[HN Gopher] Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
Author : baobun
Score : 972 points
Date : 2025-10-08 08:19 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.guru3d.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.guru3d.com)
| blitzar wrote:
| FA ... FO
| joshstrange wrote:
| Thank god they reversed course. I'm coming up on needing another
| NAS and I was not looking forward to digging through
| alternatives.
|
| I've run raw Linux servers, I've run UnRaid, and now I have
| Synology and it's been the best "set it and forget it" solution
| yet. Yes, the hardware is overpriced but it works and I'm willing
| to pay a premium for that.
| closewith wrote:
| If you just want storage and not apps, Ubiquiti's UNAS line is
| a much better choice, especially if you're in their ecosystem.
| aranw wrote:
| Yeah UNAS is one option I'm exploring. But the only thing I'm
| wanting on top of all that is something like Plex or Jellyfin
| and I don't know how well it will play with a UNAS if running
| on a external server
| lostlogin wrote:
| It'll be fine. I eventually managed to get a Mac mini to
| work nicely as a headless docker + VM server. It's a
| moster, and averages just 7w of power draw. A neat saving
| for a solar house (the old nuc 9 was 70w).
| jychang wrote:
| It works fine as a NAS, but you need to run Plex on a
| different server.
|
| You can't run Plex directly off the device like a DS224+
| would.
| mlrtime wrote:
| A N100 or other type of cheap hardware will be much better
| than the synology.
| kristofferR wrote:
| https://cwwk.net/collections/nas/products/cwwk-eight-
| slot-10... (NAS-N150-8P)
|
| That + a Jonsbo N2 is a great option, it's what I run.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Would not recommend, given my UDMs logs are full of random
| errors and issues all the time, which seems "normal" for
| them. Not to mention pretty ui but weird bugs and strange
| behaviours - plus ui looks great but feature wise it sucks.
|
| Next time I upgrade I'm just buying mikrotik again...
| closewith wrote:
| Fair enough, but I've used thousands of Unifi devices at
| work and at home and I don't recall ever having to look at
| the logs. Obviously YMMV, but their NVR storage has been
| rock solid.
| jchw wrote:
| I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a
| mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for
| this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of
| many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.)
|
| If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most
| promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping
| soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to ship
| this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has
| been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly
| competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice
| for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to
| temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS
| fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with
| Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as
| Network Attached Storage, after all.)
| kimixa wrote:
| "successful" boycotts always have a weird decision
| afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing
| course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying
| things again next time.
|
| And it feels like for most of these companies it's a whack-a-
| mole of cycling from which happened to burn you last rather
| than any actually being fundamentally "better". Pretty every
| alternative mentioned in this thread have released some real
| bad products.
| jchw wrote:
| At this point I'm not suggesting a boycott at all, I'm
| placing a vote of no confidence in Synology. There is no
| reason to believe they've had a "change of heart" on their
| mentality, they're not stopping due to backlash, they're
| stopping because their greedy scheme _failed_. If they can
| figure out one that works, is there any reason to believe
| they won 't take it?
|
| Go to the Synology website and browse to a NAS. Here's
| Synology's closest product to the new UniFi UNAS offering,
| the DS1825+.
|
| https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1825+
|
| > See why Synology drives are ideal
|
| And it just links to a marketing video announcing Synology
| drives... Does it explain why you should use Synology
| drives? ... No. It is _literally_ 100% marketing puffery.
| They do not mention or acknowledge any of the dumb software
| lock-in tricks they were playing. Coupled with no formal
| announcement, they are apparently willing to do the
| absolute bare minimum to win back customers who left over
| this. Apparently for some people, this is good enough, even
| though unlike many markets there are actually plenty of
| competent NAS products. And we wonder why enshittication is
| so prevalent? We 're paying for it. Its a positive signal
| that they can't get away with anything, only _almost_
| anything. Feel free to experiment with user trust! There 's
| no consequences anyways!
|
| And honestly, while Synology DSM is a pretty decent
| experience, though to be clear I have personal misgivings
| with it all over the place, I really struggle to see how it
| can justify the price tag. The UniFi UNAS Pro is a new and
| weird product, but by any account it does have solid
| fundamentals for the job of network attached storage.
| Comparing the specs... The DS1825+ comes with 2x2.5GbE...
| versus the UNAS Pro's 10GbE. It comes with 8 bays over the
| UNAS Pro's 7. It comes with a Ryzen V1500B over the UNAS
| Pro's Cortex-A57, both with 8 GiB of RAM. One thing the
| Synology NAS has is the ability to expand to 18 bays with
| additional enclosures, which is certainly worth something,
| but what I'm trying to say is, the specs are not actually
| leagues different especially considering that this is what
| you get without paying extra. For Synology you will pay
| $1,149 over the $499 of the UNAS.
|
| Don't get me wrong. UniFi UNAS is brand new. I don't think
| it has support for running third party applications or
| Docker workloads, and there are definitely less storage
| pool options than with Synology DSM. But, it really seems
| like for the core NAS functionality, the UniFi option is
| just going to be better. Given that neither of these
| devices are actually all that powerful, I reckon you'd
| probably be best off actually just treating them like pure
| storage devices anyhow, and taking advantage of fast
| networking to run applications on another device.
| Especially with 10 GbE!
|
| You could literally buy two UniFi UNAS Pro units and a
| Raspberry Pi 5 and still come up a little short on the
| price of the DS1825+. Not that you should do that, but it
| says a lot that you could.
|
| So sure, buy whatever you want, but Synology already played
| their hand, so don't be surprised when they do what they've
| already shown they are more than happy to do. I'm not
| buying it.
|
| And P.S.: Yes, there are plenty of mediocre or crap
| products on the NAS market, but you literally don't just
| have to buy on brand names alone. There are plenty of
| reputable reviewers that will go into as much detail as you
| want about many aspects of the devices, and then you can
| use brand reputation to fill in any gaps if you want. It
| feels silly to hinge entirely on brand reputation when you
| have this much information available...
| mlrtime wrote:
| I agree, two companies that I've dropped recently.
|
| Synology: Switching to Unifi
|
| Sonos: Switching to Wiim.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > "successful" boycotts always have a weird decision
| afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing
| course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying
| things again next time.
|
| I wouldn't want a company to be "rewarded" for reversing an
| anti-customer decision, but instead they should be made to
| realise that their customers goodwill can disappear and be
| very difficult indeed to be won back.
|
| However, most consumers aren't aware of these kinds of
| issues/boycotts, so most companies don't get to reap the
| full impact of shitty decisions.
| techpression wrote:
| After I heard from someone who worked there about how
| incredibly bad their code and software development practices
| are I wouldn't trust them with my data. And that was for
| their enterprise products.
| jchw wrote:
| Having dug into Synology DSM to try to debug issues, I
| would bet my left kidney the code quality in DSM would give
| any of Ubiquiti's own crappy code a run for its money.
| These vendors don't make sales on code quality, for better
| or worse.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| As someone that has a UDM, I will never buy another Unifi
| product. It had all sorts of issues. It doesn't even have
| proper QoS lmao.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb
| storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot
| of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able
| to run Plex, etc.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Personally that's all I need/want. I still run UnRaid as my
| "app" server, I just want dumb storage, hotswap bays, and
| software raid.
| jchw wrote:
| That's correct AFAIK, but software like Plex and Jellyfin
| work just fine if you store your media on a separate
| machine. For the price gap between the Synology NAS and the
| UniFi UNAS you could buy a cheap machine to run some
| workloads on over the network. Even better since the UNAS
| has very good connectivity out of the box (10GbE) that I
| figure it will basically always be bottlenecked on the HDD
| speeds anyways. Maybe a Raspberry Pi or small form factor
| computer could be sitting above the NAS. Many of us already
| run Home Assistant OS anyways, and if you don't... It's
| never too late to start :)
|
| I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how
| well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble
| on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent
| products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good
| stride and just released some pretty solid good value
| products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the
| UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great
| value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't
| personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently
| recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the
| UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support
| for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their
| offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without
| it, it _is_ challenging to ignore how much better of a deal
| you 're getting for the core functionality for sure.
|
| I of course hope people do some level of research before
| buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I
| think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people.
| I do acknowledge Synology DSM has _a lot_ of stuff built
| in, but frankly most of it just isn 't that great.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of this. But I have a few non-
| tech savvy friends (and particularly older folks) who
| just want a clever box they can plug in and it will do
| stuff - even if it's a bit clunky. I wonder how much of
| the Synology market people like that represent.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Synology photos is garbage... it does do one thing ok which
| is backup photos.
|
| The software stack of usability is severely missing. So
| they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of
| it well.
|
| In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only
| does storage.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Agree! Though to be clear I'm not saying it's necessarily
| amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem
| to like it!
|
| I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I
| think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details
| about upgrading RAM how many people seem really
| passionate about the various synology apps.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some
| feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog.
| Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn't know
| anyone actually used and liked it. It worked _alright_
| but the client apps were /are a giant leap behind
| alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.
|
| But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of
| fans in the Venn overlap of "people who want to stream
| video off their NAS" and "people willing to settle for an
| oddball solution".
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| Weirdly, Audio Station is the best app I've found for
| streaming podcasts from my Synology (given the quirks of
| podcast hoarding in practice). Admittedly, I haven't
| looked in a few years... maybe I should get on that.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That seems plausible. I don't think there's as much
| competition among audio apps, and I (perhaps naively)
| suspect there might be a lower bar for UI polish. We were
| using XMMS back in the day, and while it looked cool, it
| wasn't the paragon of user-friendly design.
| izacus wrote:
| Synology Photos works amazingly for me and significantly
| better than any alternatives I've tried.
| blindriver wrote:
| I just went through a complete restore of my NAS from
| backup and then migration to a new NAS. It was flawlessly
| executed through Hyperbackup so I don't agree with you at
| all.
| blindriver wrote:
| I don't think Unifi UNAS has the same functionality as
| Synology. From what I read, it's focused just for storage as
| opposed to letting you run things on it like Docker, Plex,
| etc. I have an extensive Unifi investment across multiple
| sites so I'm well versed in Unifi but I don't think it's the
| same use case for UNAS.
| globular-toast wrote:
| That's a shame IMO. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go
| down the right path. I built a NAS 5 years ago in a Fractal
| Design Node 804 and put TrueNAS Core on it (back then it was
| called FreeNAS). It's been totally "set and forget" for me. The
| only thing I've done in 5 years is upgrade TrueNAS, which has
| always worked flawlessly.
|
| I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's
| still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is
| probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an
| all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my
| NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only
| accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping
| snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly
| corrupt the data.
| lexicality wrote:
| Good luck when it _doesn 't_ work though. I decided to take the
| hit and pay their exorbitant HDD prices on the basis that they
| came with a warranty etc and one of the drives failed within 3
| months.
|
| It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the
| drive _at my own expense_ from the UK to Germany and they didn
| 't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their
| warehouse. I had to buy another drive to repair my RAID cluster
| while waiting. Absolutely outrageous customer support.
| greggsy wrote:
| You need to have pretty tight supply chains if you're going
| to support warranty claims on something as consumable as
| disks. I don't know who supplies their HDD and SSDs, but
| you'd want the relationship and traceability to be pretty
| robust.
