOS 20TB drives…. again.. no issues with these. I used them to expand the array from 12TB Ironwolfs. The 12s from here expanded the other from 10s.
Now if someone is dropping in a drive from Bob’s Crab Shack.. then yah…. they deserve the issues. But if using a quality drive built for a NAS enviroment.
Synology is just being a whiny petulant child going “we want more money from enterprise folks, screw the poors”
the Backblaze q1 2025 drive report shows toshibas failing with similar results to seagate and others. but synology charging a premium to slap their label on a toshiba drive is nuts.
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I purchased two UGREEN DXP4800 Plus. Never looked back. Excellent customer service. Upgraded from a Synology DS918+.
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I’m glad I never gave them my money and built a NAS myself
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I understand that smr drives cause problems, but any other cmr drive should work. If a $100 mini pc can run any harddisk, then why can’t a $650+ Synology NAS work with other drives?
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I have use a whole bunch of different drives over the last few years. Some were older than hell and some were brand new.
The only failures I had were when a drive died. I had some sort of raid running and BACKUPS.
People running these nas units are responsible for choosing their drives for what they are doing.
High performance and critical date, perhaps use Synology drives.
Home lab (me), I use large old drives in my backup Synology unit for years. No problem.
I’ve used “affordable” drives for my main Synology unit.
I’ve got two more Synology’ located at one of my son’s home.
Again the backup unit is using large used drives.
The main Synology is using “affordable” drives.
Both my backup unit and the one at my son’s home backup to each other via ssh at night.
No problems other than a rare drive failure.
Synology wants to move away from non-enterprise customers.
Now, the fact that they probably knew a year ago, they should have been responsible and should have given us a years notice of their plans. That was totally irresponsible.
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Forget Synology, please! Time to move on. Some must be left behind. Still desperately waiting for the review of the TS-765eU by the way 😉
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Synology has completely shut itself off from users and customers. However, I must say thank goodness for QNAP, which ultimately has much better hardware and more robust software (I love ZFS QuTS hero and I’m really looking forward to the TVS-AIh1688ATX ????).
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Synology have allowed migration of “non verified” drives that were previously verified in older units to the new xx25+ range for purely monetary reasons. Had they made it clear that you couldn’t use your existing drives in a newly purchased xx25+ NAS, they’d lose return sales.
And so, unwitting users who buy a new NAS and move their drives will be unaware that if they want to expand or replace a drive, they MUST bi a Synology branded model. Thus, they create the lock-in via underhand means.
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Okay… looks like they need to be smashed by broken sales for some quarters, and they demand it.
Syno, just open it up for Black, Red Plus, Red Pro, that CCTV model, Ultrastar, EXOS, IronWolf…. and drives that I don’t know but not SMR.
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A few years ago, Seagate was a premium partner at Synology Partner Events, and now they are the evil that is putting systems at risk.
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agreed that we need more clarity about the 40% they keep throwing around to justify this move. like whats the actual sample pool, what are the drives being used for that comparison? like it aint gonna be fair if comparing using different hdd grades (non pro nas vs pro nas vs enterprise). reckon the move to limiting to their own drives would be more reasonable if say its for 8 bay and above which i believe is more for enterprise tier usage, let the 2 – 6 bay ones remain to be able to use unverified drives since those are more for home – smb users that honestly cant really justify the extra cost of purchasing synology hdds.
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We owe that to ourselves. There is enshitification on a large scale and most consumers accept it. Because companies see enshitification is a success for their revenue, well… what gets rewarded gets repeated… we are the stupid ones.
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After listening to Sinology’s “answers” regarding why they’ve changed their HDD policy and the verification status, it seems clear to me that they are avoiding the questions they have no good answer to.
The stats citing a 40% lower support for Synology branded drives is odd because there must be such a small dataset for this given how recently Synology branded hard drives have been available compared to the massive user base who aren’t using them.
Further, to state that drives that aren’t verified haven’t been thoroughly tested is nonsense. The very drives they are pushing are either rebranded Ironwolf or Toshiba drives, the very drives that are now unverified. The only difference is the Synology firmware. For years, Synology hasn’t required drives with custom firmware, so there is no reason, other than for lock-in purposes, to stipulate that only Synology branded drives are verified.
Sinology seem very cagey and evasive regarding this entire issue, which leads me to my original conclusion; they are waiting for the dust to settle to determine if there’s enough pushback for them to verify the third-party drives that have always been verified in the past.
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I guess I’m not sure what this will actually solve. If Synology claims to be doing this to provide better drive reliability / reduce support issues, then how does WD and Seagate getting drives verified make any improvement? Seagate makes the IronWolf HDD. They’re probably not changing or redesigning the IronWolf just to cater to a Synology verification test. So it’s not like these third-party drives will be any more or less reliable once they’re verified.
And within the same type of drive (e.g IronWolf Pro) there will inevitably be individual drives that pass testing while others fail. Does that mean that individual serial numbers will have to be verified to work in a Synology? (As in, you have to buy an IronWolf Pro SKU that’s specifically been approved for Synology)
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you hit it right on the head when you said, “more data and transparency is needed”. They state that units with their drives have 40% less support tickets, they need to explain the cause of the tickets. Just because one event happens after another, it does not mean that that the first event caused the second. If they determined that most of their support tickets came from males, would they conclude that they should only sell to females? ????I hope that they determine that they really have two markets, and us home or small business users need the flexibility to install drives from reputable companies. If it takes more resource and money to do more testing of Seagate and WD (for example), maybe it is less of an investment than the loss of sales of lower end consumers. I wonder what portion of their revenue come from 8 bay or less customers. I understand that they may want to reduce the number of third-party drives that they certify, but surely eliminating all of them seems a little drastic. BTW, aren’t Synology drives made by Toshiba? Thank you for your continued coverage of this issue.
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Synology domestic NAS devices have such minimal processing power — they need the best possible drives to perform adequately.
Few companies would use a Synology domestic NAS device in a high intensity corporate setting.
Some of us would like NAS devices with much greater processing power – able to run powerful modern applications – like AI !
So I don’t care about Synology . . . their NAS devices are not suitable. They also lack confidence in their own product
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the only valid answer is: more money
more money from selling industry-standard sata- and nvme-drives more expensive with a sticker on it and save money from less tickets
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They should have waited until third party manufacturers were tested and added to the list.
This should have been done already a few years ago.
Synology hasn’t added much non-Synology drives to their compatibility list in recent years.
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I should be able to do whatever I want with my device. If I wanna use a normal wd drive I should be allowed to.
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Had a synology NAS years ago and loved it, and so when I decided this year that was I going to dip my toes back into the NAS realm I was really disappointed to see their new policy on third party drives. I have since got a Ugreen instead and while the software is not as mature as Synology it matters more to me that I have the freedom to use whatever drives I choose to use.
I really do not like this anti consumer move by synology and while it may not mean much to them, that one action has absolutely lost me as a customer.
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Question: If I just buy into their strict rules and buy an new Synology with their drives install, how do I get all my existing data from my old unit’s unverified drives into that unit if migration is not allowed?? Perhaps I am missing something??
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there is only 1 answer, $
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The most interesting question I would ask them is: what do you think of all the negative feedback online around the x25-models, and how much you think will it hurt the brand in the long time? I doubt there ever will be third party drives on that list (because you already made a solid comment on this: why wasn’t this verification done in past few years?), but we will see.
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All I’m curious about is if they’re going to back peddle on their policy. If not – I will NEVER buy another Synology as long as they keep pulling this BS.
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Just another shitty company
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So, question: if someone is selling a say 922+ on ebay or maketplace will these be subject to the restrictions?
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Where can I buy some shares in QNAP?
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I’ve been using Synology NAS for 15 years. because of this change, my next NAS will never be Synology.
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Synology will be blacklisted, which will cause problems.
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Well I did not want to keep waiting. So instead of the 1825+/1625+ I was waiting for I just bought the 1621+ since it now dropped €125 in price at my local stores. It probably will be my last Synology if they keep messing with prosumers in this way. For backwards compatibility list I don’t have high hopes if I look at the last couple of series list. It has not grown much. So how long do you want to keep waiting?
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Perhaps Synology would accelerate the process if they were successful in squeezing some money out of WD or Seagate.
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The issue of desktop drives behaving unpredictably in read failure scenarios and dropping out of RAID arrays as a result is well known and understood, so in that respect, Synology have a point. As for SMR, well let’s not even go there! However, designed-for-RAID and/or DC drives like WD Red Pro/Gold or Seagate Ironwolf should just be verified by default. Problem solved.
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So, How does Synology’s decision to only use verified drives relate to the Seagate’s scandal from back in February where used drives were being sold as new? Still waiting for an update on that story.
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Spin baby, spin… 7200 RPM????
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I think those corporate answers to you questions were written by a monkey. Thanks Rob.
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i was about to get my first NAS and Synology just pushed me to UGREEN
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Synology just offloaded as many customers as the number of drives ????????
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Synology’s answer is pure BS! Afterall, it is linux kernel, filesystem and software RAID support that is used in Synology boxes. When all top speed supercomputers are using linux, do they suffer from that BS failure rate and reliability issue?
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lucky i steered my friend off synology and get ugreen when he was looking for a NAS.
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Why are we still talking about Synology?
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The only one that thinks enterprise clients actually consider Synology for their needs is Synology. Trust me there are far better, far more entrenched legitimate enterprise solutions and Synology is NOT on that list.
Their heads truly are full of themselves.
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So it was all corpo speak, marketing BS, and theoretical “problems” that could happen to any NAS. Right, then. F those guys.
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That’s all theoretical bla-bla for saying “we want to get more money”..
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Their beliefs will lead to a 40% drop in sales. Hope they enjoy. Those answers were not acceptable
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What if Synology is looking to cut loose the consumer market and go for Enterprise and super prosumer.
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Lets not pretend. The hard drive thing is about them making more profit since they just slap a new label on existing drives and charge 50% more for it. They were lucky I could buy a 432+ for my PLEX storage because I wouldnt have if only the newer units were avaliable. I spent years working on million dollar Netapp/Compellent/Powervault… etc… This432+ is the most basic cheap and barely home desktop level device in quality so lets not pretend a drive like WD would be the fault. Im more worried about running my $1800 worth of WD drives in this unit then the integrety of the actual drives (and this is doing nothing more then litterally using it as a network drive for storage and nothing else)
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If they actively go against supporting Toshiba drives which are always on top of the Backblaze HDD reports they simply won’t get any money/customers from me
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Synology’s disk statement is simply a “corporate” answer, i.e. it’s nothing that’s either true or false, it’s just words, devoid of hard information. If Synology needs data on enterprise drives there’s a large public database published by server company Backblaze. Now most people don’t want enterprise drives or won’t use them because of the cost, but I use them even for my simple needs, and hope to continue this use. But this database shows what you’re up against when testing drives – you need lots of drives with lots of hours. I also believe that the drive market for consumer NAS isn’t large enough for drive companies to undertake these tests..Anyway. corporate BS never cuts it, and I will be following this closely because if there’s no change from Synology my purchase this year will exclude them.
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These answers are from Synology are utter shite!
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Answer #1 BS I do not believe 40%.
Answer #2 BS Yet another crappy answer.
Answer #3 BS Not a real answer
Answer #4 BS If a user decides to use junk drive it’s the user’s problem.. not Synology. Most of us use WD or Segate. In 14 years using Synology with Segate drives I have yet to have ANY problems.
UGREED here I come.
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i appreciate this video, now i am feeling a little iffy about investing into in a synology. what would be the 2nd brand of NAS that you think is worth buying out of all the brand names you have reviewed in your videos, I just need it for data and to run my plex server on it. I would really appreciate any kind of information you can offer. please either brand is a very big investment for me so i need to make sure i get my moneys worth and once again thank you for all your videos.
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im running a 12bay right now with mixed CMR and SMR drives (for fun) and i have full performance until i reach about 1TB of nonstop 1gigabit transfer, thats when i start losing speed, so for me at least SMR has not been such a big deal as expected, also did several raid rebuilds as my old 4TB’s that are 10+ years slowly started dying, probably nothing i would recommend anyone else but for me this works better than expected
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Synology is banned lifetime from my wallet
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All they need to do is make a public statement that verification of supported third party HDD’s is under way but that they can’t give an exact time frame, It might be 3 months or it might be 6+ months, Some people(myself included) would hold off a while longer on buying another brand NAS.
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Support tickets will definitely go down by at least 40%. If no one is buying them, no support required. Devices either side of an interface should be made to a standard, so it should not matter what device is on the other side.
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Enshitification in 2025.
1. AI
2. Synology
Pick at least one, but if you’re Synology, pick both.
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Unpopular comment, but if Synology are dropping third party drives to reduce support costs, they really have no choice but to go all in.
Imagine if they sold the system and said you can use any drive you want, but if you have any of the specific issues crop up that Synology drives would have avoided – you can’t get support.
Imagine the ensuing lawsuits.
Not a fan of the policy on lower end devices below 5 bay.
Above that, you are mostly talking businesses and having a turnkey solution with support – which is what you are buying with a NAS) is what matters most.
If I can say to my business clients “buy this Synology and you will have less issues for the supported life of the unit” they will be happy with that.
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I hope the ban on using anything other than Synology hard drives continues. That way, Synology will go out of business quickly.
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When will the DS1525+ be released in the US?
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in defense of synology, at least they wont get people accidentally putting SMR drives in their raid and then call support wondering why the device is so slow, since all drives appear “green”
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No thnx Synology. You screwed up big time. You’re just another money hungry circus
All this 40% bullshit is rubbish is jusr greed & $$$$$
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Well, it could be acceptable QnA… **ONLY IF** DS series are enterprise-only devices that not targeted to individual consumer at all. They’re just ignoreing who really uses their product and just put ‘for enterprise’ labels everywhere, thinking that will make their product look high graded and profitable.
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That 40% figure also should be questioned by the number of systems sold with Synology drives. If the number of customers using Synology drives is tiny compared to people using Seagate or WD drives, then random chance could drive huge differences in the number of support requests.
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bye bye synology.
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HAT3310s of 8TB or more are completely unsuitable for home use due to noise, unless you stuff them in a noise-isolated nightstand. The branded devices seem to have been tested by deaf disabled people (sorry, no offense intended to those people), but only a completely deaf person could decide that these branded disks could be suitable for home use (<8 drives). So why pay more if these disks are worse than the competition? Stop justifying it.
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14:20 All of the responses sound like excellent reasons to provide a supported drive list for users that want it, and maybe even sell rebranded drives for convenience, but none of them are answers to why they need to lock out unverified drives. Give me a checkbox that says “i am ok with my cheap drives having crappy performance” and let me be on my way.
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As an owner / user of 8-10 Synology 4-12 bays, Synology are doing a Broadcom-VMWare.
The main reason people use these Synology products, is because they can just bung a drive in and get on with life and if all goes wrong swap the drives to a new off Synology box.. This function is now effectively a dead end. You (youtubers etc) may as well stop reviewing Synology coz who it their right mind would continue to buy Synology product. It’s clear they simply want to sell fewer units at higher profit ala Broadcom, so unless you are a mega corp big rack space user, they’d prefer you to bugger off. And that’s exactly what most sensible people will do. #ItWasFunWhileItLasted #RIPSynology
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Questions about DSM/sw?
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This just smells bad. Letting you migrate an uncertified drive that then can’t upgrade the raid is wrong.
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It was a real stupid move by synology. It would have been smarter to have a menu choice during setup to choose if they want more drive support but less tech support and have it configured the support during setup
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Non-answers and apparently no formal strategies or internal discussion. Synology just can’t be bothered anymore.
While this has been a long time coming (the count of drives certified *by Synology* has been pretty much decimated with every model generation): why not at least the OEM drives/drive series that the Synology models are based on are verified from the get go is beyond me.
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In my opinion they want to sell Synology Branded Drives . Its as simple as that . But the way there going about it especially in USA market is not going to work we want choice, And take that away we will go elsewhere as I did ..
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I don’t know about the rest of us, but the AI voice suits the tone-deaf attitude of the company.
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Is it a good idea to use UGREEN NASync iDX6011 Pro with Unraid on it, as I have different size drives?
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I love the synology brand but forcing me to use specific drives that are nothing more than synology-branded drives, I imagine – I HOPE they’re going to reverse this policy because those synology branded drives are x2 and more of the equivalent non-synology branded hdds but are most likely the SAME hdds with nothing added that supports synology’s reasoning for nickle and diming the user-base. I only want to go to 4-bay, leaving me have 40-50tb space for 2 bays and the other 2 for raid purposes. For this, I now have to start looking elsewhere to accommodate my use, which is only for home, video playback and file-backup. Thankfully I wont be looking to replace my NAS for the next 2-3 months but then I HAVE to update so bit of luck Synology get their act together
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So it’s just a lot of fluffy bs answers, that do nothing to increase confidence in this policy change. I’ve sold three Synology’s recently after buying a new Asustor gen3 a few weeks ago.
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Its sad the best company has this kind of new policies, personally moving on to unRaid.
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I was gonna buy the Synology DS1825+, but now I have booked the UGREEN NASync iDX6011 Pro instead.
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If $ynology would like to improve stability due to drive failure, they should have released a list of compatible drives before DS925+.
40% increase in failure rate is cherry picking. ppl who use synology drives are serious about data.
the other drives users probably include leisure users who put PC grade HDD into NAS, either for fun or money saving.
After stratifying for types of HDD I don’t think their is still 40%.
It’s just corporate greed. nth more.
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Thank you for your work, but all i hear from $ynology is marketing-BS. No, that’s not even true. I am hearing things that make no sense at all. It’s like they think we are stupid. Like do they really want to imply that their rebranded drives would withstand a power outage when a say exos or wd red pro would not? I’m sitting sweet with my old models still going strong, yet when they break i will move on. I won’t spend another single dollar on $ynology.
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(READ FIRST) Hi guys! Few extra notes about this video, regarding the use of an AI voice over.
1) Sorry about the use of shakey AI voices in this video – trying to find an AI Voiceover that actually said many of the words correctly (NAS, iSCSi, Synology, etc) took a while and this was as close to perfect as I could find.
2) The logic for the AI was to differentiate the questions from me and the answers. Me reading them would have muddied the waters a bit narratively.
3) Why AI? Why didn’t the Synology representative speak on camera/mic? No clear answer I’m afraid. Originally it looked like someone would come on the camera for the Q’s (questions were provided 24hrs in advance), but at the 11th hour they changed it to written quotes. Not ideal and removed the ability to respond to those answers directly – but in the end I decided these Q’s and A’s were demanded enough for me to make a video about them (and the article below in the video description).
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I’m willing to bet $2 that after 2x quarters of xx25+ sales catering, suddenly exos drives will magically be approved as “compatible” across the board,
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I don’t care if the drive is not verify or relaiable. When i plug it i just want to work, if brake i will put another.
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So Unraid server it is
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Next time, take us to visit the QNAP headquarters ????
