Hardware

To be clear, Synology branded drives are also third-party, but it's just third party they make money on. They don't actually make drives and there's no real technically valid reason behind this move.

Turns out my next NAS will be a custom after all.

Synology requires self-branded drives

I've started to categorize enshittification headlines by how many words it takes me to know I won't be dealing with a company again (after reviewing the article for accuracy, of course). This one only took 5 words, and one is a compound. That's pretty efficient.

The enshitification will continue until revenues improve...

Glad I built my own OMV

That’s a shame. Building your own NAS it’s not that difficult and a valuable learning experience.

That’s a big fuck-up.

Hey maybe the Sonos app guy can help them out.

Will avoid. Thanks for the heads up.

Feeling real good about learning TrueNAS Scale now.

Well I currently own a Synology NAS and it officially will be my last.

"third-party HDDs"

In my day we just called these... HDDs. Anytime something so ubiquitous has to be labeled third-party, you know who the bad guy is instantly.

Imagine making sure customers don't buy your shit.

They’ve been implementing this for a while with some of their models. There’s an excellent script that is actively maintained to get around their shit policies.

I’m only using a Synology (ds1823xs+) because I got a killer deal. (Sometimes I still wish I went with unraid.) I’ve never encountered any issues using unapproved hard drives with this script.

https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db

I don't regret building my home server with Unraid at all. It's great, use any drives, don't even have to be the same sizes.

https://unraid.net/

The pricing is reasonable, but one issue is that they changed their pricing scheme recently to only give a year of updates for all but the costliest license. I was grandfathered in unless I upgrade my license, but it's something to consider.

buying brand name is almost always a bad idea when it comes to computers.

take advantage of their modularity, people. desktops are still popular for a reason.

Synology's new Plus Series NAS

This isn't surprising. SOHO and middle tier business hardware installs have all kinds of these requirements from support vendors. Synology was sort of an outlier on those that just allowed mixed bag and it provide software calculations on hard drive health.

That they want knowns in their machines isn't surprising. I'm actually surprised it isn't a complete drop in any assurances if you BYOD.

These features in this product aren't home or consumer grade and indicating that it's for the "advance home user" is like saying Arch Linux is the advance MacOS. There's a lot of detail behind that statement that's not being addressed.

It is sad to see them go this route, but I cannot say it comes as a surprise. But honestly, if you're a hobbyist and see yourself using the features in this level of NAS, you're likely skilled enough as is to build your own. And honestly, you'll be happier building your own.

well after hearing this. when I buy a NAS i'll be going with any brand except synology

I love my synology router and had considered buying a NAS. That's a deal breaker for me though. I have a proxmox machine running ubuntu server as a "NAS" right now so I'll stick with that.

I really love my Synology NAS (DS220+). I don't anticipate needing to replace it anytime soon, but given how well it's treated me, I would almost certainly replace it with a 2024 model instead of a newer one if I had to, given this new limitation.

This decision from them seems short-sighted, I hope they reverse it.

Haha wow what an absolutely HORRIBLE descision, wtf?! So glad I went with QNAP!!

Is that really new? My drives are technically "unsupported" but you can just execute a script that will add all installed drives to the supported drive list and then you get all the features.

https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db

I've only seen the "non supported drive installed" notification once and in my experience it affected absolutely nothing about the device.

Some companies make it too easy to choose their competitors.

Anyone know of anyone else with the same level of turnkey NAS solution? I liked synology for its lack of having to fuck around with random bullshit.

So, it doesn't affect existing models, just the new ranges of NAS that will be released soon. And if you own an old one you can use it to format non supported drives and migrate to the newer models.

Pretty shit, but at least it's not going to majorly affect existing set ups.

I wonder if Synology will realise how bad of a move this is and one day roll it back. This will kill their consumer level market share, do they have enough of an enterprise market for this to make up the difference?

Okay I guess I'll start scouring the internets for a quiet, low energy build