|
| Syno have always been a software company first, a hardware
| company second, and a storage media company last. It makes
| sense to try and control the full vertical, but they just
| don't have enough clout to compete against the big enterprise
| companies.
|
| I honestly believe the disk whitelisting thing was part of an
| attempt to overvalue the company in preparation for a sale.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That was the absolute deal killer for me. Even if the white
| labeled drives were the same price, which they decidedly
| weren't, if I have a Seagate that dies, I know a local shop
| where I can buy a replacement an hour later. All Central
| Computers has in stock from Synology is a 12TB drive for $300
| (LOL no). Amazon Prime's largest drive is an 18TB unit for
| $800 (WTF are you kidding me?).
|
| I don't have time to wait around for them to ship a drive. I
| certainly don't have the budget to stock up on spares at
| their exorbitant prices.
|
| Hard pass.
| croon wrote:
| I've always opted for building my own and running linux every
| time it has come down to replacing, but I might split out NAS
| and compute this time and take a chance on a UGREEN one (maybe
| DH4300?), the reviews look solid for a new product segment from
| them.
|
| I'm likely not buying a Synology at this point.
|
| If anyone has one of their (UGREEN) models (or other brands)
| I'd be interested in hearing perspectives.
|
| Edit: A lot more mentions of their models in the thread
| elsewhere at this point.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| I bought a Terramaster DAS as I already had a NUC, just
| connected with USB, supports 10Gbit but my NUC only does 5.
|
| Looked a lot at NAS alternatives and ugreen, asustor, aoostar
| all seem pretty good, as you can just run truenas or a linux
| distro. Can also do DIY chassi with mini itx board.
| croon wrote:
| I checked out Terramaster too, but was unsure of the
| interface. Does the HBA do any abstraction or is it IT mode
| and direct access to the disks?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| This guy talks about it at 3:30
|
| https://youtu.be/ZdEqEWiA2CE?si=ILPrTNBsZMqgcBNJ
| dangus wrote:
| You should still look at alternatives. A NAS company that is
| willing to consider a move like this even once is not a
| trustworthy company.
|
| It shows you that their management is probably not making the
| right decisions in other areas as well.
|
| I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find
| it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube
| video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots
| and other maintenance.
|
| On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS
| hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a
| serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot
| more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.
| closewith wrote:
| However, now we know the direction their leadership would like to
| take, I can't see much of the tech savvy crowd returning to them,
| given we know they'll find another revenue screw to turn.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm not convinced of the existence of executives who _wouldn
| 't_ do this. It's just like ads. Someone is bound to notice
| that money is being left on the table. Once it becomes known,
| they'll either do it or they'll be replaced by someone who
| will.
|
| We have to start making open source hardware that we can fully
| control. It's the only way to be free. Corporations cannot be
| trusted. Any goodwill they build up eventually becomes a
| resource for them to capitalize on.
| immibis wrote:
| Bankrupting every company who tries it is also a pretty good
| strategy.
| Aleklart wrote:
| It was a bald strategy move, but market was just not ready for
| the innovation
| aranw wrote:
| I don't think anything about this was innovating. I think it
| was purely a money grab attempt
| immibis wrote:
| I think the comment was intentionally ironic
| aborsy wrote:
| But their hardware is also terrible. Their disk stations for
| consumers had 1G NICs until recently, and still underpowered
| CPUs. The sales had to decline for them to be convinced to
| upgrade to 2.5G in 2025. But then they removed an optional slot
| for 10G in 923+ model (they still would have made money from it,
| as it costs +$150), so when the industry moves to 10G, you can't
| upgrade the component and should buy the whole unit. The
| construction is plastic.
|
| I have a 920+, and it's too slow, frequently becomes unresponsive
| when multiple tasks are run.
|
| They lag, and need to be constantly forced to improve?
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I don't know why you got downvoted, you're right. Many models
| that are currently on sale as new models have CPUs that are 10
| years old.
| nosianu wrote:
| There must be more than that, another explanation, if they
| are slow. Ten year old CPUs were plenty fast already, far
| more than enough even, to power an NAS device.
|
| My Windows 11 often takes many seconds to start some
| application (Sigil, Excel, whatever), and it sure isn't the
| fault of the CPU, even if it's "only" a laptop model (albeit
| a newish one, released December 2023, Intel Core Ultra 7
| 155H, 3800 (max 4800) Mhz, 16 Cores, 22 Logical Processors).
|
| Whenever software feels slow as of the last 1+ decades, look
| at the software first and not the CPU as the culprit, unless
| you are really sure it's the workload and calculations.
| close04 wrote:
| On a DS920+ users will run various containers,
| Plex/Jellyfin, PiHole, etc. The Celeron J4125 CPU (still
| used in 2025 on the 2 bay DS225+) is slow when used with
| the stuff most users would like to use on a NAS today, and
| the software runs from the HDDs only. Every other
| equivalent modern NAS is on N100 and can use the M.2 drives
| for storage just like the HDDs, which makes them
| significantly more capable.
| aborsy wrote:
| Another factor related to speed is that, they didn't allow
| using NVMe slots for storage pool until recently for new
| models (in 920+ still you can't do that; even if they
| allowed it, the limited PCI lanes of that CPU would limit
| the throughput). So a container's database has to be stored
| in mechanical HDDs. Again other companies moved on, and I
| remember there were a lot of community dissatisfaction and
| hacks, until they improved the situation.
|
| Their hardware is limited already, and they also
| artificially limit it further by software.
|
| They changed course now, and allow using any HDD. Will DSM
| display all relevant SMART attributes? We will see!
| RedShift1 wrote:
| You are correct that the software should perform better,
| but I don't think the average buyer understands this - they
| buy a new (and sometimes quite expensive) device, yet it
| feels sluggish for them, so they feel like they bought a
| bad product.
|
| But even in the more business/enterprise segment you're
| getting screwed over. Let's go to the product selector
| here: https://www.synology.com/en-
| uk/products?product_line=rs_plus... and look at XS+/XS
| Series subtitled "High performance storage solutions for
| businesses, engineered for reliability." Let's pick the
| second choice, RS3621xs+. According to the Tweakers
| pricewatch
| (https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1656552/synology-
| rackstation...) this thing went on sale the 8th of February
| 2021 (4 years ago). The specsheet says it has an Intel Xeon
| D-1541, let's look at what ARC (https://www.intel.com/conte
| nt/www/us/en/products/sku/91199/i...) has to say about this
| CPU:
|
| Marketing Status: Discontinued
|
| Launch Date: Q4'15
|
| Servicing Status: End of Servicing Updates
|
| End of Servicing Updates Date: Saturday, December 31, 2022
|
| I'll let you make your own conclusions if that's an OK
| purchase these days.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Who's out here getting service updates for their CPU?
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Ten year old CPUs were plenty fast already,_
|
| That depends on the CPU... Some are optimised for power
| consumption not performance, and on top of that will end up
| thermally throttled as they are often in small boxes with
| only passive cooling.
|
| A cheap or intentionally low-power Arm SoC from back then
| is not going to perform nearly as well as a _good_ or more
| performance oriented Arm SoC (or equivalent x86 /a64 chip)
| from back then. They might not cope well with 2.5Gb
| networking unless the NICs support offloading, and if they
| are cheaping out on CPUs they might not have high-spec
| network controller chips either. And that is before
| considering that some are talking to the NAS via a VPN
| endpoint running on the NAS so there is the CPU load of
| that on top.
|
| For sort-of-relevant anecdata: my home router ran on a
| Pi400 for a couple of years (the old device developed
| issues, the Pi400 was sat waiting for a task so got given a
| USB NIC and given that task), but got replaced when I
| upgraded to full-fibre connection because its CPU was a
| bottleneck at those speeds just for basic routing tasks
| (IIRC the limit was somewhere around 250Mbit/s). Some of
| the bottleneck I experienced would be the CPU load of
| servicing the USB NIC, not just the routing, of course.
|
| _> far more than enough even, to power an NAS device._
|
| People are using these for much more than just network
| attached storage, and they are _sold_ as being capable of
| the extra so it isn 't like people are being entirely
| unreasonable in their expectations. PiHole, VPN servers,
| full media servers (doing much more work than just serving
| the stored data), etc.
|
| _> There must be more than that, another explanation_
|
| Most likely this too. Small memory. Slow memory. Old SoC
| (or individual controllers) with slow interconnect between
| processing cores and IO controllers. There could be a
| collection of bottlenecks to run into as soon as you try to
| do more than just serve plain files at ~1Gbit speeds.
| finaard wrote:
| That's fine, some of those also have kernels that are EOL for
| almost 10 years.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| The Synology DS925+ for example does not have GPU encoding.
| For an expensive prosumer-positioned NAS this is crazy. They
| can't let us have both 2.5gb NICs and a GPU.
| zeroflow wrote:
| I totally agree with you.
|
| The appeal for me was the "it just works" factor. It's a
| compact unit and setup was easy. Every self-built solution
| would either be rather large (factor for me) and more difficult
| to set up. And I think, that's what has kept Synology alive for
| so long. It allows entry level users to get into the
| selfhosting game with the bare minimum you need, especially if
| transcoding (Plex/Jellyfin) is mentioned.
|
| As an anecdote, I've had exactly this problem when buying my
| last NAS some time ago. It was DS920+, DS923+ vs. QNAP TS-464.
| The arguments for QNAP were exactly what you write. Newer chip,
| 2.5G NICs, PCIe Slot, no NVMe vendor lock-in. So I bought the
| QNAP unit. And returned it 5 days later, because the UI was
| that much hot garbage and I did not want to continue using it.
|
| Lately, the UGreen NAS series looks very promising. I'm hearing
| only good things about their own system AND (except for the
| smallest 2-bay solution) you can install TrueNAS. It mostly
| sounds too good to be true. Compact, (rather) powerful and
| flexible with support for the own OS.
|
| As the next player, with mixed feelings about support, the
| Minisforum N5 Units also look promising / near perfect. 3x M.2
| for Boot+OS, 5 HDD slots and a PCIe low-profile expansion slot.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Surprising to read your take
|
| Transcoding was the reason I moved away from Synology. The
| rest was _fine_ , not great but ... _Okay_
|
| But there was no way to improve transcoding performance. If a
| stream lagged, it would always lag. Hence I jumped ship and
| just made my own
| lobsterthief wrote:
| I bought an inexpensive used Mac Mini and attached a
| standard HDD USB3 enclosure to it with multiple drives.
| Works great for streaming to any network appliance I want
| to use.
| zeroflow wrote:
| I often read that take. Yes, the J4125 was fine for a few
| easy / low effort transcodes, like 1080p to 720p for mobile
| streaming.
|
| But I'm with you. The rest is fine, not great, but rather
| working well enough.
| bombcar wrote:
| I gave up on transcoding and just recoded everything into
| the format the Apple TV with Infuse wants.
|
| But my "NAS" is ex-lease enterprise server.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I now have a mini pc next to my NAS, and leaving my NAS to
| only file storage chores. That said, I also am running
| NVidia Shield TV Pro boxes with Kodi for local media and
| largely don't have to worry about the encoding.