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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Thanks for the testing. SYNOLOGY … WTF?! I have been on Synology for 20 years. My last Synology NAS failed a couple of months back (disks still OK) and I was waiting for the new units. Now I CANNOT RELIABLY USE MY EXISTING WD RED DRIVES WITH MY (SHR) SYNOLOGY VOLUME … it looks like I can migrate my disks and volume but will not be able to safely maintain a RAID … this is NOT OK SYNOLOGY. What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do?!?! A very very unhappy long-term customer here.
I had already ordered a DS1825+ when I found out … and then cancelled the order immediately. I’m not one to complain but this ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
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I have a DS224+ with WD Red’s. I domt know how thus thing are with my system? Does somebody has infos?
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synology’s hard drivers are nothing but re-branded main stream hard drivers(some one can chime in here and name the brand). I wonder if it would be possible to just buy the name brand price at their price, flash the synology firmware onto that hard-drive and install it in the NAS and see what happens.
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Wonder how long it will take them to start fleecing their customers on the price of “Compatible” HDD.
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IMO, the big winner in all this? Unraid.
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I wanted to upgrade my ds218+ to ds925+ and I cancelled my order after seeing this. Now looking into qnap.
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BS by Synology otherwise they would NOT EXCLUDE but RECOMMEND Drives.
If they do not run it back soon, DECLINE of Synology will start and the STAIN will stay on the Brand and only get bigger. Once TRUST and CUSTOMER GOODWILL is lost…. Meanwhile competition is not sleeping.
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Can a Synology storage pool be migrated to another manufacturer’s NAS enclosure?
When it’s time to replace my enclosure, can I just buy another, and move my drives over?
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Do any existing Syno customers like the vendor’s new policy ? Surely a majority are on-board, but how do they reason away the single-source storage media limitation? “Single-source” is usually a risk to be avoided. You don’t usually want your own business to be dependent on a single vendor, and certainly not on a vendor who’s experiencing backlash and boycott from other customers.
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I have a lot of hard drives in search for a new NAS.
Synology does not welcome my hard disks that I already had in my previous Synology.
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This is just an observation about corporate America. When did the new CEO at Synology start?
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This is rough. I did see the community made a script to update the drive compatibility. Is it within your channel’s wheelhouse to review the hack?
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Synology is a NO buy recommendation from here on out. They’ve just screwed their customers too many times now
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Obviously they are after money here. That is understandable, and perhaps even fair (given that you get a lot of software for free with the purchase of a NAS). From here, they should add 2 more options for the user (in addition to “buy only our drives”):
1. Allow the users to purchase a “license” to add any drive they want. The license should be reasonably priced (no +$100 or more per drive nonsense).
2. Work with the manufacturers of other drives and have them pay the money to Synology behind the scenes. (This would be similar to how Google pays Reddit to be able to index their website.)
There is an implicit 3rd option too – considerably raise the prices for Synology NAS, or even sell software licenses separately. I doubt these choices will be popular among consumers either.
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was about to upgrade 2 x synology NAS’s, glad i saw this before going ahead with the purchase. very disappointed.
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I wonder if rebuilding or expanding the RAID on the migrated disks would be possible after disabling the scan as per the instructions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKS1lSaXJN8
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I’m sorry, but at the moment it’s just a piece of sh!t!
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The scenario about not being able to repair a migrated raid with the same exact model of (previously verified but now unverified) drive is incredibly customer-hostile for a NAS provider. I am sorry, but there is no reasoning that makes that ok, in my opinion, and you might as well have stopped the testing there as it is a full-stop deal breaker.
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What the hell… somebody needs to make Synology visible on the EU commission’s radar perhaps to remind them what happened to Apple and their “closed ecosystem”!
With the help of chatGPT… 😀
Dear Synology Team,
I am writing to formally express my outrage and disappointment regarding your recent decision to restrict functionality for non-Synology hard drives on your newer NAS devices.
As the owner of multiple Synology NAS units, I find it utterly unacceptable that your policy now breaks support for any system using drives not on your proprietary “verified” list. Most critically, this move prevents the repair or rebuilding of RAID/storage pools containing previously functioning third-party drives. This not only violates basic consumer trust but actively sabotages working systems with no technical justification beyond vendor lock-in.
Let me be clear: you are coercing your customers into using your overpriced, vendor-locked drives through what can only be described as software-level sabotage. This is not about “compatibility” — this is about cornering the market and eliminating competition through artificial restrictions.
As of today, I am already in contact with:
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP)
Consumer rights organizations within the EU
Multiple technology journalists and media outlets across Europe, some of whom are already covering your anti-consumer practices
The European Union has made its position abundantly clear with recent enforcement against Apple, requiring them to open their ecosystem under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). I believe Synology’s actions fall into the same anti-competitive category — and I fully intend to see this investigated and enforced at the EU level.
I am proceeding with:
Immediate termination of use of all Synology NAS devices under my control
Formal regulatory complaints to EU authorities regarding anti-competitive conduct
Public exposure of these practices through European tech media and consumer watchdog channels
Legal review of consumer rights violations and planned obsolescence tactics under EU law
This is your opportunity to correct course before regulators intervene. I demand:
A formal statement from Synology addressing this issue
Immediate rollback of policies that block functionality for non-Synology drives
Guaranteed future support for open and interoperable drive usage
I expect a response, and I expect transparency. This issue will not go away quietly.
Sincerely,
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I left a comment here yesterday with the solution/workaround. Seems it was deleted?? Is @NASCompares in Synologys pocket?
There is a GitHub script you can run that updates the Synology HDD database on your machine so it sees your ‘illegal’ drives as legit.
Just search for syno_HDD_db
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Beware the new Synology, folks. They don’t give a damn about your data any more.
And; Your timecodes are off, mate
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Stop being so money hungry Synology, you’re becoming another Toxic Company
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Synology – the end.
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Hi. Great stuff from you! As always.
Thank you very much.
Also will you test RAM modules? If there is the same compatibility rules as for HDD? Will 3rd party work?
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Update – I have performed extensive testing of Unverified/3rd party HDDs in a Synology 2025 Series NAS. You can see the results here – https://youtu.be/aKS1lSaXJN8?si=1OFhvLEErd8NeRbs
(TLDR – Now you cannot use unverified HDDs on a storage pool that you have migrated over from an old system for RAID Recovery, RAID Expansion or Hot Spares)
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Bought last year’s four-bay system for home use to replace my Drobo which . . . you know. I don’t imagine I’ll ever need another, and if I do, there’s eBay. I feel fortunate I got in before this nonsense arose.
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Guess which hard drives aren’t on the compatibility list for my truenas system. This should be the death of Synology.
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Synology unverified themselves.
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Does this only affect the new diskstations or do they also plan to add this restrictions to older ones? Just in case, can you flash your DS to switch to another os? ????
I swear if they sneakily add this to a future “security” update, I will lose my shit ???? figuratively and literally lol
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Att: Synology. Had to purchase 2 new NAS’s for a company I look after and because of your silly new hard drive rules I purchased QNap’s instead. Your loss Synology
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Imagine buying a car and they won’t let you put on 3rd part tires, windshield wipers, or oil filters
Oh and their branded ones cost more, are harder to find, & aren’t any better than other options
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Synology really missed the boat here!
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Synology are totally a** … I already felt that after the Intel CPU disaster with the DS415+ models, where the devices started dying after only 1,5-2 years!
The issue was caused by the Intel Atom C2538 CPU, which had a well-known hardware flaw (LPC clock degradation) that led to system crashes and total failure. Synology knew about this problem – they fixed it at newer revisions – yet they denied everything and offered no real support.
Over 150 users on Amazon reported the same issue after around two years of use, but Synology never acknowledged it publicly. Instead of offering a fix or any goodwill gesture, they lied to their customer and just sent me a link to a new NAS model. No replacement, no discount, no technical solution – just silence.
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You are way to considrate with Synology.
The recomendation should be: Do NOT buy Synology 25 series until a lot more 3rd party drives are certified.
In my own consulting business I will be buying a QNAP with a view to learning it, and changing my clients over to it, unless Synology quickly changes policy.
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Synology has been my go to for me and my customers, the last gen is the last synology I use, going forward I’m going to use ugreen instead, what a greedy company synology has become.
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my guess is 7,000 hours of testing = 70 drives at 100 hours each, or some combination thereof. Either way, “competitive pricing” … no. Seems they want to push all home users to smaller NAS units and are expanding what was formerly the xs/xs+ range downwards to the plus range. Unless they start validating third party drives pretty sharpish, they are going to alienate a lot of the more “enthusiast” home market sector.
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The motivation for Synology to limit drives: Greed
The reason for the aggressive warning and preventing even basic repair features to work: Greed
The basis for claiming only verified drives can be used: literally: Nonexistent (no, synology, one firmware issue a decade ago does not count)
We will see if collapsing sales numbers will get one of the synology managers to stop sniffing their own farts long enough to stop this self destructive crapshow.
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well this information set me back big… was thinking to go from my 2 bay DS220+ to a 8 bay with the capassaty to add 2 mor 5 bay cabinets . i can get synology drives in my contry but the price on them is not even close to a regular one and i am thinking a bout the future… 8+5+5 drive in 4 Tb is a desent storage but i was thinking to have the 8 in a raid 0 and one of the other 2 as a cold storage in a raid 5 with the last as a backup in a raid 5. so the activ raid will have about 29 Tb the cold storage about 14.5 Tb and that indecating that i need to have atlest 33,5 Tb in the backup. and in that case i need to get 5 10Tb drives for the backup. and that will cost me 3 times what the SD-unit cost itself… that´s not possible… not with my income so i am thinking to check other comparnyis solutions or build me my own PC-server/nas/router so everything is in the same setup… it will probely be more of a hassle but i thing that´s the bast solution… maybe this is not for this but i have sean mor and mor comparnyis is doing stuff to F with peapol… sory for the rambeling and anny miss spelling … have dyslexia
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I have a really hard time following what you say. There is NO “good news” anywhere in this. It does not matter if synology have indicated this path forward etc etc. It does not matter if “compatible drives” perform better. There is an easy solution to all of this – if you want full support, use recommended/compatible drives. Making other drives not work or not as well, is NOT the solution.
Your discussion about the performance data of compatible drives is just completely irrelevant. IT DOES NOT MATTER! Of course there are hard drives that are better and that are worse. Why even bother discussing it?
“We crunched the numbers” – does it matter? Really? Not at all. No matter what the numbers are, it is “drive locking” !!! It guess it is Synology trying to get more money from their customers in a way that is sadly becoming increasingly common.
Nothing you say makes any sense. One of your last comments was revealing – “how users benefit”.
There is absolutely NO BENEFIT for any user. How do you think? That it is impossible to buy recommended drives if you can use other drivers as well?
This was really bad!
Trust in you videos fell by a large margin here.
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Some people at Synology need to be fired.
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easy to bypass hard drive compatibility check on Synology 925+ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t7Q7O5ii9g
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Man, imagine if Apple made a NAS, this would be about what you’d get. Un-freaking-acceptable. Be it commercial or consumer, people use these as a way to preserve and secure their data and the tests here confirm that Synology cannot be trusted with that data.
I also do not trust that they are taking any haste in whitelisting additional drives. Why would they? Whitelisted drives are exclusively Synology branded, which will carry a markup. It isn’t like WD and Seagate are gonna give them a portion of their sales should some of their drives get whitelisted.
In fact, the idea of a whitelist/blacklist for this kind of device is offensive. Trust your damn users, please!! I cannot believe that there is an issue widespread enough coming from WD and Seagate(who are almost certainly the producers of the vast majority of the drives that end up in these enclosures) that this kind of lockdown is necessary. If it was an issue, you’d hear it from them or their customers, but near as I can tell, its crickets.
As someone in your guest discussion video said, the best option was to either let them all work, or don’t even allow migration and lock it down airtight. At least with the latter, you go in knowing the situation and know to buy additional drives as cold spares.
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Its been a blast synology! See ya!
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time has come to go Qnap finally! 🙂
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This basically kills off the feasibility of upgrading from an old model if currently using third party drives.
A) It means that even if a third party drive is under warranty, a replacement would be rendered useless.
B) If you have to replace a third party drive, you’ll end up with an array with different brands, which is something Synology seems to be against now, after years of it being one of their great selling points.
I hope my six year old DS418Play lasts a good long time. I had been planning on upgrading, but its eventual replacement will not be Synology unless they undo these ridiculous changes.
I’m having a hard time figuring out Synology’s logic here, but It’s my guess that they predict not being able to stop the loss of SOHO customers to the likes of UGREEN and won’t reduce their prices to counter that, so have decided to drop that sector and gouge the corporate realm.
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Synology will achieve its goal of fewer support calls with this strategy. When no one buys the product they won’t call for support. I will never upgrade to one of these new NAS.
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Wow, still making excuses for this scumbag company. There is zero reason for them not to have other drivers verified before releasing. They are the worst anti consumer pile of crap company. At this point, there is nothing that Synology can do to get back as customer. I do not know what brand NAS my replacement for my DS1815+ will be but regardless what anti consumer pile of crap Synology those it will not be a Synology drive. They have proved that they will screw over the customer. That coming from some that had a Synology router. Has deployed Synology NAS at work. Has recommended Synology as a company for years. I cannot believe you’re still making excuses for this pile of crap company. There is zero reason to release a new NAS and not test any driver but their own before launch, other than to milk the customer for as much cash as possible.
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Appreciate the work. Was already convinced I was leaving but now I have new concerns about what to do if an older Synology dies and the drives need to go into a newer unit. That’s data loss territory! Exactly what your NAS vendor should NOT EVER be baking in. Screw ‘em. Bye.
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Good bye Synology. I’ve used your products both personally and professionally in my own personal business, I’ve deployed them to TONS of customer sites, and I use them currently in my daily profession in Public Safety. After your recent anti-consumer policies and unsupported 3rd party hardware I am going to migrate ALL of my products and services to pfSense and TrueNAS and my own hardware.
R.I.P. Synology. It’s been real, it’s been fun, but a HUGE mistake on your part and it’s going to cost you thousands of customers most likely more.
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RIP Synology. Even if they reverse their policies later, all trust I had in them has completely evaporated
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They seem to have bigger agenda with this. They want us home and SOHO users to be mad and leave ship so they can stop making home NAS boxes and focus solely on the enterprise market.
After 15 years I’m fed up with their policy and moving away to Qnap and QuTS Hero.
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Thank you for such an in-depth overview of the scenarios, very useful indeed. As a reseller of Synology devices this was disappointing news, I have been selling Synology NAS’s for years and are my go-to NAS, for now I will not be recommending the newer models and stick with the older series which do support 3rd party drives, while they are still available. Hopefully Synology will work with the 3rd parties such as WD and Seagate to make their products certified in the future. Otherwise there are other NAS vendors that their customers will move to and their sales and reputation will undoubtedly suffer.
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This is complete BS…been a customer for a long time, but now I’m going to find somewhere else to spend my money.
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Synology warns users that Kingston, Samsung, WD, Seagate, and SK Hynix are at risk. This is a direct confrontation between Synology’s own brand value and the above storage device manufacturers.
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I just bought QNAP, didnt even thought about synology… and to think my first NAS was dj210 from them…
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Here’s a disturbing thought…. Blocking non-validated drives is based on a ‘whitelist’ of ‘validated’ drives. That automatically means that somewhere on the NAS there’s a file that contains that list. What if that file gets corrupted? What if some Synology employee makes a booboo and puts a typo in there? What if there’s a ‘soon to be ex-Synology employee with a grudge’ who does that on purpose? And those corrupt files slip through QA? Things like that happen, and no matter how hard Synology is going to say it won’t I know it can, and probably will happen at some point. That might render your NAS unusable, or at ‘best’ cause you to have all these non validated drive issues with drives that might be perfectly validated and otherwise good. Artificial blocking in such ways is a recipe for disaster.
Mind you, I totally understand validation of hardware for vendors of NASes, and such. I have absolutely NO problem with them doing that. They have to keep their support costs under control (or charge the customers with the difference, which will make them much more expensive, etc). But this is just a stupid implementation of this policy.
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Ok, this is a big limitation, but Synology hw is so state of art…????
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Synology removed from the supplier list, including for small and Soho projects.
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After 10+ years of use, this is the end of the line.
RIP Synology
My 7 WD RedPro 10TB-Drives will find an other home.
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Thank God I didn’t get into synology when I decided to acquire my first NAS. All these companies seem to go down this route, when they got you into their walled garden, they start blackmailing you for more and more money, because line must go up
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was gonna refresh my synology… now need to check other brands
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When I first discovered the NAS Compares channel over a year ago my thought was once I’d made my NAS purchase I’d not have a need for the channel anymore. I was wrong! Thanks for keeping us in the know.
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If they don’t want me as a customer, I won’t be one any longer. Already ordered my first competitor NAS.
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I was wondering if that script that adds your drives to the “compatible list” works on the ’25 units, and if that’d be a way around the migrated pool and a drive failure/adding same disk test?
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If Synology will not let me use my own WD Data Center drives then I will have to ditch Synology! I will not be locked into their product hemisphere!
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Can you try a Toshiba branded drive that they are making available to Synology as a white label?
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Yikes!! Whoever pushed and shoved this decision through at Synology is probably doing a lot of “short selling” (or buying some major “put options”) in anticipation of the Synology stock tanking and taking a nose dive in price. Not so crazy, actually, Brilliant! Although, Really bad for the corporation. Oh yeah, and the consumer. Or at least what’s left of them. Major opportunities for other NAS competitors. And NASCompares.
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you cannot buy synology anymore that is the conclusion.
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Synology would like to thank you for being a loyal customer for years. So now when your Nas dies, you can purchase a new updated Synology NAS and all your hard drives all over again. You are welcome, its the least Synology can do to show you how important you are to them.
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Bye-by Syno, my next NAS will be an Asustor or Terremaster.
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I think the NAS Advocacy Though Leaders show plot out when in time the M.2 (ie: reasonable priced 16TB modules) will begin to neutralize this debate over Synology certified spinning mechanical drives.
This will be a better test of this strategy by Synology because, while there are differences in quality and performance for M.2,, the long term trajectory is going to neutralize their claim of certifications of an exclusive group of hardware
They better learn from Blockbuster Video
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meaning go for another brand NAS
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What you can do…
Give a wide berth to a company that insults the customers who have been loyal to it for years and have brought it sales.
Anyone who pulls this kind of crap has no future in the market.
One could surmise that the swings of the decision makers were a little close to the nearest wall.
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Thank you for the clear and thoughtful coverage of this important topic. I guess my old Drobo 5N will have to keep going for a little while longer while I consider other options.
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Shame on Synology.
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Not being able to recovery from a degraded array with a like drive should make 100% of people looking to upgrade completely stay away from these systems. The other scenarios people can grumble about but this on is a dick move.
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I cannot wait to see Synology products flooded with negative reviews about this stupid limitation.
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Synology redefining the term “clusterfk!”
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Next step : you only can connect to internet if you use an RJ45 cable fom Synology, they’re trying to become Apple’s NASes, so sad
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The best user feedback, we as a community, can provide Synology is that the community does buy these devices.
