Synology Locks Key NAS Features Behind Proprietary Drive Requirement (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0177055809
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/04/17/197239/synology-locks-key-nas-features-behind-proprietary-drive-requirement
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds
The restriction doesn't apply to Synology's 2024 and older models, only affecting new Plus Series devices targeted at SMBs and advanced home users. Synology itself doesn't manufacture drives but rebrands HDDs from major manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba, often with custom firmware that functions as DRM. According to Synology, the change follows successful implementation in their enterprise solutions and will deliver "higher performance, increased reliability, and more efficient support." A workaround exists: users can initialize a non-Synology drive in an older Synology NAS and then migrate it to a new Plus model without restrictions.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds
Return it (Score:1)
When companies do shit like that return the unit and demand your money back
Re: (Score:2)
At least they're announcing it ahead of time, so you know which models to avoid, and the company, as a whole.
I have a synology diskstation from six years ago, and now I definitely know I won't be using them if I need to replace the system.
That's some bullshit (Score:3)
If their drives had something above and beyond, in hardware, that the system could only report for drives with those features, fine.
But cutting out reporting because somebody else's drive is installed? Do not buy their NAS equipment, under any circumstances. A company that starts dicking you around like this will not stop, it'll keep escalating as long as they still have customers they feel they can successfully exploit.
UGREEN will fill the void! (Score:3)
UGREEN is here to fill in the void. Synology is making a huge mistake, but it will soon be their FAFO moment.
Re: (Score:1)
Are there any home NAS companies based in the US? UGREEN is Hong Kong based and I'm not comfortable with that. Synology is at least Taiwan based.
Re: (Score:2)
Ubiquiti is US based. 45Drives is Canadian.
I plan on running Unraid on whatever UGREEN NAS I get.
Re: (Score:2)
QNAP is also still around
Cool. (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like I'll be locking my wallet away behind "not buying proprietary vendor lock-in garbage."
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, people here probably already build their own Linux-based (e.g. FreeNAS) NAS's anyway.
Not sure why you would pay the huge premium to go with Synology.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Those people here who have day jobs dealing with tech might very well wish for something they can just plug in and it works for their own personal stuff tech.
I have the capability to build a FreeNAS (or whatever) box. I don't have the interest, and I don't really want to make the time. I have a Synology because it just works; it was easy, and I don't have to worry much about things breaking, or dependency hell, or whatever... I slapped drives in it, powered it on, did some basic config, and Bob's your Unc
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in that boat. I've stuck with Synology NASs since a 211j. That one is still running fine for the basic tasks but from drive age and health reports I just started looking into replacements. I have another that will move into the 211j's role when *its* replacement is set up.
I've looked at QNAP, TerraMaster, and other commercial options over the years, as well as setting up FreeNAS/TrueNAS CORE. The reliability, ecosystem (easy SW and apps on devices), security, and the amount of work I'd need to put in ha
Well this sucks (Score:2)
Back in 2014 I purchased a DS213j with 2GB drives. When I outgrew that I purchased a DS216j with 4GB drives in 2017. A few years later I purchased a DS218j with 8GB drives. All three NAS' have been running perfectly for all these years using WD RED drives. I was just thinking the other day it's time for a 16GB NAS and of course Synology would have been my first choice, until this distressing news. I looked into FreeNAS a few years back (which is now TrueNAS I believe). What are the other alternatives availa
Re: (Score:3)
I'm hoping you mean TB, otherwise that's not a very impressive porn collection.
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, yes, TB. It's VERY impressive indeed!
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, I love my older Synology NAS with its media server features but I heard those are deprecated on the newer ones and you have to use something like Jellyfin. Which is fine I guess but it was an easy recommendation to folks that want something that 'just works'. Proprietary drives sounds further user hostility.
Re: (Score:2)
They were great units. The only issue I ever had was a 4TB drive went bad within warranty. I always purchase a spare hard drive when buying a NAS so I was up and running in a few hours and the bad drive was replaced under warranty waiting to be used as a spare again. Other than that, rock solid. My 2TB unit is relegated now to image backups of computer systems I work on/repair. I've been in the IT industry since the 80s and have a copy of every driver, documentation, and useful software I ever encountered s
You are OK...for now (Score:2)
Apparently they will support drives that are moved from an older Synology device still - otherwise they would risk losing all their current customers. So all you have to do is buy regular drives, add them as an empty drive to one of your existing NAS systems and then move it into the new one.
However, I suspect this will only be available for a limited time so, as someone who was just starting to look at replacing my 8-year old Synology NAS I'm now not sure I will be getting a new Synology which is a sham
Re: (Score:3)
TreNAS is probably what you want. You get GUI management of everything you need to make it work without having to worry about learning BSD, along with related things. And also jails (conceptually similar to Docker), VMs and some other goodies.
If you want to hack around on an otherwise solid storage platform, run vanilla FreeBSD.