| jchw wrote:
| I wish transcoding was available on my 1819+. (It isn't.)
| sersi wrote:
| I sold my synology for an AOOStar WTR Max. It arrived with an
| issue (usb4 port didn't work) but replacement was quick and
| easy. So far, I'm rather happy. Really hesitated with
| Minisforum.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| There's some DIY chassis that are pretty small like Jonsbo
| n2, great since you can upgrade CPU later on.
| https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/11/diy-
| nas-2025-edition.ht...
|
| Ugreen, aoostar and terramaster are also good alternatives.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've had a couple of Synology drives for many years (DS1520+,
| DS918+). They've always worked fine (still chugging away).
|
| I have had _terrible_ luck with Drobo.
| Sammi wrote:
| They have way underpowered cpus compared to what you can get
| for the same money elsewhere. They're just a bad deal.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was just mentioning personal experience. It wasn't even
| an opinion.
|
| I would love to know what a "good deal" is. Seriously. It's
| about time for me to consider replacing them. Suggestions
| for a generic surveillance DVR would also be appreciated.
|
| Thanks!
| redditor98654 wrote:
| Hi there, I was looking to get a NAS that I can just
| install and not have to worry about maintenance too much
| and senility was at the top of the list. If not synology
| what would you suggest?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In my case, Synology has worked fine. Reliability is a
| big deal for non-backup RAID (not the same as "backup,"
| but does the trick, 90% of the time).
|
| It's entirely possible that their newer units are
| crappier than the old workhorses I have.
|
| I don't use any of the fancier features that might
| require a beefier CPU. One of the units runs a
| surveillance station, and your choices for generic
| surveillance DVRs is fairly limited. Synology isn't
| perfect, but it works quite well, and isn't expensive. I
| have half a dozen types of cameras (I used to write ONVIF
| stuff). The Surveillance Station runs them all.
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| Synology's fine - even ideal - for that use case. If you
| want to run Docker containers, run apps for video
| conversion like Plex, etc, then you'd likely want to
| consider something with a beefier CPU. For an appliance
| NAS, Synology's really pretty great.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Yep, I had two different models that had been running for
| about seven years each and had an excellent experience
| overall until Synology tried to change their drive policy.
|
| I get all the points about EOL software and ancient hardware,
| but the fact of the matter is I treat it like an appliance
| and it works that way. I agree that having better transcoding
| would be nice. But my needs are not too sophisticated. I
| mostly just need the storage. In a world with 100+ gig LLM
| models, my Synology has suddenly become pretty critical.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Min/Max pricing theory?
|
| Selling 10 units at $10 profit is far far better than 100 units
| at $1.50 profit. Maybe even $2 per.
|
| Why?
|
| Because the more you sell, the more support, sales, and
| marketing staff you need. More warehouses, shipping logistics,
| office space, with everything from cleaners to workststions.
|
| Min/Max theory is exceptionally old, but still valid.
|
| So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit, yet
| having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit overall.
|
| There are endless ways to work out optimal pricing vs all of
| the above.
|
| But... in the end, it was likely just pure, unbridled stupid
| running the show.
| 10000truths wrote:
| Shouldn't you be pricing the increased cost of
| support/sales/marketing into your profit calculations?
| bbarnett wrote:
| I'm guessing you mean for the crappier product, and sure
| that's a consideration.
|
| I haven't looked at them in years, but there are formulas
| for all of that. EG to help you work out if it makes sense.
| throw0101a wrote:
| This seems to be the model that Broadcom is going with
| VMware.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > So making a crappier product, with more profit per unit,
| yet having sales drop somewhat, can mean better profit
| overall.
|
| This will never work in a competitive market like for NAS.
| The only thing that will get you higher profit margins is a
| good reputation. If you're coasting by on your reputation,
| _sales and customer experience matter_. Less sales one
| quarter means less people to recommend your product in the
| next one, which is a downward spiral. A worse customer
| experience obviously is also a huge problem as it makes
| people less likely to recommend your product even if they
| bought it.
|
| They went for a triple-whammy here from which they likely
| won't recover for years. They now have less customers, less
| people who are likely to recommend their product, and their
| reputation/trustworthiness is also stained long-term.
|
| Crappier products at higher margins only works if you're a
| no-name brand anyways, have no competition, or have a
| fanatical customer base.
| cornholio wrote:
| The economic notion is called marginal profitability. Better
| sales are a good thing if the marginal profit is positive,
| ie, each extra unit sold still increases the overall profit,
| so in your example it's still profitable if the new model
| brings $1.5 profit per unit, and you stop only when the
| marginal profit per unit turns negative.
|
| In tech the model is often misleading, since the large
| investments to improve the product are not just a question of
| current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing
| product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's
| profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full
| of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to
| not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered
| by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| What kind of tasks?
|
| I am not necessarily disagreeing with you but context is
| important. I've had 918+ and 923+ and the cpu has idled through
| all my years of NAS-oriented usage.
|
| Originally I planned to also run light containers and servers
| on it, and for _that_ I can see how one could run out of juice
| quickly. For that reason I changed my plan and offloaded
| compute to something better suited. But for NAS usage itself
| they seem plenty capable and stable (caveat - some people need
| source-transcoding of video and then some unfortunately tricky
| research is required as a more expensive / newer unit isn't
| automatically better if it doesn't have hardware capability).
| Shank wrote:
| A significant part of the prosumer NAS market isn't running
| these for storage exclusively. They usually want a media
| server like Plex or Enby or Jellyfin at minimum and maybe a
| handful of other apps. It would be better to articulate this
| market demand as for low power application servers, not
| strictly storage appliances.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I used to like synology for that, but now I just want a NAS
| with NAS things on it that supports the latest technology.
|
| As soon as my Synology dies I'm replacing it with Unifi. I
| don't want all that extra software with constant CVEs to
| patch.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Simplification is the key. My setup went from: Custom NAS
| hardware running vendor-provided OS and heavyweight media
| serving software -> Custom NAS hardware running TrueNAS +
| heavyweight media server -> Custom NAS hardware running
| Linux + NFS -> Old Junker Dell running Linux + NFS. You
| keep finding bells and whistles you just don't need and
| all they do is add complexity to your life.
| sersi wrote:
| Not OP, I went back and forth about having containers etc on
| my NAS. I can of course have a separate server to do it (and
| did that) but
|
| a) it increases energy cost
|
| b) accessing storage over smb/nfs is not as fast and can lead
| to performance issues.
|
| c) in terms of workflow, I find that having all containers (I
| use rootless containers with podman as much as possible)
| running on the NAS that actually stores and manage the data
| to be simpler. So that means running plex/jellyfin, kometa,
| paperless-ngx, *arrs, immmich on the NAS and for that
| synology's cpu are not great.
|
| In general, the most common requirements of prosumers with
| NAS is 2.5gbps and transcoding. Right now, none of Synology's
| offerings offer that.
|
| But really the main reason I dislike synology is that SHR1 is
| vendor locked behind their proprietary btrfs modifications
| and so can only be accessed by a very old ubuntu...
| Hikikomori wrote:
| You'll get much stronger CPUs from other brands at the same
| price.
| gdevenyi wrote:
| 10G. You're cute.
|
| My institution still has 100M everywhere. I'd love 1G.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I have a 10G NIC in my DS923+.
|
| I agree with the rest, though.
| gosub100 wrote:
| This kept me from buying one too. One of the models I
| considered would make me choose between an M.2 cache OR a 10gbe
| nic. I didn't know they are plastic now either. It's a shame, I
| really want to like them. I also heard it some "bootleg" OS you
| could install over DSM but not sure what it's called. Synology
| were trying to silence it iirc
| archagon wrote:
| Are there any other NASes out there that a) support ZFS/BTRFS,
| b) support different-sized drives in a single pool, and c)
| allow arbitrary in-place drive upgrades?
|
| Last I checked, I believe I didn't find anything that satisfied
| all three. So DSM sits in a sweet spot, I think. Plus, plastic
| or not, Synology hardware just looks great.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> According to some reports, sales of Synology's 2025 NAS models
| dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was
| introduced._
|
| What did NAS customers purchase instead?
| okigan wrote:
| Ugreen
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Ugreen is king, lately.
| biohazard2 wrote:
| +1, I replaced my aging DS1812+ with a DXP4800 Plus and I've
| been quite happy with it.
| Daedren wrote:
| There's quite some competition even in the same form factor,
| like QNAP, ASUSTOR or even UGREEN which got their product in
| not too long ago.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Many people recommend Ugreen, but looking at their entry-
| level 2-bay NAS it's nearly a hundred bucks more expensive
| than a 2-bay one from Synology. Sure, it has higher specs and
| whatnot, but that overlooks the fact that I don't care about
| specs. I just need a 2-bay device to backup my home devices,
| high performance is not a requirement.
| ceritium wrote:
| Good, but I lost my trust in them, so my next NAS will be
| something else.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Synology does not manufacture hard drives.
|
| So you can't buy 3rd party HDDs --- but Synology can?
|
| Looks likes a blatant FU to the customer was returned in kind.
| aranw wrote:
| I believe they were basically saying a set list of approved
| hard drives
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| So you're saying the photo of a Synology branded (rebranded)
| 4TB HDD from the article is fake?
| aranw wrote:
| No I wasn't saying it was fake. I believe that was one of
| the approved but rebranded drives
|
| You can find the compatible drives here
| https://www.synology.com/en-uk/compatibility
| tunney wrote:
| No, it was their drives or nothing. The only approved ones
| were theirs. I am also a long term Synology user is is
| shopping around for a different brand for my replacement.
| mkl wrote:
| They rebrand drives made by Toshiba and Seagate: https://github
| .com/007revad/Synology_enable_M2_volume/wiki/S...,
| https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-hard-drives-and-ssds-...
| bapak wrote:
| What is there to understand? They want to sell you the drives
| directly. This is extremely common practice, see ink
| cartridges.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| I think I understand. Synology willingly chose to emulate one
| of the most anti-consumer products on the planet.
|
| And now I won't buy Synology for the same reason I won't buy
| ink jet.
| numpad0 wrote:
| This is actually not that rare. Enterprise server vendors
| always carried exorbitantly priced third party HDDs in plastic
| shells effectively as brand merches. But servers are contractor
| managed and/or severely discounted, so no perceivable harm is
| usually done.
|
| The differences here are that they actually implemented
| software checks, for devices bought at MSRP. And so harm is
| felt.
| piva00 wrote:
| I was looking into a self-contained NAS to keep my local archive
| of almost 20 years of photos, Synology was always the most
| recommended solution but this policy was definitely the reason I
| did not purchase one.
|
| Unfortunately for Synology I will wait to see if it's a policy
| they stick to or if they might change it again in the future, I
| have all my backups synchronised to off-site storage (Backblaze
| and Glacier), so the local NAS was just a nice to have
| convenience instead of shuffling through different local disks...