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Turning your own products into useless rubbish. These companies never learn.
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Wow. This really sucks. We need an open source software that does SHR. Drobo’s had something similar and I went to Synology because they also allowed mis-matched drive sizes in a NAS form. Unraid and Hexos does not do a variation of SHR which is sad.
I hope my 10 year old synologies last another 10 years!
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Thanks for putting this video up. This is so disappointing by synology.. I researched and bought on in 2019 and wow happy with it. Will definitely find a new company somewhere else/
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Well, it looks like I need a Ugreen now to back up my Synology !!!
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Pointless since won’t be buying the new Synology… will be looking.. for alternative’s hahahahah
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bye bye Synology
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Why go with a device/company that has a target on it’s back when it comes to hackers. Wouldnt touch them with an electric cattle prod.
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The 2025 Synology series is unfortunately Dead to Me. I have a DS423+ (Plex user here) and there is zero reason to ‘upgrade’ to the 2025 models regardless given the HW specs. This is a pity as the DSM 7.2 version I’m on (before they removed Video Station) looks to be the version I’ll be staying on as long as I can (baring some significant security issue).
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I’ve been a loyal Synology user, and this is my third unit, but it will also be my last. It feels like Synology has forgotten who their core customers are. Casual users generally don’t care about NAS, while power users, who set everything up for their families, care a lot about flexibility and choice. Forcing users to buy only their drives is where I draw the line. I’ve always used IronWolf drives and have been completely satisfied with them. I’m not going to switch just to comply with Synology’s new restrictions.
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Stability is great. But let me choose. If you want to verify drives which guarantees me a certain level of stability, great. It’s my device though so if I want to put in different drives and don’t give a shit about your verification, then I should be able to.
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We’ve had an eight unit Synology NAS in our office for several years and have been waiting on the release of the 2025 model to upgrade this. The company’s decisionn to force users to buy their rebranded drives has sent me looking to their competitors.
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In Germany, we call it “Elektroschrott”…
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In Future no Videos about this company! – They should not get a positive advertisement.
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If you can’t use the drives you want, YOU DON’T OWN IT.
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LOL. @Synology, get over yourselves. You’re not even close to enterprise class devices, stop LARPing. I was looking at replacing my fleet of aging Netgear ReadyNAS 4, 6 and 8 bay enclosures and @Synology you WERE on the list. Now, you’re #1 on the “Hard no” list, as I don’t/can’t trust you, even if you roll back this greedy decision.
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Thank you for the work you did to put this together.
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They should’ve just raised the price instead of lock it. They want to fight HDD prices falling locking you in and tap into HDD sales. I was looking for a 10 bay and due to lock in I’m passing. I need to be able to move old RAID designed drives over not buy 10 new ones. This also forces you to buy bigger drives up front. I will not be buying one of their products. I have 86TB and will be growing 24TB a year. So who is this product for?
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I have worked the industry an I can understand the idea behind Synology’s decision to ban drives that are not on the HCT list. I can understand, but I don’t think they did it the right way. The right way would be to expressly state that if you are using drives that are not on the HCT list Synology will not accept any warranty claims in case of disk failure, array failure or data corruption.
The reason I say this is because I have built a lot of storage servers and run into disk compatibility problems. In one case WD shipped over 200 drives so we could swap out the drives that failed in the servers a customer bought. Thing is these drives were actually on the compatibility list, but then using an older firmware. Once the firmware was upgraded the disks were no longer compatible. In another case I had to sit at a customer and update the firmware of about 100 drives as the R6 arrays had failed. This customer had all error mail messages sent to an employee who never looked at them. Had he even just looked at the servers once he got an email he would have seen the error LED on the failed drives and the array failures could have been prevented. As it was the drives failed, the arrays were degraded, the standby drives were used to rebuild the array and another drive failed and the second standby replaced it only for two more drives to fail and the arrays were dead. This is when they called about the problem. Seagate and the controller manufacturer went through the logs from the controllers and Seagate provided a new firmware that solved the failures. These are things you don’t have to deal with if the drives are tested, certified and the drives you buy has the correct firmware. And to get the kind of service we got from drive manufacturers it helps if you are talking about several hundred drives at a time. It’s harder to get prompt service if you are a end user and have four or eight drives that cause a problem.
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I’m so upset with this, literally bought an upgrade to my old unit 10days ago, while I was searching for new drivers I discovered this news about the drivers, I really don’t like this idea of no freedom, so I will be returning the unit for refund and i will search other company , they don’t deserve my data
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Imagine you migrated an 18tb disk pool ..and can’t even replace with synology drives cause of size ????
Good bye synology
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Very logical testing, maybe I missed 1 scenario. Any issues found trying to reintroduce a migrate drive back to the original Synology NAS?
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What about older non-Synology drives?!
I have an old DS414 that I’d love to replace but was waiting for 2.5Gb network. Now I’m just a home user, I don’t have a big budget, so if I replaced my NAS, I would want to use my existing old (but working perfectly) drives, preferably with a clean install after backing up the data. I’ve no idea if these old drives are on any recent compatibility list even if Synology were to open up the allowed list a bit.
And these NAS units aren’t cheap, there’s no way I can afford a new NAS and 4 new drives all in one go, and then what happens to my existing perfectly working drives?
I just can’t see how I can buy a new Synology NAS now.
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I’ll be replacing my DS918+ with a custom build Nas and true scale
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While it’s unofficial fixes, i would really appreciate it if you could test some of the HDD compatibility scripts (hacks), which replaces/expands the file which contains the compatibility list on the Synology NAS and whether or not it works.
Just Google “Synology_HDD_db”
EDIT: In fact, they just released a guide an hour ago to even get the new Synology NAS’es to allow you to install DSM with unverified HDDs.
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There are already scripts created that can add any disks to the Synology approved list or allow DSM to be installed on new disks. It remains to be seen if Synology will make changes to block them but for now, unverified disks can be used very easily.
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I hope more people are gonna build themselves their own storage server with Truenas
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There is no incompatibility with ‘unverified’ drives but aggravated obsession for customers money. Synology wants to make money out of thin air. Because most of Synology hardware was overpriced outdated trash 5 years ago and surprisingly it is now. But from now on company decided to do a quantum leap into degeneration and bankruptcy by enforcing usage of outdated and overpriced Toshiba drives relabeled. This would mostly hit home users, creators and some small businesses
Whatever this company did it won’t revert the accumulated negative effect. So it’s time to say “bye-bye overpriced trash”!
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Have anyone tested copying first blocks of unverified, but working disk (from DS923+) to new, but unverified disk? Something like “dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1” ?
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F0 Synology!!! You lost a loyal client and reseller for good after 14 years!!!
Thank you very much to this great channel for the always complete reviews!
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What does a verified disk mean? Every 20 year old computer needs drivers and the thing will work, with all types of memory media. So they just don’t want the drivers to load for stable operation. petty????
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Curious if when a drive fails, if you can shutdown the DS925+, pull the good drive out, clone it to the replacement disk to get the synology partitions on it, place the original good drive back in and boot, then when running add in the cloned replacement disk to see if it will allow raid repair. Might have a similar situation as when replugging in the hot pulled disk.
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In the bin it goes????, its brand new trash
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All those years of getting r&ped up the wallet and telling ourselves we’re ok with mediocre hardware because THeiR sOFTwaRe is SO aaWSome…well 1)it’s not, I’ve used all their own apps now, many don’t really work. and 2)this is what our premium dollars have paid for, a deliberate sabotage at the software level creating artificial problems…that’s right artificial problems put there by Synology.
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That is really a shame, hope they do add 3rd party to the compatibility list. Actually the Synology drives are not compatible in a lower version of DSM like 6.x while the 3rd party are, so overall they are the least compatible drives on the market! What concerns me also is if the Synology drives are compatible on other brand NAS’s ? So you can save your investment if you want to switch.
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Pure evil. May their greed be their ruin.
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I am a migrating buyer
I planned to purchase a DS1825
I’ve had (2) 20 TB Seagate EXOS drives sitting in my desk waiting for a new unit
This was the final straw, I purchased a Terramaster F6-424 Max
So far, I’m happy
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Gracias a Synology por existir … así podemos usar Xpenology 🙂
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How many of you paused the video and listened to your own NAS when the beeps sounded on the video?
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What an interesting way Synology has chosen to ruin their company.
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This is so f*cking stupid I don’t even know where to start. For f*ck sake Synology, how can you be this turned away from reality?!
This is ensh*tification at its finest really. I could’ve bought it if buying your drives would’ve unlocked something extra and it was 100% optional, but this.. I can’t believe than I’m from now on is going to suggest QNAP to people who want to buy a turnkey solution…
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It is completely UNACCEPTABLE and DANGEROUS for Synology to block recovery of an array with non-Synology branded drives. That is a completely artificial restriction that they have chosen to implement and puts their customers’ data at risk. That is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE behavior from Synology!
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STOP MAKING SYNOLOGY VIDEOS!! STOP GIVING THEM ANY TIME!!
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I’ve got a dead DS1817+ and I’ve been waiting for 18 months to replace it; I’m fairly convinced that it’s the motherboard that has died. It has 8 * 8TB WD Reds in it. I want to transfer this pool to a new NAS. I’m hoping that I can move my current pool to a new DS1825+ then one by one replace my WD Reds with something like 16TB HAT3310s The cost will be prohibitive but I might be able to do this over an 18 month period… hopefully I will then be in a ‘safe’ position…
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I’ve been thinking about this verification nonsense from Synology, and it occurred to me that it is a brand lock-in, nothing more. Think about it, for years Synology have had NAS certified drives from Seagate, Toshiba and WD on their compatibility list, a list that they have claimed has been validated thoroughly. If this is so, and those drives from Seagate, WD and Toshiba have been fully verified for years, what’s changed? Why are those drives suddenly unverified now?
How can drives previously on Sinology’s much vaunted compatibility list be unverified? It makes no sense to me. I believe Synology are appeasing their user base by saying third-party drives are/will be verified in future without seriously wanting to do this. This exercise is being done to evaluate user pushback. If most users shrug, grumble a bit and accept this new situation, Synology may quietly forget about verifying thirdparty drives. If, however, the reaction from the Synology community is comprehensively negative, they will miraculously include the third-party drives they’ve always had on their compatibility list in short order.
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This is a huge showstopper for me and many. I have 918+ running and will most likely be looking for a way out of Synology ecosystem if they stay on this path. The hard part is replacing some of the apps that I use, like Photos (Immich?) and Drive (Nextcloud is the closest but bloated) and Surveillance station (???). If you are not using these apps then getting out of Synology should be pretty simple.
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Now it’s time to consider all alternatives over synology.
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Synology going this route of trying to lock in their overpriced rebadged Toshiba hard drives is a Rubicon that cannot be uncrossed. The trust is gone. Even if they claim they will loosen the restrictions on non-approved drives, why should I trust they won’t simply reverse course in a few years? It’s time to move on from Synology.
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I wonder if there would be market for hacking WD drives to identify themselves as valid verified drives 🙂 Most likely the firmware change they have made to the drives is very minimal and could be quite easily replicated/emulated on other drives.
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This pretty much ends synology for me. Practically zero reason to stay with them.
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Doesn’t matter. I still buy synology because ugreen nas isn’t available anywhere.
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That rebuild thing is a big problem, you should always be able to rebuild a RAID if drive fails, dataloss is worse than possible unstable behaviour that might occur. And if that really is a big issue, then just allow rebuild but keep the RAID in slow degraded mode where it really cannot be used until you rebuild it with verified drive, but in the mean time all the data will be safe as the RAID has been rebuilt and there is parity data.
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Why waist your time? Synology is toast! New UGREEN 8 bay owner here.
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Synology seppuku?
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Pathetic. to let you migrate non-standard drives and hten not repair a failed RAID??? Regardless if they “fix that”, it shows you their brain-dead strategy–those were the requirements for developers!
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It is such a bad move. ????????
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That’s the way to go, try some and see what happens but remember, Synology is watching all of your moves.
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Excellent presentation. Thank you. You are doing some really amazing reporting on this situation. I try to repurpose just about all of my drives, memory and whatnot as best I can when bringing in new home lab equipment. All my stuff is enterprise grade as I just dont buy “cheap stuff” for my lab. The thought that I could never any of it, not one bit, in a brand new premium NAS just makes want to vomit. It kind of reminds me what what MSFT is doing with TPM and what Broadcom has done with VMware. Of course Apple does this same crap with their computers, phones and everything else. I have really high hopes for the new Minisform NAS and their OS. Really hope the Minisform NAS OS can be virtualized under Proxmox either on their new NAS hardware or the MS-A2.
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So synology is using Non-standard hard drives because all other drives than synology are not working normally.
Do not explain me that… In my opinion all people should fill whole internet with simillar sentence in comments and reviews to force synology to explain themself more and that will show that they are just lying about true intentions
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Synology bad
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soooo long story short, time to draw a line and put out a warning to avoid and offer usable alternatives, rip synology
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Synology: Dead and buried in 2025.
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What happens if you use an expansion unit and 3rd party drives
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Good bye. I’ve been loyal because I like the product. However, I will not be forced to use specific drives. Fuck off, Synology.
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I wouldn’t normally comment on a YouTube video, but wow. I’ve been a Synology NAS customer for longer than I can remember. I currently own six units with a total of 32 drives across them. I heard about the drama, but I was waiting for some actual tests to see how bad things were. I would say this is disaster territory. I simply can’t trust Synology with my data going forward. It’s a real shame, I’ve loved the OS over the years, and I have boxes that have been powered on for something like 10 years non-stop. I have always recommended them as the go-to solution. Time to move on. Thank you for doing these tests, and for the great videos over the years. I look forward to finding out the best new options as they appear.
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cool
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Just say it outright: Synology can’t be recommended anymore. This policy is idiotic and most of the disabled features have absolutely nothing to do with drive “compatibility”. If their software is so finicky, it’s shit software and you wouldn’t want to use it anyways. This is just a money grab, plain and simple, and coming at the worst of times where nearly every other manufacturers hardware is better than the Synology oldtimers.
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They will hopefully learn their lesson soon or go bankrupt. I for myself will never use Synology ever again and do my datndest to not let them into the corps i work for.
Damage is done ….
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Sorry if I missed it, but can you at least use third-party SSDs for the SSD cache?
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By bye Synology. Learn from Nokia
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So some kind of low level format with a USB harness could condition the disk as if it was a Synology drive?
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At this point people should boycott synlogy and move on this is nuts
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Just delete the OS and install truenas. Problem solved.
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At first I thought I would just quit if they bs spec lock. Now I need to advise other against their bs scamming. Remember this ‘once they start bs any business practice, they will do it again and again. NEVER EVER TRUST OR GIVE IN TO THEIR LIARS’
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needs to have a dev mode, where you can do what you want with your system you purchased
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Wow, looks like I may be looking at HexOS now and my own hardware solution or perhaps one that comes without an OS. I really do love Synology, but this huge change is a deal breaker for sure.
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unable to repair the raid, is the absolute minimum for ANY NAS, oh, fuck you sonology.
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Many thanks for the video . To be absolutely clear . . . . another vote for UGREEN + TrueNAS
Synology face sales loss from people/SME who start with a low end product and later upgrade to several higher end products.
It would make sense if Synology modelled their likely sales loss based on these comments . . . do they care?
Surely Synology must realise that a very small percentage of the population buy NAS units
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to late – Already migrated to UGreen 8 bay
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Ugreen here i come 8 bay
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Good job with lipsync 😉
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Nope. I own Synology NAS devices at home and for my employer (Government – Police, Fire, EMS). I’m out. This is a deal breaker for me. I will not be buying any more Synology hardware while they are vendor locked on the drives. Hard drives all meet standards. We put them in RAID arrays to protect against those rare failures. Artificially raising the price is asinine. Get your head out of your asinine Synology!
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…and don’t forget, what you might be able to do today will properly be turned off in a DSM update when they get aware of the loopholes found by the users ????
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Their decision is so stupid that it would even make more sense to stop accepting sata drives and create a new Synology type of drives…
They will regret it but probably it is already too late.
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One of the most absurd thing about all this story is that the Synology drives I see listed on Amazon (at least here in Italy) are obviously either Seagate or HGST manufactured WD (that btw for some funny reason have the sticker flipped upside down compared to the OEM drives), so there is no reason for not allowing other drives of those brands to function inside the NAS.
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Good information. My opinion is to stay away from Synology for now. Even if you pay more and purchase all compatible drives today, it does not mean they will be on the list for your next replacement system. Sadly, as a home user, I like the SHR. Does any other manufacturer allow mixing drives.
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After exchanging emails with synology the official answer is “drives that do not meet the new compatibility policy WILL NOT WORK”. I can forward the email to you if you want or you can ask for details from them.
RIP Synology. It was a nice trip.
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Jsut get Unraid. Never looking back.
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Synology turning into a useless toaster.
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What about repairing RAID consisting of unverified HDDs with new verified HDD, that should work , right ?
Also F Synology, greedy bastards.
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I’m not yet sure if I have to replace my current NAS with another one, but this crap rules out any chance for a Synology. They have begun the route down this path, and I don’t believe they will reverse it.
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You could potentially try “initialize” the drive in the older nas to try to use it as replacement for degraded RAID.
If you migrate the older box is usually kept as the backup so it may be kind of the workaround foe those who must upgrade.
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Thanks for your detailed and scientific approach to NAS videos. I have been watching about 6 months. I don’t own a NAS yet, I like to do a LOT of research before purchases like that. I’m glad now I didn’t purchase a Synology system recently.
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To whom are they going to sell their drives if most of the people will no longer buy their appliance?
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For a dominant NAS vendor like Synology, I can’t believe this product release was a marketing blunder. They’ve had plenty of time to verify 3rd party drives so the fact they have launched with a retricted compatibiity list speaks volumes for their mindset. Even if they add a few 3rd paty drives over the next few months, I think the writing is on the wall. Ultimately Synology will be a closed ecosystem and I’m certainly not going to validate their position with a purchase.
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You do realize how Synology “works” with WD and Seagate. Just trying to squeeze money out of them for “verification”. Because their NAS disks are already absolutely compatible for the reason that no special compatibility is needed. They just need to meet industry standards.
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Surely Synology knows this will hurt them? ????
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The lock-in strategy is a straight Yuck Fou to the customer. Which customer likes that?
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I have a random crazy theory. I don’t know if it would work. Lets say you have four drives from an older system. You migrate them to a new NAS. They work! Now, one of those drives goes bad. You replace it with a new blank drive of the same model. The NAS rejects it. Just pull one of the working drives, put it in a system and do a sector by sector clone to the blank drive. The New NAS will recognize the new drive as being Synology and let you rebuild the system using it.
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2:08 this part of the video testing unverified drive information is good enough for me,because i prefer seagate brand. Currently own ds920+ with 4x8TB seagate,plan want to buy 5 bays but i guess i’ll pass.