You can also run ZFS on Linux if you don't want to deal with BSD at all. I can't speak to that with any authority, but based on reports on the net at large, it seems to work pret
Re: (Score:2)
There is always HexOS, I know nothing about it other than that its a wrapper on top of TrueNAS designed to make it easier to use and that it doesn't pull any of the consumer-unfriendly crap this article talks about.
Re: (Score:2)
> "TrueNAS is probably what you want. You get GUI management of everything you need to make it work"
Indeed. We have both TrueNAS Scale and Synology. Started with TrueNAS and it is great. The reason we bought a large Synology was for their Surveillance Station product (security video) which is completely web based and pretty fantastic. We bought 30 of their branded drives to go with it. We also have Unifi Protect, which has a lot of great features, but doesn't scale as big and the UI didn't quite do e
On the one hand... (Score:2)
I fully understand why they did this. Their old hardware compatbility list was a PITA to navigate. There were some drives where one revision of the firmware was great, and another version of the same drive was unusable. Ultimately they're making their tech support much easier with this change. Also, their disk prices aren't really a premium and are sometimes cheaper than something like a Seagate or WD drive.
On the other hand, fuck this and stupid bullshit like this.
Re: (Score:1)
My experience is the opposite. I've run 12-drive Synology arrays for years, first the 3614xs (2014) which was replaced by a 3621xs+ (2021) and the 21 version had this limitation where health info was locked for non-Synology drives. That could be disabled by editing a config file but voided whatever warranty or support. Also when I looked at the time their drives were damn near double the cost.
Re: (Score:2)
> I fully understand why they did this. Their old hardware compatbility list was a PITA to navigate. There were some drives where one revision of the firmware was great, and another version of the same drive was unusable. Ultimately they're making their tech support much easier with this change. Also, their disk prices aren't really a premium and are sometimes cheaper than something like a Seagate or WD drive.
If these proprietary drives are indeed cheaper than Seagate or WD market drives, then someone would buy the proprietary drives and resell them at a profit. Also, if prices weren't an issue, the marketing would have touted that. Instead, the marketing pitch is "higher performance, increased reliability, and more efficient support." No mention of price.
Another thing, why are they requiring the use of non-standard drives? In the storage business, second sourcing is a requirement. So, Synology is saying th
Re: (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a dumb idea, it's just I can sort of half-way understand it as more than just a money grab.
Very stupid idea in light of an infinite number of alternatives out there. Synology is literally just a linux box with hot swap drive trays and a fancy gui. It's nothing special.
Re: (Score:2)
> Also, their disk prices aren't really a premium and are sometimes cheaper than something like a Seagate or WD drive.
Synology 20 TB: $720. WD Red: $420. I'd call that a premium and a half, and then some. Mind you, I only looked at B&H, but they usually are about as competitive as you can get.
Keurig... (Score:1)
So they are going to Keurig themselves.
I really like how they're claiming this is somehow a benefit to the customer. Who warranties the drives? How do you know which brand/model drive you're going to get. For example, I avoid He drives. Will they give that info? This seems like a really dumb decision from the customer point of view. But I'm sure some MBA will get a metric fuck-ton of money when the quarterly stock price jumps. Then they'll cash out when they lose half the customer base a year later.
TrueNAS (Score:5, Interesting)
We are migrating aways from proprietary to open source. Why?
Once bitten twice shy.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Stop feeding the Trolls.
TrueNAS II (Score:2)
Been running TrueNAS for years. Outstanding, rock-solid product. Never lost data.
Dell-like (Score:2)
How Dell of them.
Re: (Score:2)
HP would like to show you how it's done
Re: (Score:3)
I like to hate on big name manuf's as much as the next guy. But, in this case, I have to plead ignorance. What the Dell did they do?
NexSAN did this (Score:2)
NexSAN devices required a special firmware patched hard drive, then were sold at several times the price of the same drive without the firmware. This is a bad business model IMHO, when a hardware refresh was time, we went with one of their competitors who's systems were built around regular SATA drives. (Use case here is bulk and data integrity, not performance). I will give NexSAN some credit though, nearly 100 hard drives ran the better part of a decade with only 3-4 ever needing replacement.
No upgrade for me! (Score:1)
I guess, I will stay on my current version forever.
Prices (Score:4, Informative)
Synology SAT5221-3840G 3.84TB
$1,044.93
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Synolog... [amazon.com]
vs
SAMSUNG 870 EVO 4TB (MZ-77E4T0B/AM)
$249.99
[2]https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG... [amazon.com]
Even if the Samsung has a higher failure rate, between Raid 6 and MUCH lower prices to replace...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Enterprise-SAT5221-3-84TB-Internal/dp/B0CL4T266B
[2] https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-Inch-Internal-MZ-77E4T0B-AM/dp/B08QBL36GF/
Why does an NAS need DRM? (Score:3)
> Synology itself doesn't manufacture drives but rebrands HDDs from major manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba, often with custom firmware that functions as DRM.