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Is Synology owned by some evil equity fund? A healthy NAS company
| would have predicted the outcome before attempting to squeeze
| customers like this.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| For me, it's too late. I've already set up TrueNAS, and I found
| it a lot more user-friendly than I expected. Particularly now
| that ZFS AnyRaid is making good progress, I don't see myself
| going back to Synology.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Customers lost tend to stay lost.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| Don't get confused here: they didn't decide that their policy
| change was wrong -- they just didn't expect quite as much
| backlash.
|
| Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
| tristanperry wrote:
| Yes exactly - and they still have aging hardware, only 1Gb
| Ethernet and have recently nerfed H.265 support.
| rwmj wrote:
| Too bad. I switched to UGREEN (DXP6800 Pro) will likely stick
| with them now. It was easy to install an alternate OS (Fedora 42
| in my case) on it, and the hardware appears to be very nicely
| built.
| jamesu wrote:
| Also switched to a UGREEN, in this case the DXP4800 Plus.
| Truenas runs pretty nicely on it! One critique I'd have of this
| setup is it's a lot noisier than my older Synology setup, but I
| think that's more to do with the HDDs than the case.
| import wrote:
| I switched to Ugreen 2800 and very happy so far. Looks
| promising and n100 gives plenty of room for containers
| fasteo wrote:
| > According to some reports, sales of Synology's 2025 NAS models
| dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was
| introduced. What did NAS customers purchase instead?
|
| I honestly can't believe anyone at Synology thought this would
| turn out differently.
| nicce wrote:
| Change Synology with HP, NAS with printer and HDD with ink
| cartridge. How does that sound like?
| baobun wrote:
| The printer market is a cartel with everyone pulling the same
| bullshit. DIYing an affordable and performant printer is out
| of reach for the individual. Printer ink is not a commodity
| otherwise. Consumers don't really have alternatives.
|
| Desktop NAS market is very different.
| nicce wrote:
| > Desktop NAS market is very different.
|
| This was the first step or attempt to change that.
| consp wrote:
| How? You need to restrict the HDD sales and put them into
| the cartel.
| nicce wrote:
| Have you read the whole post...?
| rcxdude wrote:
| The thing is, you can't set up a cartel unilaterally. For
| this to work, they would need to get not only the other
| NAS appliance manufacturers on board (who clearly didn't
| and happily took the business that they were losing), but
| basically the whole PC and server hardware market.
|
| (I think some comments elsewhere in the chain got it
| right: they were calculating that they had enough brand
| lock-in and non-technical buyers who would not have much
| choice, as opposed to a largely technical userbase who
| could set up any number of options but were choosing them
| because they were both reasonable value and low
| maintenance)
| nicce wrote:
| > The thing is, you can't set up a cartel unilaterally.
| For this to work, they would need to get not only the
| other NAS appliance manufacturers on board (who clearly
| didn't and happily took the business that they were
| losing), but basically the whole PC and server hardware
| market.
|
| I understand the point, but HP's approach was not really
| based on cartel, while it might seem so.
|
| In the beginning, HP had great printers, and they used
| specific kind of ink. Back in that time, ink wasn't so
| complicated, so other manufactures started to sell it as
| well. So there was a moment, when you could get the ink
| from many different manufactures.
|
| But what changed, was that HP started to make their
| printers accept only very specific kind ink, which was
| controlled by the printers and HP, not by the ink
| manufacturers (compare to HDDs).
|
| They added one sort of digital signatures for the ink, so
| that printer reads signatures and does not otherwise
| accept it. So it does not matter whether these was cartel
| or not; it was just DRM lock-in. As long as the core
| product was desirable enough. I don't think this is a
| cartel in a traditional sense, because manufacturing of
| the ink cartridges wasn't that difficult otherwise, and
| it wasn't forbidden or highly regulated area.
|
| In Synology's case, this was just that they added similar
| checks for NAS. It does not matter if other manufacturers
| don't comply with, if core product is good enough.
| Synology thought that their product was good enough to
| play this, but apparently not.
| rcxdude wrote:
| You can do things like ink tank modifications and so on (I
| think there's even a few you can buy off the shelf with
| that option now), they're just rarely worthwhile unless
| you're doing quite a lot of printing.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| I don't think it's a cartel per se; that would require
| collusion to keep ink prices high.
|
| What seems to have happened with the 2D printer market is a
| race to the bottom to provide customers with the cheapest
| printers possible while hiding the high [recouped] costs of
| the ink. Many consumers are duped into buying a cheap
| printer and not realizing the high cost of printing that
| comes with it.
|
| This is why brands like Brother have been able to succeed,
| especially pushing their laser printers: higher upfront
| hardware cost and cheaper ink.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Printers don't take standardized cartridges. I think that was
| their mistake. They should have started with model specific
| HDD cartridges. Or just expanded models with USB enclosures.
| AndroTux wrote:
| > They should have started with model specific HDD
| cartridges.
|
| But that's exactly what they did. Just in software.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Like a good reason to not by an HP printer.
| 4fips wrote:
| Yeah, I was waiting for the DS1525+, but after it was announced
| and the HD restrictions were confirmed, I eventually decided to
| buy the DS1522+ instead.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Companies like that will always tried once they believe they
| are captured enough market shares. If I can influence that kind
| of decision, I will certainly advocate not to renew Synology
| gear parcs...
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| I think they were hoping they had enough "appliance operators"
| in their userbase that they wouldn't be able to go elsewhere or
| improvise with gear on hand. Which, given the people most
| likely to buy a prosumer NAS device is silly
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| An older Synology model, in my case. I just bought a DS1522+
| for this very reason. Haven't even provisioned it yet.
|
| So, thanks, guys, I guess.
| keraf wrote:
| Yet again another company hit by the consequences of being out of
| touch with their customers and fuelled by greed. Thankfully good
| alternatives exist, otherwise it would have sent a signal to the
| industry that this is OK.
| tristanperry wrote:
| Too little, too late. I finished my 48TB Unraid build a couple of
| weeks ago :)
|
| If Synology want me back as a customer, they also need to get
| modern CPUs, 2.5Gb or 10Gb Ethernet and reverse course on H.265
| too.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks Synology, but it's too late. I have found out TrueNAS and
| ASUSTOR (which can run TrueNAS if I want to). I'll continue from
| that path.
|
| Thanks for all the fish, that was an enlightening experience.
|
| OTOH, I wish them luck. They look fine for un-techy folks to
| store their data locally. Would like them to stick around. Also,
| competition is _always_ good.
| Netcob wrote:
| Same - replaced my smaller Synology with a UGREEN, put TrueNAS
| on it first thing, runs great. The HDD thing was only the final
| nail in the coffin, but before that, there were plenty of
| ridiculous "upgrades" that made products worse than in the
| previous generation. Literally removing features, or continuing
| to use the same outdated hardware. That's what companies do
| that don't think they have competition.
| bayindirh wrote:
| ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen
| processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a
| PCIe slot...
|
| You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but
| they have an _official_ video for that. On top of that, they
| connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its
| _own_ USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both
| interference and protecting the firmware from accidental
| erasure.
|
| All over great design.
|
| Yes, it's not cheap, but it's almost enterprise class
| hardware for home, and that's a good thing.
| sschueller wrote:
| ASUSTOR looks interesting but none of their desktop units
| appear have PCIe expansion slots so you can't put a SFP28
| card in there. It might be possible via expensive USB4
| adapter.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I misremembered that Gen3 hardware had a spare PCIe slot,
| my bad.
|
| You can either forego NVMe slots (which looks like an
| add-on card on [0]) and get the slot, or use one of the
| USB4 interfaces. OTOH, it has 2x10GbE on board, you can
| just media-convert it.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWgc8W-hIWM
| greggsy wrote:
| That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to
| boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an
| SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The problem is not getting TrueNAS on a disk. You can do
| it externally, but you need to disable the on board flash
| storage and change the boot order from the BIOS.
|
| That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot
| without a GPU.
|
| Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on
| board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I bought a small ASUSTOR NAS at work to check it out and I
| like it, it's definitely faster than comparable Synology
| units, however the camera system is quite underdeveloped
| compared to Synology. Synology's surveillance station rocks
| and ASUSTOR has a long way to go in that niche.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks, good to know. I just want my files, and a couple
| of containers doing my backups, that's all.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Do all the models support ECC ram? If not, does the website
| say clearly which do?
|
| I've been looking on and off for a smallish NAS for some
| use, but I'd really like it to have ECC. As it stands, I'm
| considering more and more compromising on the size aspect
| and getting some ASRock + AMD combo.
| bayindirh wrote:
| If I understood it correctly, all G3 hardware running AMD
| processors support ECC RAM. It's clearly labeled though.
|
| The one I'm planning to get is at [0]. It clearly states
| ECC RAM.
|
| [0]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86
| mfkp wrote:
| Same, but I went with minisforum (another well known mini-
| pc brand):
| https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-n5-us
|
| Installed unraid on it and it's been working great. So
| long, Synology.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Interesting how it seems a bunch of competition entered the
| market right as they did this as well. Unifi UNAS just came out
| and looks pretty compelling
| bayindirh wrote:
| Asustor is not new. I remember seeing it at the university
| (probably) a decade ago. It was a much simpler 4 disk unit
| without any screens or fancy specs. My professor told that
| the looks might be deceiving but it was a good unit.
|
| I took a note of them mentally at that point, but their
| latest gen hardware is something else. Since I'm a sysadmin
| by trade, having some of the features that I have in the
| datacenter at home is a compelling proposition for me.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| I have a ds920 4 bay from synology.
|
| It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is
| incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and
| I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I
| have it disabled for writes).
|
| But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em
| again.
|
| I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like
| that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just
| plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.
|
| I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much
| time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got
| a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I
| wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.
| calini wrote:
| What are the specifics of the SSDs you chose? I understand you
| have to go for specific types/models to make sure they don't
| melt down too quickly.
| mjburgess wrote:
| "build your own" just means buy a desktop PC and install an O/S
| kalleboo wrote:
| It's not common for a desktop PC to have 4-6 drive bays these
| days
|
| And besides the OS you need to install and maintain the apps,
| like backup software, photo management software, etc.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| > just plugs in and works as a tech guy installing TrueNAS
| likely isn't a barrier for you, and will almost definitely
| 'just work' more reliably
|
| there are plenty "barebones" NAS offerings that have the nice
| formfactor but you bring your own HDDs and OS
| stavros wrote:
| TrueNAS has solved that for me, by making my computer into a
| NAS appliance. It's great.
| 4lun wrote:
| >I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be
| like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool
| that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal
| faster.
|
| Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my
| homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking
| away with my most important files as I just want something
| simple that works and is reliable
|
| Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has
| at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a
| bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box
| that is mostly just an SMB share
| moepstar wrote:
| > a box that is mostly just an SMB share
|
| ...and supposedly keeps your files, safe - at least that what
| keeps me from tinkering too much with such a solution.
|
| Sure, having backups still is necessary, yet, a NAS to me is
| a means to an end..
| bryceneal wrote:
| I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works,
| but I am at the point now that setting something up with
| TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.
|
| Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I
| don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also
| fairly underwhelming for the price tag.
| rwmj wrote:
| UGREEN isn't really build your own. The hardware is similar to
| Synology (but I think slightly better made, and definitely with
| much higher specs). But unlike Synology it's easy to install
| your own OS. I used Fedora, but a lot of people are using
| TrueNAS which is almost as turn-key as the Synology software.
|
| For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and
| will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in
| future as long as they don't do anything stupid.
| computersuck wrote:
| Yes! Resist the enshittoscene!
| f4uCL9dNSnQm wrote:
| I wonder what will they try next. I guess they are really
| jealous of cloud service providers - that get recurring income
| - instead of just one time hardware purchase.
|
| "You have connected additional HDD. Please select which bay you
| want to use or try our 'Synology Super Subscription' to use
| both drives at the _same_ time ".
| AJRF wrote:
| They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to
| buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and
| got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively
| impacted them.
|
| Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.
| moffkalast wrote:
| "Synology fucks around and finds out, more at 11"
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Meh.. i do kinda forgive them. They tried, they lost, they
| reveserd their decision and hope to keep their customers
| (read:sales) happy. There are plenty of companies which would
| double or triple down their bad decisions and flatly tell the
| customer is the problem.
|
| Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes
| and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we
| could not put in any harddisk we'd wanted, but most of our
| customers did not really care, so we didn't as well. If you
| absolutely need superb storage you should stop using NASes
| anyway and get a far better (but more expensive) solution.
|
| Then again if i myself want some NAS functionality, i'd fire up
| a Debian with Samba using any hardware i want.
| Jaepa wrote:
| They did that though. They have doubled down and told the
| users they were wrong & that this was a needed
|
| Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a
| laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they
| not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR
|
| https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-
| removes...