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Yeaaaaaaaa, that’ll be a big ol’ NOPE from me. “They’re looking into compatibility with WD & Seagate”!?! Well, Synology, the damage is DONE. Shoulda ‘looked into’ it prior to launch. Your company will never recover from this backlash.
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So, I was going to update my 1817+ to a 25+ model. Not anymore. I have Seagate enterprise drives in it with several purchased spares (all on the compatibility list for that model). I can migrate but have to use Synology drives going forward for expansion/spares?! Um, no thanks. I’ll be going with a different brand. Why do companies get greedy and then stupid?
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Consider me riled ????
At this stage, I’d consider it a risk to migrate a storage pool from an older model.
I would be tempted to say that they should only offer the Migration Assistant method to move data from an older model to the ds925+ having Synology branded disks. At least this way there would be no confusion about which scenarios my data is safe.
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12m – attempt to be balanced … it has only just been launched … they may add further drives down the line….
Never buy something on a promise or assumption; buy on what it is now (especially at this price point)
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So this isn’t an issue with an existing Synology + series of NASes? does that mean firmware/upgrade support of old devices is going away? Since ultimately this is a software lock it seems.
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I take it (excuse if dumb statement) none of this matters if you’re running anything other than DSM ?? ie Truenas, unraid etc etc?
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I just bought a DS923+ and 2x Ironwolf 16TB drives to upgrade my DS918 , all to avoid this synology drive lockdown mess.
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next NAS will be qnap
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Was ready to upgrade later this year but at this point we are going to remove all Synology drives out of our business it’s a waste now being forced into certain hardware.
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RlP $ynology
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Why do they not just simply sell the hardware with drives included?
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Thanks Robbie. Great video as always. I had ONE more thought, but I totally understand if you don’t revisit. If you have a migrated pool & volume, you remove a “bad” drive, and you install a “new” unverified drive… that you first setup as a “blank” single drive in a DS923+ or whatever… would THAT allow you to use the single unverified to repair? Using an older NAS to “prep” drives to use in the DS925+ doesn’t make much sense, but if it works… well, that’s something. Again, thanks for all you do, and have a great day!!!
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I for one will never buy a Synology NAS!
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Is it possible an migrated pool with unverified drives to expand/replace failed drive with an Synology verified drive?
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Synology is dead to me. I replaced my 920+ and relegated it to a backup system until it dies and at work where we had 6 1820+ systems that we had already started migrating off of before this latest BS they announced. Outdated / limited hardware, removing features from software, and competitors catching up and surpassing them on the hardware side while options like TrueNAS, UNraid, and others are filling the gap on the software side without vendor lock in.
The value proposition Synology once had been already trending down, with the new release it is gone.
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Really hope Synology watching your videos and reading comments. I wanted to upgrade to a 925+, and wanted to buy another unit for my parents house.
Now i wont, and i will switch to ugreen or qnap.
Hope you make a good amount on your rebranded drives synology.
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Synology is dead to me now. What folks should do — what I have done — is acquired a small Plus-series drive from the recent past that can run Active Backup for Business. Use that machine as an appliance for the sole purpose of network backup. Use larger devices from other vendors as the target of your backups and for all other purposes.
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All of this wouldn’t be an issue if Synology drives were readily available in the sizes in we want for a reasonable price, similar to the existing WD/Seagate offerings. But if I need to wait a week and pay anywhere between 10-50% more for essentially the same thing, then that’s what makes me extremely annoyed at this situation.
IF you have a Synology system, maybe they should offer existing users a discount or something to buy Synology drives. They need to offer some incentive at least. However who knows how long that will last. Maybe a year down the road once we are locked into our 925+, they can decide at any point to significantly increase the price of the drives or stop selling certain sizes that meet our existing budget. Who knows.
There are too many unknowns here and for that reason, it’s obvious we need to look elsewhere.
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I have migrated to UGreen
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If they planned the compatible list they would have at least some drives on it when announcing the units , they just wanted to wait if there would be a backlash. I skip synology for a while, will buy the unas and backup my old synology to that.
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I bought a Synology NAS last year. As long as they do not mess with being able to do the basics I will continue to use it until I need to upgrade. But, when I need to upgrade based upon what is being reported by nearly all, Synology will not be part of my next purchase. I think they have made it very clear that DIY is not their focus going forward. If the other manufactures go the same way there is always TruNAS.
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Dear Robbie, Thank you SOOOOO much. You’re the first to cover RAID FAILURE and REBUILD of Migrated systems [8:25 into your video: Test 8: RAID recovery fails with identical unverified HDD]. As soon as they announced they would allow MIGRATION, that INSTANTLY became the one CRITICAL QUESTION. You are the very first to answer. As a Mac and Synology consultant for 10+ years [and I PERSONALLY OWN 5 8 Bay Synology 18XX+ series servers]. This is the MOST IMPORTANT THING. And an ABSOLUTE DEAL BREAKER. Obviously NASs are about 2 things
– PROTECTING your data from Drive Failure
– Understanding that the drives in theses systems ABSOLUTELY [eventually] will fail
– Allow ing you to RELACE Drives when they do fail.
Since ALL my Synology servers [and ALL my clients] have AT LEAST 1 20 to 24 TB drive in EVERY unit they own, this is INFURIATING… and ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. Either Synology has to:
– STOP ALLOWING MIGRATION
– Allow Migration and Replacement with UNVERIFIED DRIVE
– SHIP reasonable price “PLUS” [NOT Enterprise] 18, 20 and 24 TB drives.
They HAVE to comply with the above, I NEVER get mad, I’m a 1984 Mac Consultant who smiles and laughs all the time. I’m a professional poet & beer vlogger.. I do NOT get angry.. almost NEVER. I am ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS and this thing you have discovered of NOT ALLOW FOR a RAID to be REPAIRED when a drive fails.
Thanks for discovering this.
– Eric ZORK Alan & Sweetie [ ????Professional????Poets & Bed ???? & Beer???? Vloggers ]
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Well, if you’re a home user especially, why even try and deal with all the verified current and future compatibility issues that may come up? There are just too many other options available to keep jumping through the Synology hoops, and they are better and usually cheaper. For the home and small business user, look elsewhere, which is jus what Synology wants those users to do anyway.
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Giving you a thump up but that is not for Synology. For Synology I will give them both thumbs down.
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all this because they don’t care about their core base and want to focus more on enterprise. when I don’t see why any enterprise would choose them over a JBOD + controller
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when you got your glasses on your head, we know you been busy. Seriously though, thanks for reaching out on Reddit and confirming your strategy and taking on feedback for additional tests. All of this is incredible. And some of folks learned what BOSH means.
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Say goodbye to Syno NAS systems which are ending with >25.
Just bought a DS1621+ (used) and will never upgrade!
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This is what happens when a company gets too big, arrogance will be their downfall
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something important: the “unverified” status will override drives that have isues too, so if a disk is in critical status it will say “unverified” instead, very hard to actually know which drive it is, only indicator is the orange light, since the usual “disk critical” popup also didnt show for me.
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Someone was obviously bored up at $ynology HQ and thought, “how do we get the new rigs out there but pay less for advertising”
I bet you they switch back to how it was up to a point.
Tenner says they do????
But even without all that. Why would you go from a 920 or 923 with all the perks that come with them?????
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I am happy to say that late last year (having got fed up of waiting for a newer version) I purchased a DS1522+ and migrated the 6tb drives from my aging DS1415. No problem . I added a 16tb Ironwolf & then have since replaced 2 of the drives with 16tb Ironwolf, all no problem. Had I hung on for a 5 bay 2025 model I’d clearly be stuck with no choice but Synology drives. I’ve always used Ironwolf or Toshiba NAS srives and never had an issue.
The cyncic in me says that Synolgy want all my money not sust some of it ????
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Instead of all this work, why you just don´t ask, you still trust Synology? That is the main issue because all of this can change at short notice dependent on theirs greediness mode.
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Synology again? This company doesn’t exist for me anymore. As well as this channel, as You seem to be their billboard.
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Wel, I’m going to look for another NAS solutions if Synology not going to change there path…
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FU!!! Synology!
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Bye bye $camology.????
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You haven’t been able to mix HDD and SSD in a pool for a long time now. My guess is the unsupported SSD thing will change when the new slim model comes out.
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HAHAHA you can not repair your migrated raid pool after a disk failuare? That’s the final nail on the coffin. Bye bye $ynology. LOL.
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Worth noting too that RAID recovery would be impossible if you’re migrating say 24TB drives of which Synology doesn’t have such higher capacities. I’d be very interested to see how they might reply to this
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bye bye synology, welcome seagate ironwolf pro to my truenas
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Synology should exit the home/prosumer market and do only enterprise. This will significantly decrease their market share.
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I’ve actually installed some high end rackable synology NASes which already have drive verification and it’s basically a text files with a list of serial/model numbers. The third party drives work fine for storage but don’t show any smart and the NAS complains about them all the time. BUT you can go and modify the file in SSH and add your drives’ desrciptors to it and suddenly you have access to everything and the alerts stop.
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Nope. No more…
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So I can tell you with 100% assurance that I will not be buying any additional Synology products and with 100% certainty now already have to consider already a non Synology backup strategy and also already looking at moving out of the Synology eco-system. Congratulations Synology for isolating yet another customer.
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Shareholder interests are always the highest priority and more recently have gotten to the extreme in profit over product decision making. There are far too many acceptable NAS options now to put up with Synology’s crap. I’m more intimidated by by shifting away from Plex than I am shifting from Synology. But I’m fed up with both.
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I guess I can live with, maybe not thrilled, but understand at some level, much of what Synology says–I just wished they’d partnered with somebody who didn’t make crap hard drives. I.e., not Toshiba. My 218+ with 2x HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5″ 8TB drives has hummed happily since October of 2017.
It’s not clear why, say, WD, would go to any expense to get their drives on Synology’s list. Nor why Synology would go to any expense to add any drives besides those they get a profit from onto their list either.
I’d bet SMR drives are why Synology’s failure and support stats are what they suggest.
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This will become really interesting when the first YouTuber buys a few of the ‘Synology drives’, tears them down, confirms that they are bog-standard Seagate drives, and exposes the real reason for this policy, and that’s a markup of expected 30% for no delivered value whatsoever. 16:25 exactly, show me the data!
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i believe later or soon the next ver DSM. will force ppl to buy their driver and discontinuous support the old DSM
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we should report to EU and let them handle this. someone need to learn a good lesson
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Is broadcom trying to get its foot into synologies door? I mean, they seem to be stearing the ship the same way … 🙂
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Good bye Synology.
You create this *hit yourself.
But why?
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Synology doesn’t have drives. They are relabelling other manufacturers. They up charge for the sticker. Its enshittification.
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Not affecting old systems isn’t altruism. It would be illegal to restrict features later.
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This is nothing but a big margin lift planned by Synology. We will see wheter or not this will work out in the end as end users should have become alerted even prior to the market entry of the first 2025 product.
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Bye, bye Seagate & WD ? No ……. Bye, Bye Synology and Qnap Welcome ???? Sad after 15 years
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I understand and appreciate that you’re trying to take a “facts only” position for the purpose of this video. Having said that, absolutely everyone understands what Synology’s real plan is here, and giving them “the benefit of the doubt” is denying obvious reality.
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At this moment it looks like a money grab by Synology. How can they say that a non-Synology drive that has run 24x7x365 with zero issues for years in a plus series device is suddenly inferior and not good enough? How dare they.
Asustor is probably my next purchase. After that my DS923+ will be for sale.
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ok, nice lying from those crooks to force their own products on us. that’s why you will never ever see any data. hope they get the worst product launch in their history. it is such a shame how incapable monkeys on the top can destroy a good brand.
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I would be 100% okay if Synology put a big WARNING that only their drives are compatible, and if you install unverified 3rd party you get ZERO support. Fine, self support on reddit it is… I can live with that and decide if I want to “risk” a non-certified drive or live with result (especially since crowd knowledge of good/bad drives will happen). Their non-enterprise drives are reasonably priced, but lacking in capacity of some of the larger drives. Depending on my pool I might be fine just going full synology to avoid a warning. But if I’m willing to take the risk because my needs exceed their capacity I want that option. I paid for the hardware, and I should be able to take the risks. So NO, as this is full lock in, I’m going to pass on their system, and I will stop recommending them to others.
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So they are saying i can’t use a Seagate IronWolf Pro, which is used in NAS Systems by the hundertousands all over the world without issues…. because it’s supposedly problematic….. WTF is there to validate….
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It’s really funny to hear all these marketing excuses about “stability”. These are the same disks, just with different model numbers.
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I think the largest problem is that the sellers don’t inform buyers of this “Feature”. Looked the DiskStation DS1823xs+ up with 5 different sellers, none of the sellers mentioned anything about drive compatibility.
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Hey Synology. FU. I just Welcomed new QNAP in my organization (16 bay) i put EXOS drives – no issues.
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I bought a new DS220+ a few years ago and I found the very steep learning curve and dwindling feature set a journey that I would not recommend going through again. Having said that, I don’t know that any other NAS brand is any more end home user friendly so perhaps Synology ma be the best of a bad bunch? By end user friendly I mean someone like me who doesn’t want to have to learn about certificates, a plethora of intricate settings which mean nothing to me, and more. A GUI would be appreciated by folks like myself who just want a simple set up NAS. If there’s one out there it may well be my next brand.
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Cory Doctorow needs more praise for coining the term enshitification. Synology is officially headed for the wastebin. I am heavily invested in the Synology ecosystem (for a home user). No more. I’m not buying anything from that company ever again.
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The prices (brand new and lowest I could find with some quick searching) of 20TB drives (the largest capacity Synology offers currently) in Canada are:
Synology branded – $1097.99
Seagate X20 & X24 – $549.99
Seagate Ironwolf Pro – $579.99
Western Digital Red Pro & Gold $599.99
Toshiba N300 Pro – $549.99
That’s insane, get bent Synology.
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I think you’ve glossed over the biggest problem with this new policy. If Synology-branded hard drives offered the same capacity at the same price as equivalent third-party drives, few would have a problem. The reality is that in the US you pay as much for a Synology consumer-grade Plus drive as you do for a Western Digital or Seagate enterprise drive. That makes this whole thing little more than a cash grab in my mind – even if the claimed reliability benefits are even partially true.
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after a synology update last night, my synology stopped recognizing a 28tb exos that i had in my shr array, and stopped recognizing the nvme cache drives i had in my system – borked – confirmed the drive still works with my pc, going to build a custom nas now.
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Another area where the DS925+ is a downgrade from the DS923+ is the change from 10Gbe network option down to 2.5Gbe ports. I run 10Gbe switches with option of 1Gbe ports but no support for 2.5Gbe. Means the next replacement NAS cannot be Synology.
I must admit I have not checked for a drive cache calculator. That used to be a nightmare when you attempted to cache large drive e.g. greater than 10T Bytes.
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I never had any problems with Synology before. My drives (and none of them are on the compatibility list) all still work and the only reason for buying a new Synology was because the old one is filled with data and I need more storage.
Ans yes: none of my drives are on the compatibility list, they are NAS rated seagate of WD drives but when Synology shows the -RL11C variant of a drive, I can buy different version of that drive locally but never the one that ends in -RL11C…
I guess my new NAS will no longer be a Synology one
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My next nas wont be a synology
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I’ve been installing Synology systems including their routers for over the past 10 years. I have certain brands of hard drives I’ve used for years and never had issues until having to replace or migrate when needed.
I happen to use Seagate ironwolf drives for my personal Nas nice to know at least that my old Synology will not be affected by this.
They should have offered an Enterprise side of things at their higher level product but they’re but they’re prosumers should not have been affected by this at all. This is pure stupidity on their marketing and I will not buy Synology products ever again including their non-affected currently products because they’re obviously heading towards some silly subscription model. This is obviously the first step testing the market.
To think I used to dabble with nas for free free Nas and many others just to make my own Nas systems in the past personality did provide a very robust path what flexibility to use your own drives with a full feature set.
I will officially say goodbye to Synology unless they reverse course on this but then again the way some of these tech companies are they love to bait and switch and lie or mislead.
I’m definitely considering going back to custom making my own Nas and even for my customers as well.
Goodbye Synology we are now officially divorced and can no longer support your company in any way shape or form and will do my due diligence to tell people to totally avoid this nothing but a cash grab to oversell you overprice you hard drives that are no different just rebranded that is all.
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I found a potentially killer app for AI: Come up with comedic acronyms for corporate BS. Behold:
S.Y.N.O.L.O.G.Y. – “Sorry, You’re Not Owners, Lock-On Guarantees Yield”.
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One thing that needs to be confirmed is if I migtate the WD drives from my 418play to a 2025 plus model (which they indicate is doable), and then one of those drives fails, will I be able replace it with the same model WD (i.e. under warranty) or will DSM refuse it?
These are prosumer/small business NASes at best. I’m more concerned about them only having a single power supply than drive failures (coz backups, right?). A big part of the appeal of these devices is that you could chuck pretty much any drives in them to meet your budget. This enterprise-type drive lock-in nonsense IS 100% gouging. Enterprises aren’t using these models for anything even vaguely critical.
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Ordered a Ugreen NAS. Good luck Synology.
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Just here to like the video because of how good the thumbnail photos was ????
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I suspect the decision by Western Digital to sell SMR drives as WD Red drives caused a REAL increase in support cases to Synology support. That’s likely where the statistics come from.
Synology isn’t keeping their new support policy a secret. They aren’t making it retroactive. Major enterprise storage vendors (including Synology) have identical policies for enterprise systems. Synology has apparently decided that “normal” home users that are likely to install shucked or desktop drives are no longer their target audience.
Vote with your wallet. This is just making a mountain out of a mole hill. I own 3 Synology systems, but I won’t be purchasing new ones. UGreen makes some great systems for cheap (I also purchased their 6 bay on their Kickstart price). Lots of vendors want your business. Synology has decided they no longer want to support the “wild west” of hard drives. That’s their right. People wanting the EU to ban rebadging drives are just divorced from reality.
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It’s crazy nobody came in to replace Drobo.
Sure they were slow but they made it so easy to just hot swap any drive to a bigger drive.
All I want is a couple 8 bays that can plug into a Mac mini or a switch that can use any drive so I can buy what I need and get drive after a price drop or a sale.
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The issue isn’t that their drives are encouraged for ‘better reliability and easier diagnostic’ reasons, it’s that the third party drives are soft-locked out of features that are expected in a NAS. So drive health stats are only a feature if you buy Synology drives. F off Synology.
Edit: There’s also no practical reasoning why a handful of third party haven’t been tested either. They just want us to buy theirs are couldn’t come up with competitive advantages to buy theirs so made everyone else’s worse. Scum move.
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Drobology ????
