> That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them
The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery.
Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tech friend to keep it within their budget.
Synology is seen as the premium choice in the consumer NAS argument, so vertically integrating and charging a premium to guarantee “it just works” is not unprecedented.
There are definitely other NAS options as well, if someone is willing to take on more responsibility for understanding the tech.
I don’t think anyone would care if Synology gave priority to their own drives. A checkbox during setup that says “Yes, I know I’m using these drives that have not been validated blah blah blah” would be plenty. That’s not what Synology did however and that’s the main reason everyone is pissed.
I have a DS1515+ which has an SSD cache function that uses a whitelisted set of known good drives that function well.
If you plug in a non whitelisted ssd and try to use it as a cache, it pops up a stern warning about potential data loss due to unsupported drives with a checkbox to acknowledge that you’re okay with the risk.
So…there’s really no excuse why they couldn’t have done this for regular drives.
That assumes that the person setting up the NAS is the same person using it, which is not going to be the case for non-tech-savvy users.
Everyone will understand it costing more, fewer people will understand why the NAS ate their data without the warning it was supposed to provide, because cheap drives that didn’t support certain metrics were used.
If Synology wants to have there be only one way that the device behaves, they have to put constraints on the hardware.
But those people would call support when the array couldn’t rebuild. And many of them would blame Synology, and demand warranty replacement of the “defective” device, and generally cost money and stress.
As long as Synology is up front in the requirement and has a return policy for users who buy one and are surprised, I think they’re well within their rights to decide they’re tired of dealing with support costs from misbehaving drives.
As long as they don’t retroactively enforce this policy on older devices I don’t understand the emotionality here. Haven’t you ever found yourself stuck supporting software / systems / etc that customers were trying to cheap out on, making their problems yours?
It’s not that I don't understand. It’s that as an end user I don't give a shit.
Toyota might have great reasons for opening a chain of premium quality gas stations, but the second they required me to use them, I'd never buy another Toyota for as long as I lived.
I want to bring my own drives, just as I have since I bought my first DS-412+ 13 years ago.
People are going to ignore that and leave bad reviews online, which will have compounding effects. SMR drives works in RAID until CMR buffer regions are depleted, and then RAID starts falling apart. This will undoubtedly create wrong impressions that Synology products, not the drives, are not trustworthy.
SMR drives work like SSD: writes are buffered to CMR zone, consolidated into an SMR track data, copied into onboard cache RAM and written to SMR zone. SMR tracks has sizes of 128MB or so, and can be written or erased in track-at-once manners by the head half-overwriting data like moving a broad whiteboard marker slowly outward on a pottery wheel, rather than giving each rings of data enough separation. This works because the heads has higher resolution in radial direction in reads than writes; the marker tip is broader than what the disk's eyes can see.
This copy operation is done either while the disk is idling, or forced by stop responding to read and write operations if CMR buffer zone is depleted and data has to be moved off. RAID softwares cannot handle the latter scenarios, and consider the disk faulty.
You can probably corner a disk into this depleted state to expose a drive being SMR based, but I don't know if that works reliably or if it's the right solution. This is roughly all I know on technical side of this problem anyway.
> The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected
I see this kind of arguments “X had to do Y otherwise customers would complain” a lot every time a company does something shady and some contrarian wants to defend them, but it really isn't as smart as you think it is: the company doesn't care if people complain, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this kind of move either, because it raises a lot more complaints. Company only care if it affects their bottom line, that is if they can be liable in court, or if the problem is big enough to drive customers away. There's no way this issue would do any of those (at least not as much as what they are doing right now, by a very large margin).
It's just yet another case of an executive doing a shady move for short terms profits, there's no grand reasoning behind it.
Your absolute conviction is misplaced. Support is expensive to provide, especially on hardware that’s expensive to ship around.
This may be a bad move, and you’re certainly right that Synology expects to make more profit with this policy than without it, but it’s a more complex system than you understand. Irate customers calling support and review-bombing for their own mistakes are a real cost.
I don’t blame Synology for wanting to sell fewer units at higher prices to more professional customers. Hobbyists are man attractive market but, well, waves hands at the comments in this thread.
The thing is, that more professional market would never make the mistake of putting SMR drives in a RAID array anyway and they are also (I hope) good enough at doing their own research to filter out reviews from uneducated retail consumers. So, again, we’re left with trying to find a justification for this move other than Synology’s profits.
And when this issue happened with WD drives, I don’t remember a backlash against Synology at all. WD, on the other hand, deserved and received plenty of blame.
Synology is in that "prosumer" space, though, where maybe you don't really want to sell to hobbyists - but the bulk of your hobbyists in this space are tech-savvy and will recommend your products at work if you don't alienate them.
> The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery.
Is it though? Most (consumer) NAS systems are probably sold without the drives which are bough separately. When there is an issue with the drive and it breaks, I’m pretty sure most people technical enough to consider the need for a NAS would attribute that failure to the manufacturer of the drives, not to the manufacturer of the computer they put their drives into
I know a photographer who needs tech support for really anything, and who has bought drives and upgraded is NAS himself. I don’t think that’s unusual, but of course n=1.
I see your argument here and this could also be solved by some type of somewhat difficult flag that Synology could implement.
Meaning that by default it could require a Synology drive that is at minimum going to work decently.
Want to mess around more and are more technical ? Make it a CLI command or something the average joe is going to be wary about. With a big warning message.
Personally I only like to buy very reliable enterprise class drives (probably much better than whatever Synology will officially sell) and this is my main concern.
Nobody blamed Synology when that WD SMR issue happened. Come on, let’s get real here. Locking the devices down so they only work with drives bearing Synology branding is about Synology’s profits.
For a BYOD product it would be fine to add a blacklist of DM-SMR drives imho. Or have a big red banner and a taint flag.
But that's not what Synology did.
Also, if the image on the Synology page is accurate, they are relabeled Toshiba drives. Which doesn't really seem a good choice for SMB/SOHO NAS devices, because the Toshiba "Machine Gun" MGxx drives are the loudest drives on the market.
I had some 12TB WD ultrastar that I happily replaced with some Toshiba MG09ACA18TE. To my ears at least the toshiba sound signficantly more bearable than the ultrastar were (lower pitch so less disturbing). Due to living in a small apartment my NAS is in my living room so noise matters.
That said, I've since added an ssd and moved almost everything to the ssd (docker, the database and all apps) and it's much nicer in term of noise.
Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units.
I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement).
Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR).
I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.
Seemingly not, at least not for the moment, based on the experiences of people migrating arrays [successfully] from older units and the massive backlash that would result if they trashed currently working arrays.
If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.
but that's the proposed change, that their Plus lineup which is generally targeted for SMB/SOHO/enthusiast market, will be working only with their drives
It can't be programmatically identified because manufacturers actively hide them. There are ATA commands for that, DM-SMR drives lie to it.
I wouldn't be sure why Toshiba M-prefixed 7K2 drives would be bad for NAS use cases. They're descendants of what were used in high performance SPARC servers. Hot, dense, obnoxious, but that's just Fujitsu. They're plenty reliable, performant, and perfect for your all-important on-line/near-line data! You just have to look away from bills(/s).