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I stand corrected. Thank you. I was under the assumption
| you could use any type of drive from any brand now again.
| It appears i assumed wrong. Just use any SSD brand, but
| forced to use Synology branded platter HDDs is not quite
| acceptable.
| Jaepa wrote:
| My guess is that the confusion is very much the point.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| And they might only be backtracking to get a few more sales
| until re-applying the restrictions, feeling justified because
| that's how the devices were originally advertised.
|
| The key word in the article being "quietly" - they didn't
| apologize or even announce the change, it seems. The update
| also "Added an option to postpone important DSM auto-updates
| for up to 28 days after the first notification.", suggesting
| mandatory updates (not sure if those already existed
| beforehand, or if this is a hidden way of saying "introduced
| mandatory updates, but you get 28 days before we brick your
| device if you catch it in time").
| kstrauser wrote:
| I agree with the first.
|
| For the second, Synology has an option to apply important
| updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent
| security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret
| the new option to mean something like still installing the
| updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably
| to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with
| stories of bricked machines.
| rconti wrote:
| What I don't get is, what's the point of doing it quietly?
| Bad publicity hurt your sales.
|
| How is sneaking in a fix and hoping people notice going to
| help sales?
| osivertsson wrote:
| When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with
| their customers it also severely impacts _internal_ morale.
|
| Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support
| people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That
| feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your
| everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the
| magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.
|
| My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable
| employees unless they replace management with some internally
| well-respected staff that understands their customers well.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the
| internal support people would fight a decision like only
| allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?
| m000 wrote:
| A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability
| of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.
| bapak wrote:
| Doesn't make much sense to me? How would they argue that?
| "Don't ban third party HDDs, you'll earn less on sales
| _and_ you won 't have to pay me". Wut
| glenstein wrote:
| Evidently profitability went _down_ due to the change, so
| if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing
| it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it
| internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is
| coming from.)
| INTPenis wrote:
| It depends on who their target audience is. VMware for
| example have strict hardware compatibility lists because
| their target audience is big enterprise. But Synology being
| a consumer NAS, this decision was perhaps not wise. They're
| sort of standing in two markets. They need to make a
| decision as to which products are enterprise and which are
| consumer.
|
| I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict
| HCL.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in
| my case I do this kind of thing out of principle.
|
| Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince
| management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't
| work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when
| things are done well and relations are not adversarial.
|
| In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make
| a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about
| their NAS not working without first checking that it's
| actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top
| of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work
| in infrastructure, and some people were installing something
| that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any
| network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| You may enjoy this classic Raymond Chen post:
|
| _Blow the dust out of the connector_
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=4
| 0...
| palata wrote:
| > I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are
| done well and relations are not adversarial.
|
| That's how we _all_ benefit. But if a company wants to
| benefit more than you, they can. That 's how
| enshittification works.
| newsclues wrote:
| Because trying to explain stupid decisions is annoying and
| listening to endless complaints is demoralizing.
|
| Source: worked AppleCare
| glenstein wrote:
| My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| And by guessing, we mean _grasping wildly at nonsense_.
| pylotlight wrote:
| Why are people booing you, you're right.
| ryandrake wrote:
| People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of
| meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an
| unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their
| positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or
| better at business, or have better product ideas. They're
| generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went
| to the right prep school and college, they were friends
| with the right people already in the executive class,
| they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA
| school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they
| get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to
| retirement.
| glenstein wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that
| it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts.
| I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more
| clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.
| luca4 wrote:
| Yes and choosing a NAS brand is not something you change your
| mind like switching an android phone brand after 2-3years. This
| will stick quite a bit.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yep. I'd already started moving things out of Docker on my
| DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are
| perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology's police shoved me
| toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed
| never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device.
| It's going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell.
|
| In a few years, when it's time to replace this NAS, if
| they've demonstrated that they're serious about doing right
| by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology.
| And if not, I'll have already migrated my services off it
| such that I'll only need a "dumb" NAS and can choose from any
| of their competitors.
| kstrauser wrote:
| (Amendment: Synology's _policy_ , not _police_. If they
| have police, so far they haven 't shown up at my house and
| told me to stop it.)
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| A bad reputation never goes away either. Trust once lost is
| not something that returns easily. Some customers might
| forgive a company but many wont and any business willing to
| be this scummy will almost certainly do something else (or
| the same thing again in a few years).
| rickdeckard wrote:
| While I see where you're coming from, in my experience
| _ESPECIALLY_ Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-
| cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-
| scope".
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made _BECAUSE_
| Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all
| these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone
| stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and
| only support own HDD 's...
| WmWsjA6B29B4nfk wrote:
| Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being
| crazily overpriced.
| gertop wrote:
| If you compare the branded version vs the equivalent model
| from the manufacturer you'll find that there's a markup but
| it's minimal.
| supportengineer wrote:
| The sales team should be able to sell the value proposition
| using hard facts.
|
| "The official drives have a MTBF which is X longer which
| saves you Y amount of time and Z dollars, but the choice
| and the risk is up to you."
| cyanydeez wrote:
| This was greenlit as a cash grab first, justify support
| later.
|
| They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.
|
| If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as
| third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level
| prices.
| glenstein wrote:
| They could also oppose the change simply out of a belief in
| what's best for the customers, and an ethos of hardware
| compatibility. It would represent no change to their burden
| to continue the company's long-standing policy.
| toyg wrote:
| _> It would represent no change to their burden to
| continue_
|
| But it actually is: because sales must keep growing, so the
| support burden typically increases linearly - while hiring
| does not, more often than not.
|
| I've seen this at a few companies now:
|
| * CS teams get built, delivers great support
|
| * sales increase (partially thanks to that support, but
| there is no way to show it with metrics)
|
| * hiring in CS does not keep pace (because it's largely
| seen as a cost centre)
|
| * CS teams get overwhelmed and look for ways to downscale
| per-customer effort.
| barrkel wrote:
| It's a little bit trickier though, if you're selling
| hardware with a one off cost and not a subscription.
| Because your installed base grows even with flat revenue.
| The lifetime cost of CS (including the calls from people
| who need to be turned down) needs to be baked into the
| sales price, but that's a bet.
| toyg wrote:
| My experience is with enterprise software, where most
| products were born as shrinkwrap and slowly moved to
| other models, and I agree, it's not an easy problem to
| solve. Even if you size lifetime costs correctly (and
| very few people can), it is quite hard to scale a support
| org; even if one can see the storm coming, one might not
| be fast enough to be prepared for it for a number of
| reasons (geography, capital investment, training times,
| churn, brain drain, etc etc).
|
| That's why some big names have literally declared support
| bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support
| (google, amazon...).
| GolfPopper wrote:
| That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between
| 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the
| latter without doing the former. Synology actively and
| painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own
| drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to
| try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives.
|
| Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome,
| business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack
| on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| There's a misunderstanding, I don't defend Synology's
| decision.
|
| I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely
| that especially Customer Support would step up and complain
| about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product
| or Sales.
|
| Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are
| the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time
| per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes
| across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they
| highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he
| found the "silver bullet"...
| j45 wrote:
| Customer feedback is feedback from Sales.
|
| Post sales, the feedback comes from customers.
|
| Pre-sales, it might be heard from sales.
|
| R&D and Product might not get real world input or
| feedback as directly as the actual paying customers.
|
| Maybe it's just me.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >especially Customer Support would step up and complain
| about such a decision
|
| As a life long customer support person I disagree.
|
| Customer support would 100% complain about this as they
| get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely
| good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you
| are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon.
| R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed
| customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by
| issues like this, followed by sales.
| yason wrote:
| > Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut
| criteria to reject > support-requests as "officially out-of-
| scope".
|
| All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell
| their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine
| Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to
| fix your issue."
| mort96 wrote:
| At that point, you have essentially made it a policy
| already that you only support Synology-branded drives.
| Uvix wrote:
| "We only support Synology-branded drives" would have gone
| over a lot better, because we could have used non-
| symbology drives without support. Instead they actively
| prevented non-Synology drives from working.
| mort96 wrote:
| It would have been way better than what they did, I
| agree. However, it would've been pretty shitty from a
| user perspective still. I'd be pretty angry as a customer
| if customer support just refuses to help me with anything
| unless I buy Synology-branded drives.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Plenty of companies support products that work with
| third-party components. It's not realistic for them to
| support those components. The standard approach is to
| support the aspects they can control, and the customer is
| on their own for problems that involve the third-party
| component. Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger?
| No? Try one of ours. It works with ours? OK, our job is
| done, go talk to the company that made your charger.
| mort96 wrote:
| > Plenty of companies support products that work with
| third-party components.
|
| Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if
| you do use third-party components.
|
| > Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try
| one of ours.
|
| That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-
| party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all
| charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my
| phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful
| than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with
| third-party chargers".
| wat10000 wrote:
| That really depends on the company. Comcast would tell me
| to reboot my computer even after it was clear their modem
| wasn't getting a signal. Any decent company will help you
| out if you've made a good case that the problem is on
| their side, as in your example. But if your phone only
| fails on one charger made by somebody else, and works
| otherwise, they're not going to help you fix the charger.
| mort96 wrote:
| > Any decent company will help you out if you've made a
| good case that the problem is on their side, as in your
| example.
|
| Not if they follow yason's guidance of:
|
| > All they needed was criteria at which point they can
| tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with
| genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an
| internal bug to fix your issue."
|
| ---
|
| Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue,
| Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify
| that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing
| feature in the Synology software which tests for common
| failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives
| to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive.
| That's fine.
|
| But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you
| test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing
| against.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, it gets really messy in hardware support.
|
| Typically you'd want to tier it out
|
| 1. Fully supported drives: Synology branded
|
| 2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that
| meet x features
|
| 3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
|
| 4. Does not work: list of drives.
|
| There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy
| crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things
| going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when
| dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well
| supported drives is a must in that market. This said,
| only supporting branded drives sucks.