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they lost the plot. hope they will also lose the customers
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Here is the thing. I work at a business that provides enterprise class appliances. I fully get why Synology is doing this as fewer variety = easier support. Not all hard drives are created equal. You use the lower end consumer based junk and there are a number of differences between the firmware to the controller behavior. So yeah I get it. However, in today’s world, consumers are rightly pissed with businesses in general trying to nickel and dime everyone to the edge of what consumers can tolerate. So it is completely understandable why people are freaking out as this can be seen as a cash grab lockin. In any case I’m done with any of these AIO systems as I was burnt by QNAP when my motherboard died after only 4 years of owning a $3000 NAS. In that time they discontinued the model. And didn’t have parts to repair even after EOL. Meaning to get my data off the system (I could recover about 80% of the data from backups) I ended up spending $2300 for a new NAS. From here on out I’m BYOing it so if a motherboard dies, I drive down to Microcenter and pick up a new one for a fraction of the cost of a new NAS. Never again
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So, if I have a couple of WD red pro drives in my existing NAS, they will not work if I upgrade to another synology NAS ?
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Synology, never again, R.I.P.
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Own two synology NAS units and I’ll carry on using them but I’ll never buy another. First removing white a few features and now this. Even if they end up doing a complete 180 (which I doubt), there’s 0% chance I’ll buy anything from them ever again.
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Synology is the new Drobo.
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I own three Plus-models (oldest is the 1618+) and am the “familiy admin”. If they are going through with this bs, those are my last ones and the last ones I will ever suggest or administrate. Not even the 20TB IronWolf Pro and higher are in any of my compatibility lists.
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So a Synology M.2 2280 NVMe SSD SNV3410 800GB is £385 in UK. Wow, that’s expensive! These are rebranded Toshiba or Seagate drives with modified firmware and with dreaded DRM added. A few people have had these die already.
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Not like I would have ever bought Shitology anyway given their extortionate surveillance licenses to use hardware you already own
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I don’t care what Synology do with their future products, there are plenty of alternatives out there. Let’s hope they aren’t stupid enough to brick older devices. That won’t end well for them.
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I don’t think there’s any reason defending this behavior. People will simply switch to other brands and abandon those who rip them off, like Synology tries to do here. There would be an argument if Synology produced their own drives but the only thing they’re offering are rebranded drives for a higher price.
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I live in australia and a bit fund strapped, but was thinking of getting the 925+ so we can see just what the heck it can do without synology drives. Should setup a go fundme to purchase the 925+ with some 8tb wd/seagate drives to see what we can do? How do you even do fundraising? Go Fund Me? Indigogo? most of those platforms are for scammers and this is a genuine question so we can get to the truth before we abandon a sinking ship!
Update: Looks like 1×925+ and 2xWD WD80EFPX 8TB Red Plus 3.5″ 5640RPM SATA3 NAS Hard Drive and 2x Seagate ST8000VN004 8TB IronWolf 3.5″ SATA3 NAS Hard Drive runs around $2400AUD from MWAVE. Only distributor I could see selling 925+ at a competitive price
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A class action needs to be brought against Synology. Customers bought these systems on Synology’s word—that they were fit for a particular purpose, that there were third-party drives that were compatible and explicitly listed as such. With this rug pull, they have fraudulently misrepresented their products to their customers with a bogus compatibility list they had no intention of honouring. They are effectively implementing software-induced obsolescence under the guise of “system integrity” and “reliability.”
This is not just an utter betrayal of trust—it’s a textbook bait-and-switch. Synology sold NAS systems promising flexibility and interoperability with widely-used third-party drives. Customers made purchasing decisions based on those claims. Now, through firmware updates and policy reversal, they’ve effectively revoked support for those same drives, stripping users of key functionalities like storage pooling, drive health monitoring, and lifespan analysis—unless, of course, you buy their marked-up, rebranded hard drives. Drives which, in many cases, are just Toshiba internals with a different sticker and firmware, although they claim that these drives are rigorously tested, consumers have no visibility on that process, so we should just take their word for it, their word that so far has been lies and manipulation, they might as well re-brand themselves to a sticker company since they are just plastering their brands on Toshiba Hard Disks .
This move is not just unethical—it’s legally questionable. By disabling expected core features after purchase, Synology has breached the implied warranty of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. When consumers buy a NAS system based on a published compatibility list, that list forms part of the product’s value and functionality. Retroactively invalidating it effectively renders the product unfit for the use it was purchased for. That’s a breach of contract, plain and simple.
What’s worse, they’ve pushed these changes through under the radar. Users report installing firmware labeled as “DSM 6.2” only to find DSM 7.2 stealth-installed, complete with the new limitations. No warnings. No opt-ins. Just a unilateral, forced shift to a closed ecosystem. This is deceptive, predatory behaivour, and it may also amount to a violation of consumer protection laws in multiple jurisdictions, including the U.S., EU, and Canada.
To be clear: Synology has intentionally devalued their customers’ hardware post-sale in order to funnel them into a locked-in, proprietary ecosystem. It is an act of unjust enrichment—one that needs to have legal consequences. Their actions not only diminish the resale value of older units, but they also coerce consumers into purchasing overpriced Synology-branded components simply to retain functionality they already paid for.
This is about more than NAS drives. This is about a company asserting that it can change the rules after the fact, undermining your ownership, your purchase, and your rights as a consumer. We cannot allow this to stand.
A class action is not only justified—it is necessary. Synology must be held accountable for this deliberate, anti-consumer manipulation. There needs to be a precedent set and a warning to all manufacturers: you cannot redefine the terms of sale after the sale. You cannot steal value from your customers and hide behind firmware. You cannot gaslight a user base into silence while you rewrite the fundamentals of product ownership.
This is not reliability. This is abuse. And it’s time the courts stepped in.
More than Just NAS! It’s now fraud! Two in one bargain!
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This was why I migrated from WD to Asustor. I know that the MyCloud series doesn’t feature very highly among followers of this channel but they essentially did the same thing a number of years ago.
There is a comparatively short list of non-WD drives that are said to work with WD enclosures but availability is a limiting factor.
Ironically, it might have been that move that cost them a place in this market. These kinds of monopolistic tactics rarely pay long-term dividends. The market just migrates to other, less predatory brands.
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We are all understand company needs for profit, that’s not the problem, having more “security” and “stability” is also good and understandable, the problem is that all Synology fans feel BETRAYED, that is the most important asset for a company, when you lost trust, there’s no comeback, they choose their profit over their customers
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The time will come when plenty of tutorials will pop up on how to migrate from Synology to xxxxxx.
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I was thinking of replacing my DS918+ with the new one, but this just put me right off. That and the insane prices…
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The lock in is going to push labers and folks that care about to put for example, 5 WD red 12TB in their Synology. That will save them 500-600 euros in regards to use Synologys own Toshiba drives. After my 1522+ is done, i will get something else, like Unifi:s NAS. Synology is doing all the wrong things right now. It all started with videostation and the codec:s impacting surveillance station. That’s to bad.
I know something that will never change. That is Rob:s goldy watch ????
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I want videos of new operating system on these synology devices. Videos with a caveat of locked in drives is pointless now. Thanks.
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In yhat case why don’t they just add a button – use own storage at my own risk
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While there are plenty of alternatives when it comes to raw storage, replacing Synology Drive, hyperbackup, active backup for business, cloud sync, and backup for 365/google has its own costs in setup and management time or licensing.
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I’d love to hear more about other brands that are not Synology products. The business related products don’t really appeal to my interests.
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That’s awesome! It’s going to force me to build my own—TrueNAS SCALE, here I come! They just keep taking away video station is gone I can’t pay for the h265 license within it it should be progressing not regressing.
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Simple question: what feature does the DS925+ have compared to the DS923+ that makes it so much more desirable ? Because honestly, my DS918+ is very much sufficient in most cases. I’m not transcoding videos all the time and also a 10 Gbps port is much more a nice to have feature than a required one, because I would need to update all the rest of my home network to profit from it.
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You make it sound like more messaging benefits them. It sounds like confusion may be to their advantage. This is them circling the drain like HP printers and their liquid-gold ink.
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Thanks for this. I was waiting to see what Synology would say about this stuff. All I had up till now was just rumors. I’m in no rush at this time to replace my DS1817+. So, I’ll see how honest they are with the statement about adding 3rd-party HDDs to their official HCL. I am very skeptical though, and have already queued up an equivalent QNAP upgrade when the time comes. One could say too that if this was not simply “drive locking” then Synology would have probably already provided the data to back up their statistical claims. Yeah … I’m very skeptical. Seen too many businesses pull this type of thing, using similar claims, and none of them ever provide any data to support their claims. Here’s a few examples:
Apple: Resisted 3rd-party repairs, throttled iPhone performance to preserve battery life without clearly communicating … only acknowledged after they were caught in the act.
HP: Printer ink. FW updates routinely disable 3rd-party ink cartridges. Marketed as QA measure (like Synology is doing), but no public data released backs up the stated failure rates of 3rd-party ink.
Dell: Server and workstation components often require Dell-branded HDDs, RAM, and power supplies. BIOS-level warnings or flat out refusal to boot if 3rd-party parts detected. Claimed it’s about “validated reliability” but without transparent metrics.
Cisco: SFP/SFP+ modules are disabled or warning presented if they are non-Cisco branded. Argues about QA and compatibility, but again … no public failure stats of 3rd-party products.
Sony (PlayStation): Locked PS3 and PS4 down hard. Removed Linux support mid-cycle, blocked 3rd-party accessories with FW updates. No data ever provided about why 3rd-party gear posed a problem.
John Deere: Agri equipment -> implements software locks to prevent self-repair or 3rd-party app usage. Publicly claimed it was for safety and reliability, but offered no concrete data on part failure or repair quality.
Samsung: Smart TVs and SSDs: Occasionally locks features behind specific drive models (eg: in SSD firmware/TV FW updates). Promotes them as “optimized” but without side-by-side transparent performance metrics.
Bose: Pushed FW updates that removed or degraded features (ANC, EQ control) from older products. Blamed user experience “optimization” … again, with no data shared.
So, yeah, I’m not expecting any data to be publicly shared by Synology that would support their claims. At the end of the day, they’ve chosen their stance, and it’s up to consumers like me to decide whether “enough is enough”.
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I’ve owned two Synology Plus series NAS units. The first went for warranty repair then failed out of warranty, and I replaced it to reuse my SHR array. My drives have outlasted one NAS and are now in the second. I’m looking to move away from SHR to avoid being locked into Synology, as I don’t want to be forced to buy another when this one eventually fails. Even though it’s working now, I need to plan for future failure. If I need to migrate my files to a more standard RAID, I might as well switch to something like a QNAP.
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There’s a mouse on your shirt! ????
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Good call on show us the statistics. I mean if its 1 drive in every 1000 failure rate then these percentages they quote mean nothing. because its percent of the failures i.e 1 not the 1000 drives.
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They could have gotten away with it if this gen of boxes came with a significant increase in network and CPU capabilities and like a 5 years warranty on both hardware and disks combos but not while still recycling the same 10 yo sht bottom of the trash parts bin hardware at the same time.
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There’s just too many issues with this kind of lock out (and I am being locked out of buying drives I want, not locked into theirs). What if there’s a manufacturing issue with a batch of their drives? What if someone buys a huge portion of stock and we have to pay scalpers prices? What if THEY suddenly decide our prices are just 30% more than better known manufacturers? Supply chain issues could stop us having any drives at all. Where is my CHOICE?
Actually, I do have a choice, and that’s not to buy Synology at all.
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Hopefully, they will lose 75% of there customers and correct their course BEFORE they go out of business.
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As a business user I understand this strategy. If I buy a new NAS for my company, I want reliability. And if that reliability costs me 50% more for each (already inexpensive) HDD, I don’t care a bit. I want reliability. The moment I spend two hours on troubleshooting a problem caused by a third party HDD, I am losing way more money that what I spend extra for Synology approved/branded drives.
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So when is that mini pc Nas coming out so I can switch from my 918+?
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Just accept Synology desire to go bankrupt and stop buying. Once it goes bankrupt the other NAS manufacturers will receive a clear message not to follow such a stupid plan.
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Synology is really taking the piss.
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16:20 EXCELLENT point. They need to “speak with data”. So far their approach of “trust me, bro” doesn’t make sense.
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So they only want high-end $$$ Enterprise users.
That’s the message I’m getting.
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I didnt know Synology is now run by Tim Cook….????
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bs mean bs, they learn from adobe
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Now we only have the options Asustor, Qnap, Terramaster, Ugreen, Unifi…
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I had just settled on a Synology for my first proper nas. Back to shopping around i guess
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Compaq use to issue the same type of statement regarding equipment that could be installed in their PCs and servers in the 80’s and 90’s – other businesses like ALR, AST, Intel, HP and many others just set their prices below Compaq’s and the rest is history. All Compaq did was to provide guaranteed operational margins for the other vendors.
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DS1815+ owner. Been waiting and waiting for the new DS18XX+.
Been disappointed in the hardware, but the couple of apps in there catalog (Hyper Backup, Active Backup For Business, Active Backup For Microsoft 365, PLEX) but the hardware is under powered.
Now with this HDD BS, I am looking at UGreen more than ever.
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And THIS is why I bought an 1821+ I’m so glad I saved the money and preserved my freedom of choice. What’s worse is the drives aren’t even true proprietary drives. They are just white labelled drives from the brands you already use but at a more expensive price, just like their NIC cards and NVME sticks. Totally a ripoff.
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Synology are seeing all the new competitors in the market (UGreen, UniFi, etc) and going, how can we reduce our market share and help these guys out. It’s a slippery slope, they may add third-party drives “later” but it’s obvious they want to move all there solutions to Synology only drives eventually, might not be this year, might not be next, but it will happen eventually and we all know it.
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I really need a video on how to transition away from Synology.
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With PLEX as my main usage for my DS1019+. I am asking is there away to change my storage over to a qnap whilst using my 10 tb drives from the Synology ?
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with this news ill never buy another synology product, massively anti consumer, ill take my money elsewhere
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This is the same crap that NetApps pulled by putting their own custom firmware on HDDs.
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It’s hilarious watching them loose 100s of thousands of dollars and loose a lot of customers because of bad decisions haha. Dumb ppl..
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I wanted to buy my first Synology NAS this year, but I’ll be getting something else instead.
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Just moved to unraid as the docker support is good. And ZFS pools are now supported without the need for arrays.
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If the synology drives were the same price or cheaper than other brands and were readily available then it probably wouldn’t even be an issue, but they are none of those things.
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I don’t understand what the fuss is about when you can always build your own NAS, just like how you can build your own PC instead of buying prebuilts.
This isn’t like the laptop market where basically your only options are buying prebuilt or refurbished, since no one really sells individual laptop parts like the chassis on its own. You have a ton of freedom when it comes to NASes.
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Just read it. Don’t use generated voices. Turned off the video.
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Raid negates drive failures, i call BS. Glad i built an unraid nas.
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I’m getting f****** sick and tired of these corporations being predatory against the consumers.
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The fact that Synology does not disclose critical information that substantiates their reliability claims sends a signal in itself. Confusion can be a deliberate tactic. Indeed, very often silence speaks much louder than words.
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Synology no longer wants you as customers. They only want companies that spend as much as they want on devices and maintenance anyway and are impressed by all this phrase-mongering on the homepage. The hardware is outdated: The fans are loud, the processors are weak, and they still haven’t managed to integrate an uninterruptible power supply for private users. Every laptop, no matter how cheap, has better features.
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Can someone explain to me if this will happen with this setup? I currently have a 918+ running DSM 7.1 with Seagate 8TB Ironwolf drives. If I buy a new 1825+ when released and stick those drives in and then expand the unit out to have 8, 8TB drives in it all seagate iron wolf drives because I am moving the drives from one machine to another then those drives are not compatible to that unit? or will it be tied to software or is it in the firmware ie bios etc? Cheers
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RIP Synology
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No way Synology. They’ve embraced the dark side of enterprise storage lock-in. Who needs those pesky home office/SMB customers who want flexible and cost effective choices at the expense of our bottom line? Reminds me of Broadcom’s purchase of VMware.
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I have been a Synology user for about 15 years now. I will not purchase another Synology device if I am not able to use regular HDDs. Nor will I be able to recommend them to small businesses either.
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Can’t wait to see a business purchase their products and drives and then when a disk fails find that the time to replace the drive will be weeks because they have to purchase a drive from Synology themselves and have it shipped out vs going to a local store and purchasing another drive. I’m sure their customers will be thrilled!
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I am just sad that I can no longer be a Synology customer
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I want to use my ironwolf drives, I want snapdragon X in synologys. Their software is good, don’t kill the platform.
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19:16 I’m sorry, but this is not correct. The largest complaint isn’t that the messaging is “garbled”. The messaging is pretty clear. They are locking these down to Synology-labeled drives only. They literally said that exactly in their statement. The largest complaint that people are saying is that that sucks and is very anti-consumer. You are giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt on this point, as well as the “let’s wait and see once it releases wider.” Why wait? It is released already, and this is the state of it. Their promises of “future compatibility validation for 3rd parties” aren’t worth the bits that they were written with. It is vapor until they prove it with an actual list actually being out on actual machines, and if it were important to them to do so, they would have prepared ahead of time so that it _was_ ready for the release of these new systems.
I don’t mind the impulse to avoid jumping on bandwagons and to take the news with a more critical, measured eye, but your conclusions here are pretty divergent from what I would expect a reasonable person to come to.
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Do people actually know that Synology drives are just Seagate drives with a Synology sticker and $50 higher price.
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I was considering building a NAS. I was really considering Synology. Not anymore.
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Completely locking out drives that are not on white list are unacceptable, especialy with specific firmware.
Drive models are often getting replacced by vendors by never models or their revisions and its absolutely impossible to get ones with specific firmware.
For me hard locking on anything is 100% unacceptable so for me Synology is on black list from now on.
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My device, my choice what to do with it. If I want to use the cheapest, most unreliable HDDs in it it’s my choice and I have to bear the risks. The manufacturer can’t dictate which drives I’m allowed to use for a product I own privately. If these were enterprise models with dedicated support/warranty it would make sense but not for consumer products. If they force consumers to use only their certified drives they need to be liable if a drive fails as they’ve certified the drive for longevity/reliability.
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Welp, I’m gonna keep my 1522+ for along time then!! Seagate EXOS 16/18 drives are VERY highly regarded in the data industry, and that’s why I run them. I would be furious if I was REQUIRED to purchase the Synology branded drives, an inferior drive at a much higher price, no thanks.. And, 55.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot 😀
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I heard it first on NASCompared! Let’s wait and see what they do at official EU launch in July! Eggs? ????
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I just got a UGreen as my first NAS between this and Synology’s lollygagging on new products and improving features
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I bet they will back down on this, I think they already mentioned they will make a list of drives that are allowed. (to clarify I mean non-SYNOLOGY drives)
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Scummy move. I will never their stuff, and I’m thankful the only commercial NAS I’ve ever purchased is QNAP.
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What a scum company… never buying Synology again…! QNAP for the win.
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Biggest load of absolute marketing and PR bullshit ever. I won’t be using Synology products going forward, plenty of other offerings available that don’t put artificial and unnecessary restrictions on usage. Well don’t Synology, I hope your shareholders are pleased with this plan to alienate your now former customers ????????♂️
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Welcome to an EU antitrust lawsuit Synology ????
