I’d like to hear from everyone here at the community their thoughts about the Synology announcement about the new NAS boxes going forward only working best with their hard drives. There’s a lot of misinformation and hate out there when companies try to make money. What’s your thought?
Haven’t they been saying that forever? Are they literally going to do like HP does with their ink cartridges and chip the drives so they check if they are Synology drives?
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I’m not sure what to think about it. It’s not a big deal to me, and we have quite a few deployed. The best part is all the pearl-clutching, especially since there are some unknowns regarding this press release.
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As Truenas now has better docker and VM capabilities and Synology keeps changing away from retail consumers (photos, video station, docker is many releases behind and now mandating disks..) it is just a matter of doing a Truenas install.
I feel like I am being forced to 3rd party apps anyway so why stay and wait to see what I will lose next with Synology.
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For me going 1st party is normal for enterprise, they are only really talking about their enterprise level stuff not their home level stuff. When i go out and buy a fs6400 ha pair im not going to risk data loss by saving a few grand on 3rd party drives. If i got pure, lenovo, netapp, hpe, dell, ect ect for enterprise storage its all going to be 1st party drives on them as well.
I think synology is looking to go more inline with enterprise level processes than home level stuff now. Now they need to get onsite 24x7x365 repair to really compete with the other enterprise level stuff out there.
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Releasing this video in the morning but Synology reached out and gave me an official response that I can share:
Hi Willie,
Just wanted to reach out and provide more context about the changes to our HDD program.
First I apologize that the info came from the German press release, which was honestly premature, incomplete and lacked useful information about what was happening.
For your reference, here’s an at-a-glance summary of what is happening and the reasoning behind these decisions:
What is the new Hard Drive Compatibility Policy?
For new models in the 25+ series and above we will be instituting new requirements for hard drive compatibility. These new models will require users to use drives listed on our product compatibility list, with a few exceptions. Users migrating from an older plus series model to a 25 series model will still be able to use whatever drives they have in their original unit. Additionally, some SSDs not listed on the compatibility list will work. This is only for Plus series models and above so the J series and Value series will not be impacted by this change.
What this is not:
This is not retroactive and does not apply to SSDs. This change is only for 25 Plus Series models and above and only for spinning rust. This is not tied to DSM but to the system itself so users using older models with different drives can continue to receive updates without worrying.
Why implement the new Hard Drive Compatibility Policy?
There are a few reasons for this so I’ll break it down into sections.
- User demands
So, this is kind of a big picture thing, but according to our data the United States is the only market where home users frequently buy the Plus Series. Both in and outside of the U.S.A. these are primarily business devices with home users typically favoring the J series, Value series and now the Bee drive. Business users and home users have different considerations for their NAS units and as a result some changes need to be made.
- Support
Our support team data shows that around 20% of all incoming support tickets are related to hard drive errors or failures. That, to some extent, is to be expected because HDDs are a perishable product and will fail at some point. But issues caused by inconsistent firmware, or unannounced updates by HDD manufacturers have resulted in failures leading to increased troubleshooting times, clogging up the system and decreasing overall resolutions. By implementing this change, we can provide better and faster support for our entire product, hardware, software and HDDs. This is an especially important step here in North America as we are preparing to launch our Premium Support Program for our business and enterprise customers.
- Overall performance and reliability
We’ve been in the game for 25 years now and we have spent a lot of that time optimizing the performance and reliability standards of our systems. We have found that HDDs have the biggest impact on overall system performance and reliability due to their mechanical nature. Ensuring all HDDs in our systems match the performance and reliability they’re capable of is critical to meet the demands of our customers and the specifications we advertise on the box. Our technical support data shows that using validated drives results in a 40% lower chance of critical disk issues.
Synology’s core business is reliable data backup and data protection. That’s what our users count on us for, and it’s what guides decisions like this. By developing Synology hard drives we are able to have greater control over every aspect of our product and offer the next level of protection and reliability to our customers who rely on us to secure their data.
I hope this helps clear some things up. HDD compatibility aside there are some exciting hardware upgrades coming to the new models that I’d be happy to share with you in addition to our new enterprise offerings we are announcing at Computex.
I for one think this is OK, easier to support business customers who before insisted on getting none certified drives
WRT home use/personal use I’ve never purchased synology for that, i dont need the synology software at home and rather save my monies and do my own bespoke NAS (on low power ex server hardware)
for non techy home users, they will never need plus and the the non plus NAS’s still accept any drives so they can still take advantage of the excellent software
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