| viridian wrote:
| There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially
| support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from
| using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is
| actually significantly better for the user than just
| straight up preventing the use of non matching
| proprietary drives.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and
| dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically
| soulless already; they care more about their own immediate
| convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about
| the human being on the other end of the phone line.
|
| Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this
| way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service
| reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the
| lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive
| satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand
| are extremely important to the long term viability of the
| company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising
| the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw
| over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless
| customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on
| their computers instead of helping people, the company has a
| real problem.
| duxup wrote:
| I've worked in tech support at all levels. At most
| companies it doesn't matter what customer service is happy
| or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given.
| Customer support as an organization's opinion isn't
| generally valued at most companies.
|
| Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment
| I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams "It
| doesn't matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets
| me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If
| you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to
| do what you're asking then I'd be happy to do what you're
| asking."
| rickdeckard wrote:
| That's also my experience.
|
| That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-
| costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was
| unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for
| their effort and one thing they came back with was a
| metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
|
| Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to
| include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than
| other HDDs, but the price already includes possible
| support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
|
| Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C
| they cannot charge for support required to just provide
| the advertised core function of the product...
| wat10000 wrote:
| The cost of providing customer support is clear and easy to
| measure, while the benefit is nebulous. This leads to
| incentive structures centered around controlling costs.
| That means rewards for handling more calls, and thus
| punishment for taking too long on a call regardless of the
| merits. In such an environment, it is inevitable that the
| reps will care about their call times instead of the
| customer. "It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends upon his not
| understanding it."
|
| If you empower customer service to actually provide
| service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty
| reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying
| to cut down on support effort because they want to play
| solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many
| customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish
| them.
| chrbr wrote:
| I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original
| decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play,
| but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the
| dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from
| the places I've worked, but product usually drives
| everything, and the support staff has to deal with the
| consequences.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Yes, but it's not support wagging the dog, If they sell a
| NAS, the customer adds drives to it and already runs into
| issues requiring support, it creates cost which becomes
| part of a product problem.
|
| In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries,
| because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-
| functionality the customer has the right for a full refund
| of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24
| months!)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Agreed. Most of the time, customer support finds out about
| things product did from customers.
|
| "Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"
| pif wrote:
| > "Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"
|
| Because you wouldn't read it anyway.
|
| </OT>
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Let's be honest: because some developer forgot to send a
| message somewhere
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring
| theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle
| around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is
| indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an
| impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to
| leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.
| hsjsjdnbdbdb wrote:
| Sounds like you don't argue hard enough
| lazide wrote:
| Bosses often fire people who 'argue hard enough'.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Eh. I'm out of fucks to give.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've been at a couple of places where I've had similar
| experiences and I get to the point where I'll explain it
| once, and if they're not listening or discard the
| suggestion without really considering it, then I'll just
| wait for them to figure it out themselves.
|
| I get paid either way.
|
| I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to
| this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things
| get to that point.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've been there. After a while, I realized that they're
| paying for my advice. If they take it, awesome. If they
| don't, and I feel like I did a good enough job
| communicating my reasons, then that's their option, and
| their consequences.
|
| It's annoying, but either way I get paid.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I find I get stuck with the inevitable clean-up work,
| having voiced an opinion earlier. Learning that not many
| of these battles are worth choosing.
|
| There's no advancement, just bigger piles of bullshit.
| The goal is to get paid for shoveling the least.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I get it. The situational context makes a huge
| difference, too. Most of the people I advise now are
| Chief Something or Another. Their jobs are generally to
| take a whole lot of inputs and make business decisions.
| Maybe I'll say "I don't think we should do that because
| X", and they'll decide to do it anyway because Y is a
| higher priority. As long as it's not something truly
| horrible, like "let's sell our user list" or "we don't
| have time to hash passwords" or something else egregious,
| eh, fine. They asked for my advice, I gave it, and
| they're free to do whatever they want with it.
|
| But sure, even then it'd get super annoying if they
| _always_ ignored it. At some point it'd be obvious that
| my business goals don't align well at all with theirs, so
| maybe it's time to find a better fit.
| willis936 wrote:
| Having seen this story happen: sometimes a "leader" would
| rather their entire team quit than admit a mistake.
| 7bit wrote:
| It's not his position to argue hard. That's what the
| product owner or manager is paid for.
| eecc wrote:
| Hey, in my case I've been kicked out a couple times
| already... it doesn't always pay
| jacquesm wrote:
| That seems to be a rather short-of-support conclusion based
| on the evidence available.
| GrumpyGoblin wrote:
| At my company there is a team like this who are solely
| responsible for a significant piece of internal
| infrastructure.
|
| People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't
| be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not
| how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them
| exactly how to do it and that it does work.
|
| Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later
| and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of".
| Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close
| to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
|
| They're a fun bunch.
| taneq wrote:
| Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a
| bad decision (or even a decision that's seen to be bad)? In my
| experience internal morale often suffers _before_ the customers
| catch on.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let
| them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to.
| The reality is that often such leaders can come out net
| positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to
| the ground because they extracted out everything in a short
| term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But
| at least the company and its products disappear. It's
| evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some
| kind of internal hero.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite
| technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that
| I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete
| own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently
| wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by
| their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at
| your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the
| longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do
| not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber
| that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of
| money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty
| much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.
|
| I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking
| at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going
| to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little
| bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time
| before they crash and I don't want to end up with an
| unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the
| storage business.
| reactordev wrote:
| There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with
| RPI's having sata shields and other SoC boards that are
| readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but
| so is the decision to not ever use them again...
| deelowe wrote:
| Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of
| any such claims.
| dangus wrote:
| 500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat.
|
| It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at
| competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since
| Synology peaked in popularity.
|
| Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something
| like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of
| NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's
| customer base certainly has the technical know-how to
| accomplish that.
| tzs wrote:
| Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe.
|
| I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME
| SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of
| the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.
|
| I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD
| not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost
| storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an
| RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4
| to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant,
| but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5
| would actually give much noticeable performance
| improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to
| replace the 3.
| dangus wrote:
| I guess this is a side note personally don't think any of
| the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are
| using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type
| of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general
| compute it's hard to make it make sense.
|
| I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of
| solutions that just make more overall sense.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a
| niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not
| even a year and a half after.
|
| Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs,
| spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you
| have the server in your bedroom / living room, install
| modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for
| much less.
|
| For use cases where consistency and future support is key
| (education and industry) you really can't beat a
| Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top
| class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the
| latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's
| even still being manufactured.
|
| For all their products they commit to long term
| availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active
| production until at least January 2036 (assuming the
| company itself exists of course).
|
| For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing
| commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks
| you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to
| replace it.
|
| For most other companies you'd need to buy a different
| piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but
| now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need
| to support and maintain going forwards.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage /
| predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for
| making me aware.
|
| And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were
| never good there, not even when they got out for the
| first time. The form factor is what won over people back
| then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly
| substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and
| driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last
| time I looked, admittedly).
|
| And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an
| SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the
| broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test,
| drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
| reactordev wrote:
| Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent
| speed.
|
| For $300 I could get an ITX to run.
|
| So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who
| wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you
| heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I'm uncertain of why $40 vs $300 is even a point of
| debate on HN. The latter is a one-time investment and you
| likely can expand it a bit i.e. add a 2.5" or M.2 drive
| later.
|
| What's the gain of running 12 RPi, exactly? Do you do
| research work requiring distributed low-cost computing?
| reactordev wrote:
| I do distributed computing, and doing it at home for low
| costs without cloud spend helps...
| somehnguy wrote:
| Are virtual machines not an option for your use case?
| From the outside looking in they appear like they would
| be easier to manage and far less costly.
| reactordev wrote:
| They are if the GPU can be attached. I avoid virtual
| machines in favor of container workloads from containerd
| for this reason. It's easier to attach Mali GPU and do my
| work than it is to find cash in this economy for a dozen
| RTX's.
| somehnguy wrote:
| A "server" doesn't need to mean a pizza box with 15k rpm
| jet engine fans.
|
| My server is repurposed desktop hardware in a desktop
| tower case and is nearly silent except for the subtle
| hard drive noises. The hardware cost next to nothing and
| is far faster and more capable than any pi (except the
| pio of course which wouldn't be used anyway).
| xp84 wrote:
| An ITX isn't the competitor for a Pi. I'd suggest a USFF
| prebuilt. I use an HP Elitedesk and Dell and Lenovo each
| have similar tiny PCs. They're nearly silent or
| completely silent, and half the size of a Mac Mini. Cost
| is about $150 for hardware that is more than enough for
| me, plus they can have 1-2 SSDs and a hard drive inside
| the case.
| xp84 wrote:
| Clarification: They're about half the height of the OLD
| Mac Mini. Better comparison: They're the size of a
| typical hardcover book if you chopped it to be square.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| You're running the pi and drives in a plastic take away
| container off usb power for that price.
|
| At the very least you want the case and psu. At which
| point the question is which cpu+motherboard+ram combo do
| you want in that case. The rpi is one of many such
| options and is actually quite expensive for the amount of
| cpu+ram you get for the price.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Does that $40 include everything to make the Pi work?
|
| After looking at lots of small board options, I got a NUC
| for $110 to be the brains of my NAS.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| > I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled
| a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted
| not even a year and a half after.
|
| They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche.
| The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux
| system really doesn't have a competitor at its price
| point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I
| had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my
| local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a
| few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up
| the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the
| dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python
| program to log the data from the sensors to a
| spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and
| it really sparked her interest.
|
| I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in
| accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning.
| Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet,
| and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole
| GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in
| very different directions, hence this dropped off my
| radar. Thanks for the reminder.
|
| Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN
| comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I
| just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get
| Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount
| small (or big) fans, and all that.
|
| And don't get me wrong, I _love_ tinkering myself but
| after reading people 's experiences for a while I just
| thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 -
| $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a
| 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful
| and with 100x the storage space".
|
| Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to
| get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I
| bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if
| it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling /
| VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.
|
| So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives)
| seem mostly unbeaten.
| reactordev wrote:
| On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc
| ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write
| directly to frame buffers. I don't need Linux. I don't
| really need a kernel...
|
| Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-
| PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just
| putting the box outside the box):
|
| Coffee table Digital Touch map.
|
| Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo
| battery.
|
| ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.
|
| Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.
|
| Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.
|
| Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.
|
| Wearables.
|
| Playing with high density distributed computing. (More
| than 5 machines)
|
| Where the mini pc really shines is:
|
| Storage. (NAS included)
|
| Media PC (TV sold separately)
|
| Gaming Console
|
| Personal Cloud (docker + nfs + caddy + <insert
| personalized preferences>)
|
| General Autopilot (sensors that need GPU support).
|
| You have left over old PCs and don't want to open your
| wallet...
| pdimitar wrote:
| Pretty cool, thank you. Those things have been not on my
| mind for a while, thanks for the reminder.
|
| I was commenting in the context of why people choose them
| for servers but I recognize that I did not make that
| clear.