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Screw Synology they can get F’d
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Less restricted in a cloud NAS ????
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I have been and the emphasis here is on been a customer or user of Synology products for many years now.
I once had problems with a DS1515+ with disks from WD that were not on the compatibility list.
This was due to the batch of disks. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they had been on the list.
Then I once had an NVME SSD fail. It wasn’t on the list either. But it also failed completely, so
the list wouldn’t have made any difference here either.
For years it has been annoying that you couldn’t transfer the warranty to the new owner if you sold it.
I got stupid answers from Synology, such as that it could not be guaranteed that the device had been properly packaged,
when it was sent to the new owner.
Oh, that’s why the electrolytic capacitor in the power supply burst months later, because the box, which was the original packaging, was not ok……
Then there were the various annoyances of the customers: volumes only with NVME SSDs, which are on the list,
the annoying message regarding incompatible drives and so on.
Now the final bully of the customers, with this ridiculous “only our drives” nonsense.
As if the customer couldn’t have been given a choice. Support for drive problems when it’s our disks, none when they’re not ours.
Simply confirm with a check mark when setting up the pool.
Hey Synology, thanks for making my decision to switch to another brand easier.
In any case, I’ll vote with my wallet and avoid you in the future.
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Weird they won’t validate the original 3rd party drives that their own brand drives are re-badged from… almost like they want you to ONLY buy THEIR drives.
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quality easter egg to end the vid ???? thanks for the comprehensive summary!
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I currently operate about 30 NAS from Synology of the lower product line. (Only 3 Plus series). Except for the Plus series, they are not production storage, but only for storing backups of stations/servers, etc. … The ecosystem suits me and in my case vendor lock is completely irrelevant. I use the same device for 8-10 years before I replace it, so the costs are not important to me. And since it is one of the backups, I do not need 24/7 production reliability. However, I do not welcome the step from Synology and their justification is weak. The competition is at the same price level for my cases +/- and a custom solution TrueNas and the like is out of the question.
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My next NAS is UNIFI. Docked part, get an N100 run Proxmox.
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I could imagine their Chief strategist saying “ok guys, its time to put Synology First”
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My guess is the migration won’t let you expand the volume. You will be locked into the size volume you migrate.
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I’m a little conflicted.
I manage just shy of 30 Synology NAS.
I’m now investigating other options for clients – but at them moment, I don’t have a valid replacement that has something as good as Active Insight, replication and more importantly Synology Drive (basically on-demand sync using Apple’s FileProvider API)
A large portion of my clients are mixed onsite/WFH.
VPN/tailscale doesn’t cut it for remote access with design tools – I do need a sync on demand client
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Ah yes, ‘Competitively priced’ sure Synology, thats why your HAT5300 4TB is $451NZD and an EXOS 7E8 drive is $468… oh, that EXOS drive is 8TB…. much better, EXOS 7E8 4TB for huh… $310 or an Iron Wolf for $191 — I could even get a Red Plus 10TB for $474 and I’d far sooner spend an extra $23 to get 2.5x the storage.
Very competitive… if you’re blind and numerically challanged!
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I have owned two Synology devices 920+ and currently a 923+. I will not be buying another now that they are locking their platform down. It’s Unraid for me from this point on. This is nothing but a shameless money grab.
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I wanted to buy the 625 slim as I have 5x1TB SATA WD Red SSDs, but if they only support their enterprise SATA SSDs, there is no way I am going to buy one. I want to move over to pure nvme flash storage in the future anyway, so my 423+ might be my last Synology.
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I am on my third Synoloy NAS, and it will surely be my last. I was already sick of overpaying for ancient hardware, so this ridiculous price gouging on drives is the last straw. What an absolutely stupid move…
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Is Synology adopting the Apple model ?
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The “40% less storage issues”, even if real and whatever it means, still applies to ALL supported drives not to Synology-branded drives. So Synology already has a list of verified drives which it recommends and supports, but somehow this list is magically not applicable to new models.
They can’t even say there’s a new compatibility situation because it’s the same AMD hardware as before. Not that compatibility issues between SATA drives and SATA controllers was a thing ever.
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Synology have a very shallow moat around their business, which is DSM. Once a cheap or open source version of solid alternatives to some of their apps appear Ill have no reason at all to keep buying their hardware.
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Honestly this is some of the most gutless fence sitting waffle I’ve ever heard out of your mouth ….
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Maybe someone can hack this new system with other or cracking DSM so it can bypass this limitation? I have to admit Synology hardware is quite good, no problem so far.
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Glad I pulled the trigger on a UGreen 4800 plus with 3 16TB Ironwolf Pro drives last month instead of continuing to wait on the new Synology systems!
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Synology is going to die. They’re going to die like the American Democratic party because they cannot read the room. Americans are going to buy American rather than being mandated to figure out which HDD they need to buy to support yet another Chinese business that is struggling to stay relevant. The reality is they are moving manufacturing back to America along with the fact that up to 80% of factories in China, in any business, are experiencing MASSIVE amounts of expected orders that will simply not happen. Enterprise systems and those system engineering pathways will not return to a standard in the long run that allows Synology to continue down the path of controlling a market they already lost to their own Chinese competitors that were already pivoting to use new reliable media that is more reliable and less problematic (in perception if nothing else) that the hundreds of companies that xAI alone is financing to correct the global market toward an American market. There could be a revolution in China tomorrow and this trend will not stop. No one is going to pay for foreign enterprise systems if an American alternative presents. Synology has probably invested heavily and will ride this river out to it’s end. They should pivot to partnering with an American manufacturer and offer as many HDD alternatives and other storage strategies just as fast as they possibly can. The Chinese NAS companies that will survive are probably the first to partner manufacturing in the physical CONUS landmass. They’ll make secret deals outside of political channels because they don’t want to be axed, as has been the case in the past. Personally, if I were in that position, and I were one of their engineers, I’d defect as soon as possible, and buy one of President Trump’s Gold cards and start a new storage company in the US.
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I have two older Synology NASs. I had been planning to replace with this long overdue lineup. First they are using old processors, now locking out drive options. I wasn’t going to even look at the competition. With these new developments, it is time for me to research other options, i doubt Synology will compare well.
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Note that when they say 7,000 hours of testing, they probably mean they tested ten drives for a month, not one drive for ten months.
Meanwhile, it seems they’re implementing some kind of migration path for people who want to take their drives from old Synology systems and put them in the DS925+ . How long before someone writes a utility to format a drive so it looks like it’s been in a Synology system before? ????
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I have been waiting to see their 2025 lineup to replace my 214play. When the specs leaked and showed they would be selling outdated hardware, I started considering looking at other options. With this new policy, I will ONLY be looking at other options. They can run their business however they see fit. But, I am not paying $550 for rebranded $275 drives in perpetuity. Hard pass.
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It’s not that the “messaging is a mess”, it’s that the value for money proposition has gone from bad to worse.
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Being “appliance focused” does not mean to unnecessarily restrict customer choice.
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Based on the trade deficit we will now chage our mind every 2 hours so our pre-informed friends can greatly benefit from the rapid changes. For now – Western Digital is out. I mean is in. I mean is out
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Sounds like they wanna go full Apple.
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If Synology is going to a closed-in ecosystem with their own branded HDDs at premium prices, then if anything goes wrong with their NAS devices, then they need to send a Synology technician to my house and troubleshoot and fix anything that has gone wrong, free of charge for me of course ????. I didn’t realise that off-the-shelf, branded drives’ reliability has been giving Synology such sleepless nights when the problem is most likely not significant despite their statistics shown here in this video. Appliance model? They’re going to start making refrigerators now? Please !!!!!!
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Synology’s justification is made up BS. Bye, bye Synology. Bought two of your NASes but will from now on tell everyone to stay away from Synology.
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Been with Synology since 2011, 3 NAS’s, been a big fan but it’s the end of the road for me. Pulling a move like this in 2025 won’t end well for them, they act like they are the best and the only choice, they’re not and they’re not. Best thing that ever happened to the other brands!
I imagine my 1621+ has another 5-10 years of life in it but my next NAS won’t wear the Synology brand. Easy decision.
I’ll go a step further and predict Synology reverses course 6-12 months in when they see sales figures, by then it might be too late.
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Synology is so full of themselves. I would take any regular hard drive, let alone NAS level, over any of their NAS drives. Synology is prosumer at most not enterprise level. No more Synology for me.
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synology 923+ for $599 w/limitations or…. Jonsbo N3 with AM4 board and 5600gt with 32gb ram for about the same price and Zero limitations and truenas scale…hmmmm decisions….. Who’s going to even look at the 925+????
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That’s it, I’m moving over to dell unity
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I’m not fond of this approach and so I wont be purchasing another Synology NAS again (have been buying them for the last 15 years or so). I would rather build a small PC or go for another NAS manufacturer as it seems to be this not just about forcing customers to buy Synology-everything.
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They don’t make it clear on the purchase details page what happens if you don’t use a compatible hard drive. I guess there will be a lot of returns when people buy it and find out that they can’t use their hard drives.
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Always appreciate a good Mitchell & Webb reference. Those failure and issue statistics sound suspiciously Numberwang, though.
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If they had included third party drives from the start I might have believed their PR and been OK with it. But they’re communication sucks. I’m not interested in paying a premium for Synology drives. My current NAS will probably be the last from them.
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Was needing a new NAS as my 920+ just died. I just ordered the Unifi NAS. Done with Synology.
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I’m out — that was the last straw. I’ve been satisfied with Synology products so far, even though they weren’t exactly cheap and often used older hardware. But artificially limiting the choice of hard drives is just one step too far. There are other vendors out there, and I hope they seize the opportunity.
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Would this make companies that are thinking of using a NAS, go with something besides synology? That they can move there drive, that they already have from and old system?
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Appears death of Synology, I will not accept vendor lock in
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As a consultant for a number of small businesses, this is concerning.
I have been able to sell Synology as a solution due to its reasonable price, support for server, VM and PC backups, cloud offering for offsite disaster recovery…..and the fact that virtually any NAS rated drive will work.
If the newer versions are only going to support their proprietary drive offerings, tat removes the reasonable price and drive flexibility part of the value. That’s leaving me with the just the backup license and a paid cloud backup…..which can be applied to any hardware solution.
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*Shrug, then I’ll be pivoting to either QNAP or Ugreen for both myself and for my clients for the forseeable future. Pity, I’ve been using them for years.
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Synology is no longer a Taiwanese company, but a Chinese company. Its corporate policies are like the Communist Party’s.
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Now Synology is trying to make money by selling HDDs.
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Ah come on. Those Synology drives are stock drives with changed manufacturer infos and a nice sticker. No way are they having own drives manufactured. They could have changes in the firmware besides manufacturer infos, but that would mean other drives could NEVER be certified for use. So the fact that even the original stock drives aren‘t on the compatibility list means one thing and one thing only: This is about money. The Synology labeled drives will cost quite a bit more than the underlying stock drives.
And Synology will feel the loss of consumer because of that.
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So, if I say buy a Ds1522 now will it be under this synology restrictions? I have been pricing one out since the beginning of this year, but now I am a little bit concerned. Please advise. I was looking @ Ds923 or Ds1522.
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Lmfao. This is why I’ll never waste my money on NAS’s. Locking you down on fucking HARD DRIVES. ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
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I could understand if Synology offers extended options for their own HDDs – but not supporting Toshiba, WD or Seagate anymore is a bad joke. As well as the handling of NVME SSD.
I wonder all the time if synology really believes the crap they’re telling?
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LOL there’s nothing more compatible than harddrives. pure upsell but funny to say “we’re turning into appliance” yet removing features left and right (Video Station, HEVC etc).
but i wouldn’t worry much, this will be surely fixed be scripts.
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Ubiquiti needs to jump on this and allow apps to be installed! My next NAS might be a ugreen. But I really like my UniFi system.
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Synology has betrayed those who got them to their current success in the market. I have a low regard for their leadership and I hope their market share goes down to zero. A pox on their enterprise and their leaders.
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I have a Synology NAS ansd was planning on buying a new 8 bay model this Summer.
Now ? Never. QNAP here on.
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Bye Bye Synology, I’ll never buy another. I’ll use the drives I want to, ridiculous!
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You should not be recommending Synology because of this drive toward restrictive propriatory practices. How can you recommend when overprices synology brand Ram&HD are actually low quality 3rd party products rebadged. If nothing else, the value proposition means you should not be ‘recommending’ them. Ive owned and maintained A range of DS products for many years. They are OK… but a pig when things go wrong (like the Intel Atom bug) . My DS918+ just completely died, and the plan was to get a DS925+ and move the 4x8tb Ironwolf drives over… now maybe not!!! Unless they sort this out quickly, looks like the 925+ is a no-go and time to move onto something better (UGREEN with TrueNAS maybe).
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This is disheartening to say the least. This is pushing me harder to use TruNas or Unraid. This also removes the budget option for people wanting to use manufacturer recertified drives.
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The irony of it all is if their own drives start failing (because Seagate…)
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So we can move our existing drives from an older to a newer Nas ,bit if one hdd is broken and we get a replacement disk by manufacturer, we can’t use it anymore…cause it’s not listed…and this also means, if you have a listed disk..with a newer firmware..causes..not tested
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How is this not going to be hit by the same regulations that stop printer manufacturers compelling you to use their inks? Look forward to the EU spanking them in the future.
Until then, I will advise anyone looking for a drive to avoid these like the plague.
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Doesn’t matter, I’m out
I have two Synology unit units now
Last night I ordered a Terramaster
The low performance and high price was one thing, but the software made up the difference
Now they keep canceling apps that I use, and with the inspector ofdrive restriction either happening, or happening in the future, I’m out
I’m done with Synology
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Synology is digging a hole like VMware. Never again, overpriced lackluster hardware, 4Gb of RAM in 2025, lack of respect for costumers. Synology is dead for me.
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I own multiple synology units currently. I will never buy another synology product.. even if they reverse course here. I will also not be recommending them or installing them any longer through work. This is unacceptable.
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Guess I won’t be buying or recommending Synology going forward. This might be fine for enterprise, but for home gamers and normal users this change will jack up prices over most peoples budgets. I wish they would just do a split, units for home and units for enterprise. Where all drives work for home, only Synology drives work on enterprise. Dellemc does this on some models.
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I have noticed many software companies also going down the “take it or leave it approach” with their customers when they get too cocky, have a large user base and think their customers will just accept whatever they decide to insist on to generate more profit for themselves rather than as a benefit to their customers – especially in relation to subscription only models. I think this will be the end of people going with Synology as a product default – there are other players offering other higher specced/cost effective products in the market now and Synology don’t have the NAS monopoly to themselves any longer.
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First, they abandoned Plex Media Server users, and now this ….. Without knowledge of their internal workings, it’s hard to know for sure, but it seems to me they could still serve the segment of the market that needs hardware transcoding. Does AMD not make processors with GPUs? And you would think with this move to limit HDD choices, they would have had 3rd party certification lined up and ready to roll out at the same time these 25’s come to market. The problems are compounded by the fact that the HDDs they offer don’t come in 20tb and 24tb. And what’s with the lack of 10Gbe ports? They were the market leader and probably just pissed that away. I’d rather not have to migrate to a whole new ecosystem, but within a few years, I may have no choice. Smells like poor leadership with confused priorities.
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As long as there are “custom bootloaders” I´ll continue using DSM ????… but I won´t buy any new hardware from them.
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you get on the accepted list with a BIG CHECK
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I completely understand and agree with Synology’s reasoning—it’s actually coherent and makes perfect sense: verified hardware == fewer issues, and if issues, better support. Simple, basic, solid.
HOWEVER, THEY SHOULD COMMUNICATE THIS CLEARLY AND GIVE PEOPLE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE ACCORDINGLY. It’s the lack of choice, that’s where they’ve lost me. For that reason, my fourth Synology NAS will be my last, and the ten I’ve recommended to others will be the last. HexOS has some strong years ahead, that’s for sure!
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I think it’s a big mistake of theirs. They’ll lose a lot of goodwill and support.
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IF YOU CAN’T USE THE PRODUCT IN THE MANNER OF YOUR CHOOSING, YOU DON’T OWN IT.
Their home-user friendly software stack will not be enough to carry them from the slump they are about to experience. I will never recommend them.
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I will never buy a Synology NAS server because the limits are based on monopoly greed. The limits are not real, if Synology goes bankrupt then all new Synology NAS servers are a waste of money.
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I don’t see how Synology would see such high failure / problem rate then a company like Backblaze. If Synology is using rebranded drives, there failure rates shouldn’t be any different than what backblaze sees in their quarterly reports.
10:00 – your positives, aren’t really positives. Synology and DSM “moving” an appliance like ecosystem with a simple setup and config is WHY people bought them in the first place. Synology was ALREADY using an appliance model.
And not retroactively screwing over customers using older devices isn’t a positive either. Synology knows that If medium to large businesses were suddenly needing to buy a bunch of brand new drives for NO reason for hardware thats already in production environments, Synology would be an instantly dead brand. And they aren’t dumb enough to do that.
This move is ALL negatives, and NO positives in my opinion. Synology is trying to position itself like HPE and Dell. HPE and Dell will have their own re-branded drives in their servers at deployment (with the SSDs being re-branded Intel SSDs years back). However, Dell and HPE were doing so from the outset.
This is planned obsolescence at its most transparent and evil. Now Synology can start doing what all the other brands are doing, lock away new features in their newer hardware… so not only do we have to spend money on the new device itself, but if we bought third-party drives on an old platform, Synology get to double-dip and make us pay more for their branded drives. The upfront cost to upgrade from an older device to a new one just raised by multiple hundreds of dollars.
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I saw the writing on the wall awhile ago and went with a dedicated NAS … Unifi UNAS Pro. It does have it’s limitations, but it doesn’t have this arbitrary drive BS. It’s been working for months. No it doesn’t run apps like Synology, but I repurposed an old AMD Ryzen 4 motherboards and CPU for that. Bye Bye Synology. When my old 920+ dies, I’ll be done. As is, I’m relegating that drive to just backing up my UNAS PRO and App server.
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Wow! for a 4-bay NAS that would be about $230 (CDN) between Synology and Ironwolf Pro drives. If you look at a TrueNAS Mini R vs. Synology 12-Bay RackStation RS2423+ would I be spending a difference of almost $1300 Plus the “Synology Tax” for 12 drives. I know which way I will be going… Synology you were great, but I think that time is past.
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Synology has turned into a massive joke
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Why waste your time with recommending Synology anymore? There must be the narrowest segment of users who would want to pay premium prices for inferior hardware, lock themselves in an ecosystem at the mercy of a company willing to alienate a large segment of its user base, for what? Only those with money to burn and “just need it to work” or some niche DSM functionality would consider Synology and they don’t need a YT channel to tell them this. Your expertise is best spent on assessing the other options that would suit the 99%.