Why does an NAS need DRM? That's almost as concerning as forcing people to buy their shitty rebranded drives in order to get deduplication and the like. I feel like technology is going backwards when it comes to end-user needs, and shit like forced DRM top to bottom smashed together with ad supported everything is leading the charge.
HP trys to lock you to there overpriced storage on (Score:2)
HP trys to lock you to there overpriced storage on servers.
Re: (Score:2)
> HP trys to lock you to there overpriced storage on servers.
HP has a lot of garbage practices these days./p.
Memories... (Score:2)
And not good ones.
Back in the day (early '90s), we had a Motorola VME mini computer (specifically a MVME147 board) as a server. It used SCSI, and when we needed more storage, we went out and bought a 300MB (yes, MEGAbyte) off the shelf SCSI drive. Needless to say, it didn't work. Only the branded hard drives would work.
I'm torn here (Score:2)
On the one hand, yeah, it's kinda crappy.
On the other hand, Synology does a LOT for nothing more than the price of the hardware. I've gotten phone support on three-year-old appliances. Their Active Backup for Business application allows the automatic backup of unlimited Hyper-V/VMWare VMs *and* workstations. They have dozens of plugins, a DDNS service, and mobile apps, all bundled in with the purchase price. ...and what they're paywalling here is a health check system that would likely be unreliable on unce
Re: (Score:2)
There's a reason storage cluster systems are getting hit by stuff like ceph though.
Why does my NAS... (Score:2)
Why does my NAS need me to replace magenta ink?!? WTF?!?
Weird choice (Score:3)
This is common in enterprise NAS/SAN space but no one cares because no one at that level is going to throw rando drives into their critical storage servers, and they are usually under maintenance anyway so if a drive fails the vendor just sends out a new one. I don't see a great reason to push this down onto consumers, even at the prosumer level. They will just be pissing people off at that tier.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe for some people who feel the price premium is worth it, but RAID is for "inexpensive" and the whole point is you can use cheaper less reliable disks and make up for it with the overall system.
I also think a cycle has been happening for "traditional enterprise SANs" with both stuff like Hyperconverged and CEPH... making whole storage units cheaply disposable.
They've been doing this for several years now (Score:1)
nothing new here.. you can also add any drive to the database as compatible. Though I'm sure they'll disable this now too.
[1]https://github.com/007revad/Sy... [github.com]
[1] https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db
Firmware (Score:2)
> "and automatic firmware updates will be disabled"
That has never been available except with Synology drives. Nothing new there.
How much is the pricing lock in? (Score:2)
If the pricing premium for a Synology branded drive over (say) a WD Red Pro drive is nominal (less than 10%) this does especially bother me. But if this is more like the Apple premium (well more than 100%) this is a deal breaker for the consumer market (at least until all the other consumer NAS vendors all follow suit).
DIY NAS (Score:2)
Second best thing I ever did was replace my WD NAS' OS with pure vanilla Debian. Best thing I ever did was replace it with a self-built server running Proxmox.
Copying NetApp's strategy (Score:2)
Ah, vendor lock in. The path of the lazy. Instead of innovating and creating a compelling product and service reputation. Probably just custom firmware to identify the drive. Hopefully people will soon produce a tool to copy and write the firmware. Of course they'll not ship the units with drive trays that accept drives, only maintain airflow, just like NetApp and similar ilk. 3D printing to the rescue. Fuck these guys.
Bold strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see how that works out for them.
Re: Bold strategy (Score:1)
So they offer additional features/functions when users use drives with custom firmware?
And what, exactly is the problem?
My server drive controller offers greater speed/functionality when I connect SAS drives to it, but it will support SATA drives too, just with less functionality.
If the additional features relied on nothing more than being from a higher-priced vendor, I could see an issue, but when it requires custom firmware, it's OK I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
> So they offer additional features/functions when users use drives with custom firmware?
> And what, exactly is the problem?
Nope. They're taking away things that already work on our existing Synology hardware with commodity drives, and forcing consumers to buy drives from them, just like a Lexmark printer demanding that you buy their ink cartridges.
Basically, if we buy new Synology NAS systems, we'll be stuck forever buying hard drives through Synology from then on, at a HUGE premium.
A Synology Enterprise 20 TB drive costs $720 from B&H.
A WD Red 20 TB drive (which is the brand I use in my Synology NAS) costs $420.
That's a
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt it hurts there bottom line all that much.
Synology understands there user base, which is primary the less technically inclined Apple type person. Smart enough to know they need onsite and offsite backups but not technical enough to easily wing an opensource nas with enough disposable income to buy an incredibly overpriced hard-drive caddy that needs to constantly phone home.
That's not a dig on there userbase there's times when I wish I could be that blissfully happy but alas I'm to much of an asshat
Re: (Score:2)
Open source NAS isn't a competitor here. Countless similar proprietary NAS setups are.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately that comment proves my point about there user base.