| ozim wrote:
| If you don't have use for GPIO or some ISC^2 sensors and
| want to use it as a server then yes you should get
| something else.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Userspace-accessible GPIOs, I2C, SPI, PCM, and UART on a
| system that runs Linux. My employer uses them for a bunch
| of our hardware-in-the-loop test automation, with the
| GPIOs used for CAN, relays for switching various signals,
| vibration table control, etc. The USB gets used for SCPI
| device control (power supply, multimeter, etc.) and DuT
| connection. It's a lot cheaper to use a Pi for this than
| it is to use a small form factor x86 machine with a bunch
| of USB-<protocol> dongles.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Power consumption is a major draw (pun intended) to keep
| Pis and other SBCs of that kind of form factor employed.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Valid, thanks. But to what degree? The light bulb that
| runs 18h a day in the kitchen likely draws the same power
| that my mini form factor Optiplex 3060 does.
|
| To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless.
|
| I am much more concerned about data center power usages,
| especially in the age of LLMs.
|
| Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept
| preaching we should stop using electric kettles because
| it's bad for the planet. While the 3 plants in her
| hometown amounted to ~83% of all power usage and ~92% or
| all pollution. Boy, was she unhappy when I did that
| research and pointed it out to her.
|
| Pi-s / SBCs are I suppose very good for computing out
| there in the meatspace, where you might need a battery
| because sometimes power stops for 6 hours? Could be that.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| Wait how did she suggest people heat water for tea/coffee
| instead? I've never heard an environmentalist attack
| electric kettles before.
| pdimitar wrote:
| She did not offer any alternatives. That was also a very
| funny element to her preaching. She saw a class of
| students and thought she can signal her virtues.
|
| She was, shall we say, disappointed with the response.
|
| Also this was some 15 years ago.
| reactordev wrote:
| Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched.
| I'm sure there's someone squeezing 300 out of one.
|
| The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it's not that fast.
| The point isn't whether an RPI is a Synology device. The
| point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other
| than Synology.
|
| Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would
| also do just fine.
| procaryote wrote:
| Do you need it to?
| dangus wrote:
| Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their
| customers' appetite for alternatives.
|
| The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus
| of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and
| abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the
| rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I
| buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?)
|
| Their core customer always had the _ability_ to set up
| their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn 't
| really want to have to do that when an easier solution was
| available.
|
| This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose
| of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the
| customer base doesn't know how to do on their own.
|
| For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own
| TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour
| including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who
| is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends
| to be highly technical to begin with.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I
| didn't want to tinker with the backup system for my
| family's data. And when I read about the drive
| requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that
| tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really
| screwed up.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a
| trend toward less openness, toward greed (including
| removing capabilities from units they've already sold)
| and toward a decline of their business as a result of
| tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a
| reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking
| for in a NAS.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology
| has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot.
| There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The
| default external ports are usually 1g and most others
| have moved to at least 2.5g.
|
| I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a
| lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and
| there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too.
| Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
| mrob wrote:
| Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any
| reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error
| correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of
| this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever
| reaches the disk.
| reactordev wrote:
| The RPI CM5...
| mrob wrote:
| The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details.
| ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-
| die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers
| between the RAM and the memory controller are not
| protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or
| triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable
| error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's
| on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but
| still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC
| RAM.
|
| [0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-
| module-5/?varia...
|
| [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=229644
| 9#p2296...
|
| [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irrya
| x/raspb...
| reactordev wrote:
| The chip is the memory controller...
|
| Yes it's on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don't spread
| fud. There isn't a dedicated chip because there doesn't
| need to be.
|
| Broadcom BCM2712
| mrob wrote:
| In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum
| posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe
| is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting
| supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault
| injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's
| working?
| j45 wrote:
| ECC is very helpful.
|
| Having used both, I can't help but notice how NAS'
| routinely run just fine without it.
| mrob wrote:
| >NAS' routinely run just fine without it.
|
| How do you verify your data to confirm that?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| ZFS helps, and many people are okay with the risk of a
| cosmic ray causing a bit flip while data is in flight
| once in a blue moon.
|
| I currently manage four NASes (two primary, two backup
| replicas). Only one has ECC RAM. And I'm okay with my
| setup.
|
| ECC is great to have, but it is oversold by some as being
| absolutely required for all storage devices, IMO.
| turnsout wrote:
| For truly important files (photos), I'll take the slight
| added expense of ECC for a little more peace of mind that
| old photos aren't being gradually degraded with every
| resilver or scrub.
| j45 wrote:
| Good point about ZFS. Having more than one copy helps
| too. ECC is great when possible.
| j45 wrote:
| My first thought is the same way everyone's laptops and
| desktops and cellphones without ECC data do?
|
| I'll share any more that come to mind.
| j45 wrote:
| Multiple backups.
|
| How many files have you personally seen gone corrupt on
| non-ecc?
|
| ECC originated first out of server grade servers. Self-
| hosting rarely hits that level of demand.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Use a RAID5 and hope the write hole doesn't eat it all =(
| izacus wrote:
| This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync"
| and equally silly.
| reactordev wrote:
| What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync
| works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? "Why
| Lamborghini when Honda" is equally as silly yet I've seen
| them race head to head. Honda won.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't
| think it's silly.
|
| But building your own doesn't scale to all the things.
| For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same
| person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z.
|
| They will eventually need to buy some products. So there
| will generally always be a market for pre-packaged
| solutions.
|
| For example: someone building an app may need network
| storage. They may not also want to block the building of
| the app on the building of the network storage.
| reactordev wrote:
| In which case enjoy your Synology DRM and don't complain
| that an RPi or ITX DIY build isn't comparable...
| wat10000 wrote:
| There's nothing silly about building your own. What's
| silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to
| be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person
| with a lot of free time to build their own.
|
| If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go
| wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up
| with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't
| have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and
| building our own is not a realistic alternative.
| dgacmu wrote:
| It really isn't, though.
|
| 1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing
| approximately equivalent functionality
|
| 2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also
| provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as
| easy.
|
| I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology
| boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time
| when Synology offered something quite better than the
| alternatives, but that time is no longer.
|
| My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled
| and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to
| the races. It cost more than buying the individual
| components would have, but it had zero headache and was
| cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from
| Synology.
| izacus wrote:
| I looked at all of those and they came nowhere near the
| convenience and software that Synology provides.
|
| It's literally the "Why would you buy Dropbox when I can
| glue it together with rsync" level of ignorant comment,
| completely ignoring how behind most of those solutions
| like TrueNAS are in time cost.
| pbronez wrote:
| Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a
| whole new NAS product line. They don't run arbitrary apps
| but for basic storage on the network they look pretty
| solid.
| sylens wrote:
| I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage
| device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But
| if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure
| storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run
| as a server.
| nottorp wrote:
| For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine
| with one ssd.
|
| For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of
| which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may
| be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and
| forget about it, they aren't.
|
| But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is
| larger than the computer box...
|
| And three, the latest Pis have started to require active
| cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
| reactordev wrote:
| My point is there are alternatives, like you said.
| Arainach wrote:
| The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are
| plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running
| TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs
| attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single
| device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power
| and cooling, and easy management.
| reactordev wrote:
| The alternative is anything not Synology that can do NAS
| with SATA SSD or NVMe storage. That's it. Anything more
| than that is in a class of enterprise servers that
| deserve its own discussion over a simple DS1522+
| thedougd wrote:
| Exactly the route I took. I had an aging tower machine
| full of spinning disks running on an old LSI adapter that
| was doing hardware raid. They were out of space and I
| began to get nervous the LSI adapter could die and I
| would trouble replacing it. Decided JBOD for the future.
|
| External drives were on sale, I bought several and setup
| with a RPI. Lots of headaches. It took effort to iron out
| all the USB and external disk issues. Had to work out
| alternative boot. Had power adapters fail for the RPI.
| Had to enhance cooling. etc. Kept running into popular
| Docker containers still not having aarch64 variants.
|
| I finally replaced the RPI with a used Dell SFF. Kept the
| USB drives and it's been solid with similar power draw
| and just easier to deal with all around.
|
| Though I am considering going back to a tower, shucking
| the drives (they're out of warranty) and going back to
| SATA.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think most LSI adapters you can get a battery backup
| for. I've got one on mine, plus a spare battery sitting
| on a shelf somewhere. I admit when I put the system
| together for the first time I was a little hesitant to go
| with hardware RAID but it's worked out fine so far.
| crote wrote:
| I reckon the issue is more in replacement than transient
| data loss: what are you going to do when you can't find a
| replacement controller card, or it only available at
| ludicrous prices?
|
| With a proprietary on-disk format you can't exactly hook
| them up to any random controller and expect it to work:
| either you find a new one from the same controller
| family, or your data is _gone_.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Replacing your RAID controller is already major
| maintenance, so there's going to be downtime. I wouldn't
| be opposed to just wiping the drives and restoring from
| the latest backup. I routinely do this anyway, just to
| have assurance that my backups are working.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And a risk! I've had this on a premium machine put
| together specifically for that purpose and when the raid
| controller died something got upset to the point that
| even with a new raid controller we could not recover the
| array. No big deal, it was one of several backups, but
| still, I did not expect that to happen.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power
| adapter is larger than the computer box...
|
| You say that like it's a mystery why people by then but
| NUCs are fantastic little PCs.
|
| The power adapter is just hidden under the desk whereas
| the NUC is sat on the desk (or behind the monitor/TV).
|
| It's the same as with Mac Minis and Apple TV. And other
| devices of that ilk.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I've had mixed experiences with my NUC. It has what I
| think is a firmware bug that causes display output to
| fail if you connect a monitor after boot. Very annoying
| if it ever drops off the network for some reason.
|
| There seems to be a Windows-only update tool available
| that might fix it, but that's rather inconvenient when
| it's used as a server running Linux! No update available
| as a standalone boot disk or via LVFS. So I haven't
| gotten it fixed yet because doing so involves getting a
| second SSD, taking my server offline to install Windows
| on it, just to run a firmware update.
| K7PJP wrote:
| Both the Mac Mini and the Apple TV use internal power
| supplies.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Ah yes, of course they do. Doh! Thanks for the correction
| procaryote wrote:
| If you use a couple of magnetic disks, the pi is fast
| enough. The disks will be the bottleneck. There are sata
| cards that allow up to four magnetic disks, and where you
| power that card which in turn powers the pi. It's very
| doable.
|
| It's of course more work to set up than synology, and if
| you want a neat box, you have to figure that out yourself
| crote wrote:
| You'd be surprised. A single spinning rust drive can hit
| 200MBps for sequential access, so that's plenty to
| saturate its 1Gbps NIC.
|
| However, in my experience with a Pi 4, the issue is
| encryption. The CPU simply isn't fast enough for 1Gbps of
| AES! Want to use HTTPS or SSH? You're capped at ~50Mbps
| by default, and can get it up to a few hundred Mbps by
| forcing the use of chacha20-poly1305. Want to add full-
| disk encryption to that? Forget it.
|
| The Pi 5 is _supposed_ to have hardware AES acceleration
| so it _should_ be better, but I 'm still finding forum
| posts of people seeing absolutely horrible performance.
| Probably fine to store the occasional holiday photo, but
| falls apart when you intend to regularly copy tens of
| gigabytes to/from it at once.