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It’s one thing to publish compatibility lists. Synology doesn’t actually make RAM or HDD/SDD media. If you’ve ever seen what Synology charges for memory upgrades vs. what they’re available for as 3rd party retail, their pricing is way too high. I always bought my drives based on the published compatibility list models. To single source drives through Synology, however, is a whole other animal. I will not use Synology platforms if I have to use their labeled drives at their outrageous pricing. I’m looking to replace my DS918+, so it looks like I’ll be parting ways with Synology.
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I hate to be the one that points out at Synology’s board meetings that people who run multi-drive NAS with redundancy are the same people who treat drives like a commodity… lol
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So we have ancient hardware at high prices, phasing out of important features without a heads-up and a lock-in to relabeled overpriced bottom-of-the-barrel HDDs, sounds like a great recipe to lose all possible customer groups at once.
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The fact is that, without exception, all the problems I have had with Synology, some of them considerable, have been purely software bugs. Hard disks have never been the problem. Search the forums, you will find NOTHING. Synology is dead. They are shooting themselves in the foot. No longer interesting for home users and there are better options for business. Fortunately there is Unraid out there. DSM finally runs fast on Unraid thanks to good hardware – surprisingly, no matter which hard disks 😀
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I was really waiting to pick up 925. Not any more.
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The transition will be easy indeed. We’ll go look somewhere else lol.
I’ve been looking at Synology NAS for 5 years now. This is the last touch to my network (Unify), Plex server and personal home cloud to part from Google cloud. I wanted to make me this gift finally, and was waiting for the 2024 rooster that became the 2025 rooster.
Damn synology! I already bough 3x24Tb Ironwolf Pro installed temporarily in my pc-based plex server as my 2nd level backup solution.
Too bad for them someone else will get my 1500$+ NAS investment.
Synology ????????
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Just get Unraid.
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The lock in to overpriced memory/drives is why I went Terramaster rather than Synology.
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NASCompares is paid by Synology, NASCompares says what the people that pay him want him to say. NASCompares is an Advertiser channel not a review channel.
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A HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) can be a very good thing to follow. But I think it’s a big step going from being aware of the HCL and being forced to only use parts that are on this list.
Way back a customer needed a number of servers to store their surveillance videos on. They had a bit over 200 HD cameras and needed a lot of storage to handle this. The number of servers were limited to four as the surveillance software licenses for the servers was pretty high. So they wanted these servers to use the largest HDD’s available at the time.
The problem was that we used Adaptec RAID controllers in the servers and the latest and greatest HDD’s were not on the HCL yet. After discussions with both our contact at Adaptec and a drive manufacturer they were saying that it should work, but as it wasn’t on the HCL it wasn’t guaranteed. Anyway the customer wanted the drives and we built the servers.
I think there was 32 drives in each of the servers so about 128 drives installed. And naturally it didn’t work reliably!
I spent a day at the customer after all the RAID pools had failed drives, and on two servers R6 arrays had failed as two or more drives in the same pool had failed. Each pool had two standby drives just in case a drive in the array would fail and these had been initialized automatically. The positive thing was Adaptec and the HDD manufacturer had checked the logs and provided a package with a new firmware for the drives. So I spent a day updating the firmware for all drives on all four servers. We also switched out all drives that had as much as a single fault listed in the logs. After that the system was stable for years with no failed drives, we thought at least.
The disturbing thing is that this company with over 200 cameras and a rather large server room with a lot of tech didn’t have anyone ever looking at the logs or taking a look into the server room to see if there were any red LED signaling that there was a problem or a failed drive. The reason they called us about the drives the first time was because the surveillance software couldn’t access the videos stored from a number of cameras. Before that they hadn’t even looked at the error messages that the RAID mailed to them about drive failures.
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You know they will release a update that bricks your NAS and forces you to upgrade or purchase a new NAS requiring their drives. You won’t switch to a competitor at that point because you are locked in. Probably better to switch now
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Pure sophistry from Synology. The mention of supporting third-party drives only if and when validated is an excuse. Their branded drives are Ironwolf or Toshiba units, so why are the OEM versions of these any different in terms of validation requirements? It’s like insisting on crash-testing a particular model of car simply because it’s a different colour to the ones sold by you.
The only limitations Synology should place on the choice of hard drives is whether they’re NAS certified units. Don’t they think the HDD manufacturers making NAS oriented drives haven’t tested them extensively to live up to their enhanced reliability and operational environment claims?
It’s pure profiteering from Sinology. They can package it any way they like, but that’s how I see it.
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at this point just skip Synology anything. They dont want our business.
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I’ll just stick with my Seagate filled DS 1821+.
My concern is that this policy will be implemented in future versions of DSM. That is, if you want to upgrade to “DSM X”, one of the prerequisites will be to replace the Iron Wolf Pros with Synology Enterprise (in order to get the larger capacity) drives.
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Presumably Synology doesn’t manufacture their own drives. They just get Seagate, WD or Toshiba to make them. So what specifically makes a “Synology drive”? It’s almost certainly just a rebadged existing model from one of the top 3.
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Whoever is managing this change should be fired. Agree or disagree with the drive lock-in policy, the way it has been rolled out has been dismal.
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They’ve shot themselves in the foot by not bringing out a list of 3rd party compatible products early on. I refuse to buy a product that requires their own branded drives. That’s all I’ll say for now.
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They even do not try to hide their lies (statistics & printing another name on a well known product doesn’t make it better only more expensive), that’s not my cup of tea. Time to try other manufacturers…
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Perfect time to figure this out, was about to pick up Synology and now I’m not. 🙂
Looking for suggestions for an alternative to operate a Plex server and backup server at home. Comment below>>
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Dumb decision. So the question is: if you have an existing RAID drive set and simply put them into a DS925+, will it just work ? Or are we cooked in that context as well ?
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I was a long time Synology fan too, but no more. I’m done. It’s a pity because I was looking to buy a big upgrade in the next 12 months (4 bay, 20TB HDDs, 10Gb NIC) but clearly it’ll be best for me to look elsewhere.
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I got a warning when I put a hard drive in my Synology NAS that was not on the list, but I was still able to run the system. You have to click past the warning.
I don’t think I’m getting another Synology system.
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I was thinkong of upgrading to a 2025 mod, hopefully one with 2,5G og higher networking. But Now I might look at other manufactures. ????
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20:20 of course he is. Do you think he is going to stop taking those checks and free product. Lol
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synology should sell their OS and their apps only. no hardware.
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That statement is complete bullshit, everybody with half a braincell knows this. I’m sure at some point there was ever a harddrive that came out with some very early firmware and somehow corrupted a synology drivepool. Then the firmware got fixed and all was fine. That is where they get their numbers, they are just fooling us. You really think they are testing all drives for months? No ofcourse not , it’s only about money. They buy OEM drives just build in a identifier tag in the firmware from the manufacturer and that’s it. Synology has become greedy, some manager came up with this stupid idea what sounds great on paper but is going to kill them completely. I’m sure they have corporate customers but they seem to forget us IT admins are the reason your products are even considered in those companies. If we don’t like you’re product you’re not gonna sell much of it anymore.
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Curious if DS1621+ still a good NAS option in 2025?
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Synology is now on the do not buy list.
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Ridiculous. Those drives better have a 10 Year warranty. I’ll ease the transition…of going to another brand.
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Let the enshitification begin!
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RAEPD: Redundant Array of Expensive, Proprietary Drives. Pronunciation of this new acronym is self explanatory.
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They just made migrating from a competitor financially ridiculous. This prices me out of my planned ’25 series move – looks like I will be sticking with TrueNAS.
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The second that UGreen has an integrated NAS -> Remote NAS back up.. I’m switching
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As I’m watching this.. my inside voice is “PLEASE Synology don’t be stupid”… Nope they are being stupid.
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I wonder if this is a ploy to gain revenue via asking manufacturers for “validation fee”… Not so sure they have the influence to ask this from the drive manufacturers.
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“Give ’em the razor; sell ’em the blades”.
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When talking about drive verification I am willing to bet a large amount that they will use their own firmware / device IDs on commodity drives. Remember from the statement they already raised the idea that drive firmware can have a 40% detrimental impact on reliability.
In all honesty I wouldn’t really care if they were serious about this and offered that firmware for you to install on an already verified drive.
However, we all know that this will be used to enforce single party supply and at much higher pricing. Stock issues with their drives? Fuck you, the customer, just wait for your urgent storage upgrade. Want a diverse manufacturer base in case of design flaws or implementation issues? Fuck you again customer, have all the drives in the array fail at the same time for the same reason. Oh, you have the same drives in the backup NAS? Fuck you with a cherry on top.
Congratulations Synology, you have just become as you aimed for, an appliance company. More realistically you are now in the same business as ink jet printer suppliers. You no longer sell NAS solutions, you sell consumables, with a lock-in, at exorbitant profit margins.
I work in the SMB and Enterprise / Data Centre industries. Synology will never compete in the latter where this sort of approach is barely tolerated but accepted as part of the package. In the SMB space they are finished, neither myself or any of my colleagues will ever recommend Synology again.
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And they better not catch you slipping using other companies drives. OR ELSE.
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Glad I bought a Synology nas already – I won’t get another one, the price gouging is really bad in Canada. At least I can use Seagate drives in the one I have.
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i wonder if the 7000 hrs is 100 drives running for 70 hours a piece, all running at once.
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7000 hours validating? Not even a year.. 100 drives for 70 hours.
It’s like the Mafia’s protection money.
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As of April, 2025, I will no longer be buying Synology products. This is very sad
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You are so fair to Synolgy to close out with that statement but I am not.
The more verified messaging that comes out the worse the whole thing looks. Synolgy will destroy the reputation they created.
I started out knowing nothing about NAS or homelabing, and now I want to expand. The DIY or dedicated machine is something any of us that like these products will confront eventually and this just solidified if I do go with a dedicated machine it will not be Synolgy.
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Looks like QNAP and Asustor will be getting my business in the future.
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“Disheartening for some”. That’s a hard NO. I’ll stick with QNAP.
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You can % this and % that but the drives are 2x as costly. I’ll retain this sentiment until they acknowledge that they rebrand aka slap a new sticker of other manufacturers drives. So they themselves use 3rd party. Hypocritical would be the word we use.
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It is this exact reason why I chose QNAP over Synology when researching for a new NAS. Whoever came up with this idea probably needs to be put on their own performance & testing review ! Let’s see how this pans out over time. GREED
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I worked for a “major storage vendor” in the support engineering group. The hard drives used there were both SAS and SATA based. Several years ago, fiber channel disks were the norm for high performance. All the drives had custom software. All local caching was disabled on the drives to prevent data loss in the case of power failures. (The write complete was the last thing set, and if was not set, any on the fly transactions were simply backed out of the system. The systems phoned home to report failing drives. In many cases, a replacement disk was on the admin’s disk by the time they noticed a disk had failed.(when you have a few hundred petabytes of storage, any chance for failures HAD to be minimized. That being said… there were certain brands of disk I ran into there that I won’t buy. I still avoid those disks, because the huge drive company was happy to send a few pallets of disk drives every few weeks to cover the drives that failed…but I will not put up with level of bad workmanship. When you see drives failing while not even in use, that’s not good. I am quite sure that Synology is using that brand.. Having drives that are certified to work in the storage array is good… every good. Unless they don’t follow up on the manufacturer’s testing. By having WD, Seagate, or whomever put custom configs on the drive is probably what they will be doing. The company I was working for did exactly that. Anything that didn’t have the company’s mark would not work, could not be brought into an array, and could not be accessed in any way by the normal operating system.
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Just you wait… maybe 1-2 years until Synology starts charging for the software as well to increase (“security”).
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Well, time to look for alternatives. I’ll be missing ActiveBackupForBusiness
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Just talked to a Synology Rep About new 2025 Line Up , He said Synology didn’t realize the Negative issues on the Hard Drive situation and
how unhappy people are. Also said reason using old 2018 2019 hardware was to keep prices lower. I said raise CPU to something modern and I will pay the price. Synology will only care if sales are affected.
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Well, there is is. Where is the data that shows their claimed 40% improvement in failure rate? An “appliance model” is not what I want.
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I think you’re spot on as it relates to messaging. Nonetheless we are talking more specifically about “Prosumer or Small Business” consumers here who have already invested in their desired drive brand and have successfully used them without issue. I’ve literally used (18) 14 & 16TB white labeled WD Red shucked drives in 3 NAS’s without a single issue for 5 years. That’s riskier and yet it’s been 100% fine.
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I agree that the ambiguity in Synology’s messaging around this issue gives pause for concern…especially for existing users (like myself). It’s because of this ambiguity that I can’t in good conscious recommend a Synology 2025 plus series NAS model to existing Synology users.
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Only important conclusion from this flustercluck is – don’t buy Synology products.
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Welp…. That is the worst load of BS those clowns have yet to regurgitate. And that is saying something. It is indeed completely over for them, and they don’t even seem to know.
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require drives that you add 50% premium to cost, defiantly feels mostly like a cash grab.
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Synology statement: Marketing BULLSHIT. They do NOT manufacture hard drives. They slap on a sticker. Totally disgusted with this brand now. From Hero to ZERO.
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Come on, be serious anyone that recommended a synology system from now on is playing into the hands of prue corporate greed and nothing more.. If synology branded drives were the same price or cheaper I would believe everything they say but there is zero about there drives that will make this better. What they should have done is just have a synology certified drive and hdd manufacturer would have had to adhere to their certification standards.
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Is there a business model where I can rent out my DS916+ to initialize drives for new 925+ purchasers?
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Come on, be serious anyone that recommended a synology system from now on is playing into the hands of prue corporate greed and nothing more.. If synology branded drives were the same price or cheaper I would believe everything they say but there is zero about there drives that will make this better. What they should have done is just have a synology certified drive and hdd manufacturer would have had to adhere to their certification standards.
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There statement actually proves that non synology drive work just fine because they stated that the have 40% less issues with compatible drives and there is no way in hell that many people are using synology branded drives in there nas, in fact I think stuff all people are using branded drivers as there is no reason atm to buy a synology branded drive that literally cost more money for nothing. How did they get there bullshit data. It’s clearly not from end users using synology branded drives, because no one is actually using them.
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it is worrying esp since the last time i had any problems with my synology nas, it was the nas itself that croaked. was able to just pop the drives into a newer model to get it working again but it looks like i might be able to do so in the future unless i can source an older model that accepts the drives ????
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I’ve only had Synology devices for about 4-5 years, with one installed at home and one installed at my parents, mostly because of SHR and the first-party apps like photos, drive, and Active backup, and that it was just simple to use. But this news has me exploring docker alternatives for easier migration for when it is time to replace mine in the future, be it QNAP, UGreen, or maybe even TrueNAS.
Even if the HAT 3310 Plus drives are comparable in price to others on the market, it is still hard to accept this decision for a consumer/prosumer device. They should have just kept this requirement at the business level devices.
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What concerns me is that a channel like your will still recommend their products. This is something that may lead to other brands to do just the same. Your channel convinced me to get their product, bought the first on and then deployed one to my dad and my brother was the next to get his.
One thing that concerns me is the fact that if the drives have a problem, like 2 drives fail, and there is no synology hard drive available in stores? I live in Brazil, we barely have nas drives to buy, imagine a specific model from a specific company. Another thing is value. I use to change my spinning drives every 2 years. Wipe them out, migrate, sell the older ones and recoup my money a little bit. What will happen now? We will pay for overpriced HDD and if you decide to sell it, only specific set of people will buy them from you, but even lower than what they pay for regular drives. This is not enviromentally friendly too.
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Damn. I was hoping 3rd party drives would result in a lack of technical support. This looks like a hard stop on installation, and regrettably a hard stop on my continued customer patronage with Synology. I only run Synology endorsed enterprise drives by Western Digital because that way the drives are larger than the kind of with Synology branding. All my memory and nvme are Synology branding. But whatever, I’m very disappointed and will probably switch to some other product in the future.
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Damn, Synology(
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I just recently bought a 923+. First time buyer. This replaces a drobo 5n that finally died. I guess my ride with Synology is limited to this one unit because I will not buy another Synology if this policy persists.
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Thank Heavens there are alternatives to Synology. I wish them well with their arrogance and ignorant behaviour!
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I’d like to know how much they charge the hdd manufacturers to “certify” their drives?
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I’m AAAAAAOOOOOUUUUT!
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Qnap and uGreen is applauding this decision. ????
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I currently have 5 synology devices, I was hoping to replace with 2025 models, what a shame, i will not now. I do not trust synology to keep the drive compatibility list up to date, very disappointed by removal of 10gbe, removal of h265 native support, even older cpu with no transcoding support. I do certainly think they are ditching soho / home prouser market.
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Yeah, I’m not a fan on this. Drives are largely agnostic, and “drive issues” they talk about, is down to user choose and using drives more likely to fail, not any sort of made up compatibility and “increased” data risk. This is most likely down to partnerships, drive rebranding and “Synology tax”. I have considered Synology, and would recommend them to other for software simplicity, but not anymore. I don’t wanna use Seagate drives, I’ve had bad experiences years ago, and statistically they do have a higher failure rate in the first few weeks. I personally have WD Reds in my 2 QNAPs (1 offsite – and those drives are 8 years old this year), and not mixed drives in DIY NAS, a couple are Seagate, but were lifted from free devices. Not once have I have experienced any hardware issues or compatibility, they 2 times I have had to contact QNAP support have been related to software/app updates that have broken something, and were fixed. This lockdown is purely a money grab exercise, and limiting drives available, where it reduces flexibility and agility if there are bad drives/models for people and companies, which does happy from time to time, then what Synology? You gonna compensate for data lose? No, I doubt that are you!
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They just Bud Lighted themselves
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Wouldn’t be nearly as big of a deal if they didn’t overcharge like crazy for these S drives. As it stands, I am in the market for a new NAS and I will NO LONGER be considering Synology.
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After 12 years, it’s time for me to say goodbye to symbology, I was very fed up with how close system they are now it is way too much, they preferred me to rely on their hard drivers other than brands which have been the Marcus for many many years what an idiot movement for a company
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I’d doesn’t matter if they add WD and seagate drives eventually. The trust is gone. I buy a reliable product and trust I will get long term stable communication. This is hogwash. Everyone I help manage their NAS for agree as well. We will move on from Synology.
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This is a very unnecessary and anti-consumer move. Even if you take their statement at face value, there’s a far better solution: just force the customer to acknowledge that by using unverified drives they will relinquish their right to user assistance from Synology.
It’s ridiculous for a company whose whole business is making drives work together, to give up on making drives work together unless you pay extra.
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Im glad I got a Ugreen
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QNAP IS CALLING ME.
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I think they have been showing the prosumer the door for a while now. I am sure other manufactures will be glad to fill this void. Synology has become all about the enterprise now. My equipment is still fairly new so it will be a while before I upgrade. Time to let all this shake out. I am thinking QNAP, but we will see.
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It will be interesting to see how they handle support requests.
If you have an issue with a Synology drive, will Synology then handle replacements, or will the customers still have to source this themselves?
I can see a customer being pretty upset if left to find a replacement from a single manufacturer rather than pick any drive from a QVL.
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Who’s kidding who, this move is ALL ABOUT GREED! Their stance is we’re only allowing our drives to protect you…. ????????????????????They better fix this or they are going to lose a LOT OF CUSTOMERS!!!
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The whole point of hard drives is they just work in the machine you put it in. But now im off to another nas supplier its such a pity as synology have good software I hate companies who are not thinking of their customers but rather their bottom line.
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Synology is over here telling us that we aren’t allowed to use anything but their blessed drives in their new systems while enthusiasts have been hacking Synology DSM to run on unofficial hardware. I think the group that know how to build a nas will probably jump ship and Synology branded drives will become the “Apple tax” of the Synology world that people will just be okay with paying.
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Great video! I think you missed one crucial thing though: I (and I am sure many other Synology users) would want to invest in the new series of models even though only Synology drives are supported IF the hardware would be truly updated so we would get something in return. So I think they should’ve wait one more iteration with this as I am sure they will jump on the AI-bandwagon as well (or they will cease to exist by the time it is 2030). So my advise to everyone who can and want to stay with them is: skip this iteration and wait for the new models coming in 2027-2028.
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Um someone just ask that ugreen nas ? That good?
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synology are talking oyut of their arse with that statement.
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Synology 8TB drive £225
Seagate Iron Wolf Pro £202
£23 difference, does that really put people off when you are spending £1400 on a 4 bay NAS. For me I dont really care, but I do care that their hardware in comparison to other manufacturers basically sucks and is falling further behind.
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Considering the supply chain is still Poo’d you’ll need to order your Synology drives a month before you order your Synology NAS.
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I think this is a Disservice to those of us who are EX or active IT people who loved using this product as an appliance and chose to use NAS Drives… I chose EXOS drives I will be building a dedicated NAS in my future and FIRING SYNOLOGY… I mean I really wanted Transcoding at a better level on my 920+ when I chose it… but the 1Gb LAN was always a bottleneck… even for my Photo business on my local LAN. Was waiting eagerly for the 925+, but now… FORGET SYNOLOGY… Buh BYE!!!
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Listen Synology, you still have time to fire department(s) responsible for this idea and start making more powerful devices and follow up basic standards. No, I don’t want to buy your sodimms, no I don’t want to buy your hdds, no I don’t want to buy your nvmes. Your OS is good. But it is not a deal breaker. Vendor lock is.
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Looks like I will be going Ugreen with my next NAS unless some one comes up with a work around to this drive locking nonsense
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Hopefully this is some kind of April Fools joke by Synology.
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I’m so glad I decided to go with Ugreen for my NAS solution because even if I hate what Ugreen does software-wise I can always install a custom OS
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This is part of the reason I have ditched my 1621+ for a homebuilt NAS running Proxmox and TrueNas. So much better and more fun too.
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So glad i just decided to build my own, may have been more headache but I’m not locked in to an ecosystem like apple does, it’s just shitty and i refuse to support any company that does this even if i have to figure out an alternative the hard way. FUCK CORPORATE GREED.
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Hahahhaaaa – sorry Synology – but I’m out now…
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the worry is that I have a DS1520+ and I am cheap and use refurbished hard drives when I decide to upgrade my Synology can i move or migrate the Drives to the new unit?
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I had no idea that UGREEN makes NAS, thanks @Synology for opening my eyes.
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I was thinking about buying a synology but they’ve convinced me to repurpose old pc parts and use truenas instead. I won’t tolerate companies telling me what I can and can’t do with hardware and software I bought and paid for.
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As of 04 2025 the functionality and features of the Synology Hyperbackup is unique among the other top NAS brands. My research showed that there are no out of the box solutions from the other vendors that come even close. Please let me know if I am wrong. Until then I am locked into Synology ????
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Soooo….Synology will be joining the likes of Bambu Labs.
They make good products, but a mistake like this will cost them, in terms of Customer base.
I wish them the best, they will see how this works out… by customers buying their products or not.
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???????????? Synology………………………Qnap the new KING of the game
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Until somebody puts out a real alternative to active backup, they still own the small business space.
For example, I’ve really struggled to find a sufficient alternative for locally backing up Office365. (open to suggestions if there’s some gem out there ive missed)
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I’ve already made my opinion of this known in various forums. One thing I thought of today was that I bet Synology is thinking they can squeeze the HDD vendors – There’s already a cost associated with rebranding HDD’s from manufacturers but this new “testing” requirement and some interesting wording in their statement makes me think that there’s even more to it. For example, “A more seamless purchasing experience” sounds to me like they want to pull an Apple move and control the entire chain. By controlling the model ID’s of drives they “certify” they can guarantee only drives they “certify”, i.e. get a cut of sales on, will work in their device. I think they’ve grossly overestimated their industry power, and SMB integrators are going to be steering customers to other more cost-effective solutions. Even at the enterprise level, which Synology barely even registers at, this won’t fly – HDD’s are a commodity when you’re purchasing them by the case or pallet. For the consumer level looking for something slightly (4 or 6 year old CPU? WTF) more performant than the non-plus models – I’m willing to bet this will be a pass too, especially since they will be competing with re-certified drives at a significant discount and Synology hardware costs are becoming more and more unrealistic in the face of competition with “good enough” solutions.
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My 1522+ is increasing in value by the day – even without tariffs!!!????????????
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This probably has a lot to do with people new to network storage picking up used units for cheap, loading them with flaky, randomly sized drives, and then begging for help recovering from the dumpster fire they put themselves in.
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imagine being a channel about NAS’s and promoting synology still. if it was my channel id cut them out right away
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Proprietary memory, Proprietary network Nics, Proprietary HHDs and SSDs, no USB connection compatibility, a reliable system is one that works with the most wide manufacture hardware, NOT one that is closed down by Proprietary crap.
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i really think nothing to see here, if your busines user just use synology drives (its not much more), if your a home/pro user plenty of better more powerful bespoke solutions out there for the price/fun!
synology plus’s are for the peoples who just want a boring reliable dependable well engineered **software stack** (the hardware is incidental)
its my goto for business customers, that won’t change …. BUT i would *never* buy one for my own use, save the monies, build your own NAS, get a ugreen etc, and if your a pro user, mess around with openmediavault/truenas etc.. etc.. etc…
PS if their software stack ever started going downhill… now that is definitely something to shout and scream about… ITS WHAT YOUR REALLY PAYING FOR 🙂
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For me, requiring “compatible” drives wouldn’t be an issue if there was no markup. But, of course…
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I don’t mind the HDD, I’m planning to buy a 2023 for my third party drives and a 2025 with branded drives. More concerned about the cashing SSD because branded ones are ridiculously expensive, I’ll definitely try stuffing a Samsung drive in there, if doesn’t work I’ll set it up first on the 2023, as well as third party RAM.
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@NASCompares : Louis Rodman, who is that ???
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Synology = Fascists!????
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Also why are seagate drives on their existing compatability lists but now for some reason not good enough for the new 2025 NAS’s ?., whats happened to the drives to suddenly make them not worthy ?.
Come on Synology explain yourself ?.
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what a joke ????
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Bye Bye Synology
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Synology would be much better off charging for support rather than dictating drive “compatibility”. They could, for example, include support for free with their drives and charge something (reasonable) for drives on the compatibility list of previous models (to allow NAS upgrades), and a higher rate for drives not on any compatibility list.
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They want that data center money but that wont happen since if a HDD goes down that means they need to replace with approved HDD only and if they are not in stock the data center loses money waiting on a replacement. The CEO of synology is truly incompetent.
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that seals it, ugreen DXP 4800 Plus and Truenas
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Illl try qnap or ugreen done with synology
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Haha nice explanation Synology – let me summarize:
Sales figures are down because we are not offering something customers want and line MUST go up, plus we will have to support our customers less. Win Win… except for customer.
I will vote with my wallet…FTSIO ????
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Hi QNAP, looks like you will be making your way on my network now.
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I don’t think I bought enough popcorn ????
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Synology is NOT a HHD and SSD manufactory. Their drives are ONLY OEM (do not know where). Unless the policy change, I will not buy their products anymore.
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Our IronWolf Pro drives have been running reliably in half a dozen Synology and QNAP units for years without issue.
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I’m very disappointed. I bought my first Synology in 2013. I currently have two rack mounts, one for data, one for backup. I have to 923’s at my son’s house to provide storage for my grand daughter while she is going through college. Again, one for data and one for backup. Then I have off sight storage between the two houses.
I’ve also recommended and help set up Synology for a number of friends.
So, where am I going to be headed? Definitely not Synology. They are throwing out the people who helped build their market.
For me, probably Unifi NAS. I like the operating system of Synology, but it’s not required and there are many other choices. It will be a while before I make changes and I’m sure that other companies are going to jump at the chance or increasing their product share which hopefully means high powered processors and more capability from these manufacturers
As a side note, having had 8 synology NAS’s over the last 12 years and having used drives considered obsolete, well used, brand new, certified used, the only problems I’ve had is an occasional drive go bad. How much more compatible can a device be?
Oh, and one last thought, how long will they support firmware and software upgrades for these “old, out of date” models? Probably not long.
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compared to other people bitching and moaning oh down with synology.
I’m more inclined to wait and see how this pans out, the logical thing would be that they limit the NASes to use their own drives AND verified/tested/approved 3rd party drives which would make sense if they want to bring down drive issue related problems by internally validating 3rd party drives.
its possible that the compatibility page for the 25 models just haven’t validated 3rd party drives yet and only their ones.
thats the best case scenario, worse one is that they are only going to support their own drives, in which case there will be a lot of backlash.
for now Ill wait and see compared to others already jumping to conclusions and raising their pitchforks
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Overpriced yet under specified and now highly restrictive and heavily proprietary. Unbelievable
Went over to self build Unraid system. Wow, what a huge difference for my Plex only system. Wish I’d made the change years ago
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thanks wd for selling smr as wdred
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@nascompares please give QNAP more coverage. They just released another update yesterday. Lots of good stuff going on with them…
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Off topic, but I’m impressed by how not-immediately obvious the AI voice is. A little disturbing, but still impressive.
On topic: Guess I’m definitely going with a QNAP NAS. Wish they’d make a 864 / 86whatever it ends up being.
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Sounds like Synology wants to leverage into more of the business market and away from the home market. Businesses tend to lean towards a single point of contact with a vendor (and avoid finger pointing i.e. The hard drive is the problem, no it’s the NAS chassis that is the problem…..). As you said, the home market has choices so I guess I don’t see what the problem is. If Synology fits your use case; great! If it doesn’t, then move on to other choices.
Down the road Synology will have to decide if it made the right choices for its’ business.
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This is somewhat old news to me, ever since they locked you to their m2s just for a silly pool, and effectively dumped prosumer years ago, none of this is remotely shocking. I just dont understand all the hype for something easy to predict…
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We’ve had enough of experts. I’ll say it.
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A+ thumbnail image!
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This was very scary.
I have a 5 year old 8-bay device. If the NAS box breaks, I was under the understanding that a could move my drives to a new nas box.
I’m using “WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drive – 12TB” with 2 x Samsung nvme as RW cache.
What if the drives are not support on the new box???
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I’m happy with my Synos as LUN storage. At least this works fine on that v 3 kernel. Would I recommend Syno? As pure NAS, I used to.
With stuff like ugreen and those little ssd NAS boxes, no, not anymore. I like open systems more.
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well no upgrades from me, their drives are more expensive and have less capacity than what’s in the market
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Synology is dead to me with this drive policy. Not to mention lack of 10GbE multi gig in 2025 as a default. The software is good but not that good.
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lets just wait and see. highly disappointing if they only allow “their” drives – it just feels icky and screams corporate greed.
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I don’t see how you can currently still recommend Synology. As of now, you HAVE to buy their HDDs for the new models and those cost even more bucks than any sane priced non Synology branded HDD. Which i also find too expensive in the first place. So how the f** am I going to buy an über expensive Synology HDD?
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the fact that they are enforcing this whole method, removes them from my purchase/recommend list. i focus on users taking control of THEIR hardware and data. this is a limit for my customers, and would put ME into a wall with no options. i personally use a Qnap, and have very happy with it.
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No more Synology for me!
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They no greedier than any company. The problem is their dsm is so standout. They are trying to capture more of the pie. Their mgt should be fired for not doing what all major tech companies are doing to build a moat around their brand. And capture as much revenue inside the castle. (Google workspace pricing, apple ecosystem etc) Whether the cost indifferent appliance user base wins out over the cost sensitive tinkerer user base time will tell. I place great store in the stability and user friendliness of dsm. I will wince at drive pricing but will probably cough up. The problem is there is no competitor close to dsm in sight. And they are milking that. Why not.
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Dumped synology 2 years ago when they started the warning nonsense with their HDDs after almost 20 years. F synology. Good riddance.
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All the unkowns you asked about from 13:44 onwards: if Synology had any interest in being straightforward, they would’ve answered those on Day 1 (today). They didn’t, which means we probably won’t like the answers. These were obvious questions people asked three years ago: it’s not a surprise Synology refused to answer it three years and still today. You seem to be giving them far too much unearned credit, mate.
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Synology has now killed their popularity. This is basically a Apple approach of only allowing their ‘own’ / ‘approved’ drives. Shame.
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Translation we plan to go out of business as we transition to proprietary equipment because we believe we are too big to fail. They forgot what RAID means, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives… Move along.
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The problem with this whole Synology endeavor is that the Seagate Ironwolf drives I have been using for 5 continuous-never-off years have worked FLAWLESSLY. It ain’t broke. Why are they forcing a fix?
This makes no sense.
Also… the last time I updated a hard drives firmware was in 2013 and it was some weird Mac-only compatibility thing. The idea that Synology (who regularly pulls DSM updates and re-releases them) would be the ONLY team in charge of firmware updates to my storage media is terrifying.
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I have a DS1522+ and I was going to switch up from 5x12TB drives (shucked + a couple of Reds) to 5x20TB (all shucked). I’d already picked up 3 of the Elements units before this all blew up. While I can continue with my plan I’ve lost total confidence in the brand. My natural instinct would be to go for a 6 or 8 bay down the line but the whole murky situation of moving a drive pool to DS**25+ model and what restrictions (or not) that may bring is not something I’d want to get involved in. So I’m seriously considering bringing my plans forward and starting afresh with a 6 bay QNAP TS-664. Shame.
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Oh, well…
With the influx of numerous new players in the NAS market, abandoning Synology has never been easier.
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It really looks like the 920+ may have been the peak I had been hoping to upgrade and move forward with newer models into the future but it’s really looking like I will need to move onto another system once it’s time to upgrade????
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Synology is very disappointing. First, I wait years for them to finally embrace 2.5Gbit. Now this money grab on HDD support! Pathetic. Another example of stupid leadership likely only looking for $$$ and not realizing they are destroying themselves.
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I hate… chickens…
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R.I.P. Synology 2025
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Wondering if they are banking on the increase of sales of synology drives to help drive down the price of their over priced drives.
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That Synology statement is some of the biggest bullshit lies I have ever heard in tech…
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The question needs to be asked, if you can only use Synology drves, why even stick with standards like SATA and NVMe? I guess they’ve crunched the numbers and think they might sell some drives to Asustor, QNAP and Ugreen customers…The part that bothers me most is that one of the things I like about NAS is its flexibility. You start with a four-bay NAS, but some drives in it, and then in the future, you decide to migrate it to more drives or larger capacities. If you must have Synology drives, it assumes you have a clear idea of what you will do with the hardware and how much space you need from the outset. Or you’ll be buying even more Synology-branded drives six months later. So much for system evolution…I predict the kickback from this plan will be brutal.
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Synology drive policy is as coherent as US trade policy.
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Reduce customer’s problem by reduce number of customer. Smart, very smart.
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just dont bother with synology problem solved
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ゴミにお金を払う必要はありません
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simple boycott synology components – until they reverse there stance, the only requirement is that it should be an enterprise drive,
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This is the beginning of the end of the dominance of large consumer NAS manufacturers, only HP has more cheeky behavior with their statements. DIY and OpenSource were already slowly burying them, and after a dozen small Chinese manufactories joined the process, the future of companies like Synology in the consumer market is very vague!
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40% reduction? Of an already small number though right? Soooo I rather have freedom and cheaper disks.
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Well, I’m looking to replace my ageing 4-bay Synology DS416j.
This sort of anti-consumer nonsense has helped me make the decision not to buy another Synology NAS, so that’s -1 customer for them.
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Synology branded drives seem to be Toshiba
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I have used Synology for over 20 years. Never again. They will permanently exclude third parties and charge more for their drives.
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Conclusion: buy the DS923+ whilst it is available. Or switch to the QNAP 464.
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1522 is the end for me i guess, i get 16tb exos drives for $170 new
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I’ve been holding off migrating from my old DS1815+, but this mess has helped me decide to just switch to a DS1522+ with a 10 GbE card while they’re still available. Should serve me well for another 8-10 years! ????
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Well Synology executive won’t be able to blame Trump for this company tanking.
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Rebranding Toshiba and Seagate drives and doubling the price tag is pure greed. Hopefully some EU regulator steps in and bans sale of Synology products in EU.
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Even as a Chinese, sometimes I have no idea why these Taiwan tech companies keep doing things like that, greed alone can’t explain this, this is stupid and greed beyond normal human standards.
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I am SO GLAD I pulled the trigger on a new Unraid server. Laughing all the way to a superior platform over here LOL!
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That does it, I am going for Asustor. Flash version.
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Bye bye Synology… Not buying their drives “just because”… Besides, their hardware isn’t really as powerful as it should be for the price that is paid. The only reason I stuck with them versus building my own is because I liked the apps and their attention to security but if they are going to make purchasing their drives a requirement for the “Plus” models, that is where I get off their train. I don’t think they understand their ProSumer / Consumer customers. What I don’t understand is why they can’t just let us use the drives and make a disclaimer that they will not support the models using 3rd party drives if the drives are the cause of the problem, rather than not letting us use them at all. Just another big company doing stupid big company things!
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Synology have completely lost their minds and this will kill their business. Their reasons are all obviously lies and it’s insulting they even try to trick us with them. I wouldn’t mind if their drives were easier to get and good value for money, but they’re neither. They’ve made their new hardware only work with drives no one can or will buy. People will just buy different hardware that can use the drives they can get.
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The only thing i am waiting for is if they restrict drives for all the OLD models once they figure out no one buys the new ones any longer… I could see that happen.
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What a BS statement…. I just build my own TrueNAS box and call it a day
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Synology have finally burnt the last of the customer goodwill!
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Let me get this right Seagate make Synology drives, but Seagate nas drives aren’t up to their standards. Let’s be honest Synology are trying to kill of their consumer side of the business because they can’t compete against new players.
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Who are they even targeting with such a commercial strategy?
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Gonna say, they have crossed the line and i thought they already crossed it with the hevc and video station debacle.
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Howdy
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