| procaryote wrote:
| The Pi 5 is working well for me with encryption. I tried
| dding a cold file to /dev/null now and got
|
| 1293685061 bytes (1.3 GB, 1.2 GiB) copied, 5.14336 s, 252
| MB/s
|
| which is good enough for me on magnetic disks
|
| It apparently hit 387MBps for a few hours while running
| the montly raid scrub. I run luks on top of mdraid though
| so the raid scrub doesn't have to decrypt anything.
|
| scp to write to the encrypted disk seems to get me
| something in the 60 - 100MB/s range.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| So long as the storage system is capable of serving a
| video stream without stuttering, that covers the 99%
| performance case for me. Anything beyond that is bulk
| transfers which are not time sensitive.
| ekianjo wrote:
| you dont even Pi and sata shields, just buy a SOC that has
| direct M2 ports...
| j45 wrote:
| Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to
| maintain and manage.
|
| The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement
| without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a
| datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home
| setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives
| sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went
| off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing,
| and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the
| amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to
| rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored
| from a full backup.
| j45 wrote:
| I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be.
|
| You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one
| fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or
| local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one
| spare isn't a bad thing.
|
| If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing
| raid only uses the same size to keep the raid.
|
| Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can
| take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR.
|
| Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely
| on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible
| cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS.
|
| Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a
| Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to
| cost a ton, it's considerably come down market.
|
| Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I
| could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent
| enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering
| off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have
| to anymore.
| delfinom wrote:
| Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was
| probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured
| solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured
| solutions with no need for a computer science degree.
| ArchD wrote:
| RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in
| your RAID/ZFS much more easily.
| _joel wrote:
| https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-
| kill-y...
| ArchD wrote:
| This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk
| data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using
| checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data
| corruption.
|
| Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-
| RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For
| example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB
| server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to
| ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB
| server without any checksum before it gets passed on to
| ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair
| the corruption.
|
| So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused
| by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results
| in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even
| though some people may consider the non-ECC probability
| to be already low enough.
| _joel wrote:
| Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer.
| It's not required but a good idea.
|
| "There's nothing special about ZFS that
| requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any
| other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc
| without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you
| used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this
| risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported
| ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum
| the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before
| writing to disk, thus reducing the window of
| vulnerability from a memory error. I
| would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM.
| Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data,
| such as ZFS."
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure
| there are people who do it and create content about it
| (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's
| quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making
| content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for
| actually running a high availability system that just works
| with minimal fussing.
|
| There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small
| and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I don't know if their brand is that great. I have been using
| synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to
| use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the
| underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now
| run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep
| increasing exponentially. And they don't support enterprise
| SSDs (SAS/U.2).
|
| So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next
| NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no
| brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many
| people in a similar state of mind.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and
| was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary
| drive announcmement.
|
| It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes
| an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly
| already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going
| back.
| fortran77 wrote:
| You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays
| to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel
| status lights, support for applications like surveillance
| cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
| rpdillon wrote:
| I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but
| I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past
| 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together
| my own system, it would probably take several days and
| cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not
| familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that
| might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in
| one hour seems like hyperbole.
| tracker1 wrote:
| When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as
| much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute,
| memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run
| ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s)
| to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run
| everything in containers under TruNAS directly.
|
| For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster
| box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off
| Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it
| and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a
| OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via
| Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity
| module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are
| handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which
| works really well.
|
| Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next
| to no reason to buy a Synology.
|
| [0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-
| class.html
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an
| hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to
| provide a solution to users who are more interested in
| the verbs than the nouns.
|
| They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has
| worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of
| their users. The difference is, for all their rent-
| seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to
| lock people out of installing their own hard drives.
|
| Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid
| move.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Once you have the case, an hour or two is pretty
| reasonable... you can even have your boot device pre-
| imaged while waiting on the case to get delivered.
|
| Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to
| run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster
| (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying
| another Synology product.
| volkl48 wrote:
| I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front
| panel status lights particularly key features in their
| home NAS.
|
| I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm
| upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or
| longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap
| doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.
|
| -----
|
| As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for
| the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd
| want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will
| generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC
| hardware from the past 5-10 years.
|
| It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.
|
| For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was
| pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.
|
| It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with
| it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on
| a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for
| everything.
| cm2187 wrote:
| In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very
| fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or
| 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A
| common problem apparently.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to
| power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that
| your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to
| replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the
| rebuild without a powercycle.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you're worried the hard drives won't spin back up, I'd
| say you should instead spin them down regularly so you
| know that risk is basically zero. If you're worried the
| power supply will explode and surge into the drives when
| you turn it on, you should not be using that power supply
| at all. Any other risks to powering it down?
|
| And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive
| and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered,
| you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap"
| for $20. And if you use hard drives you _should_ already
| have one of those laying around, imo.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Agree, you should consider replacing your drives on your
| primary server (backup servers we can debate) as soon as
| you start seeing the first SMART problems, like bad
| sectors. If you do regular data scrubbing, and none of
| these problems show up on the other drives, I'd argue the
| risk that they fail simultaneously is fairly low.
| fgonzag wrote:
| Hot swap drives are necessary on data centers where you
| don't want to have to pull the whole server and open the
| top cover just to replace a disk.
|
| But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it
| down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're
| going to resync the array anyways.
|
| I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a
| very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my
| disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB
| enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in
| raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and
| reliable storage in a very small footprint.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there
| is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one.
|
| What are you thinking of, here? Just a scary feeling?
| qzw wrote:
| Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure.
|
| In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem
| that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready
| drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to
| find. The software is probably already on github. The
| toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but
| that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't
| find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| they're pretty clearly referring to _their_ use case and
| not everyone's. i think people are mostly talking past
| each other about this. there isn't one feature set that
| matters for everyone, so of course a synology is perfect
| for some and for others it can be replaced with "junk".
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| ... and "it only takes an hour?"
|
| LOL, clearly an amateur. That's longer than it took me to
| build Dropbox. /s
| whizzter wrote:
| Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of
| missing out on a webgui or installing something like
| FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days.
|
| I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the
| markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from
| the bottom by cloud storages.
|
| RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E
| port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but
| does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really
| have that?
|
| I think the biggest factor might be that case
| manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough
| margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to
| take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
| tracker1 wrote:
| There are several drive tray cases for ITX and mATX that
| you can choose from. As for a Web GUI, you can get TruNAS
| Scale running relatively easily and there are other
| friendly options as well... so yes.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I started with FreeNAS or whatever flavor of it existed
| well over a decade ago. It was enough hassle that I went
| Synology because the stuff I like tinkering with isn't
| the storage of my most important data. Everything I do
| with NUCs, Pis, VMs, etc is somewhat ephemeral in that
| it's all backed up multiple times and locations.
|
| I spent five hours debugging a strange behavior in my
| shell with some custom software this morning and
| submitted a bug report to a software vendor that was not
| the expected cause of the issue. I feel great about it. I
| used to feel great about my Synology NAS, too.
|
| Qnap, Ugreen, whatever else, we'll see when my current
| model is due for replacement. Synology will have to
| perform pretty much miracles before then for me to
| consider them again after three generations of their
| hardware that were all very satisfactory. What a major
| mistake.
|
| They weren't perfect, but they were perfect for my needs.
| Not anymore.
| leokennis wrote:
| I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too
| simple for anything except accessing some files remotely
| via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech
| babysitting project".
|
| DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom
| to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature
| makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in
| to one specific app.
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, the GP comment doesn't seem to be their target
| market. You nailed the appeal though.
|
| Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel?
| I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.
| dymk wrote:
| As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I'm
| using for backups to be secure. I'm not saying I need to
| be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important
| security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'd be _far_ more weary of the application level services
| provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context,
| as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you
| update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the
| applications get far less scrutiny.
|
| What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS
| to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this.
| Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local
| compromised application on another machine that is on the
| same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own
| solution to all this was quite simple but highly
| dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off
| and it is only connected to my own machine running linux,
| not to the wifi or the house network.
| jghn wrote:
| Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to
| store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand
| roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the
| desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple
| things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on
| rails.
|
| Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with
| some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while
| satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on
| it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as
| a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And
| a few other odds & ends over time.
|
| Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a
| resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and
| replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
|
| All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll
| grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is
| likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a
| lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder
| a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
|
| You and I must have a different idea of "fire and
| forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell
| running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've
| never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
| jghn wrote:
| Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had
| a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and
| did state that this was beyond what most people would
| consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close
| to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
|
| Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd
| happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I
| ever had to do.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| As another anecdote, I've had a cheap Synology NAS for
| 6yrs now and I only really touch it once a year to make
| sure everything is up to date.
| surlyville wrote:
| Same here. Still rocking a DS415+ from 2015. Had to
| solder a 100ohm resistor to work around the Intel Atom
| C2000 flaw. Has had a new set of spinning rust in that
| time too. It's also connected to UPS so will power down
| if there's an extended outage. Stuck on DSM 7.1 but it
| does the job.
| sixothree wrote:
| It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM.
| It really is something special. It's worth a small
| premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the
| concerns as everyone else here and will be considering
| other options.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _It 's hard to find any other products that compare to
| DSM._
|
| A friend has a Synology NAS and I have a QNAP NAS. In my
| experience, QNAP's QTS (QuTS Hero if you want ZFS) is
| directly comparable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| QNAP has more or less caught up with Synology, but for a
| very long time Synology had a substantial edge.
| aftbit wrote:
| I find that Linux NAS and router project require
| essentially no babysitting. You do have to do some
| initial setup work, but once it's done, there's no
| maintenance (other than replacing failed hardware) for
| years and years.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Can you run a standard Linux distro on them? Is their OS
| custom or based on OpenWRT or something else?
| jdhawk wrote:
| You cannot run a standard distro (easily) - their
| software (DSM) is linux based and they expose most of the
| stock services like Docker and libvirt
| MBCook wrote:
| Why would you want to? That's not what they're for.
|
| The kind of person who wants to do that is squarely
| outside their market. And you'd be paying a real premium
| for nothing.
| jauer wrote:
| Trivially on their (and qnap's) amd64 systems at least.
| There are some quirks where they are more similar to an
| embedded system than a PC, but it's not a big deal.
| Things like console over UART (unless you add a UART) and
| fan control not working out of the box, so you set it to
| full speed in bios or mess with config.
|
| Debian has docs on installing on at least one model of
| their arm boxes:
| https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology
|
| I run Debian on a few different models of qnap because
| their hardware occupies a niche of compact enclosure, low
| noise, and many drives.
| hadlock wrote:
| Nope, the purpose of a Synology unit is to be about as
| complex as a toaster. Put it on the shelf, plug it in,
| make sure auto-updates are enabled, and forget about it
| until it sends you an email in 5-10 years that one or
| more drives is full/failing. I bought a synology almost
| 10 years ago and it's been purring away in a closet
| somewhere and never causing problems the entire time.
|
| If you want a device to tinker with, this is the wrong
| product for you.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah, just put together a TrueNAS system. Mine has been
| running for 10 years. Drive replacements and upgrades are
| so easy with ZFS.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I have been running TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) for ~10 years
| now and never had issues. There is the risk that TrueNAS
| gets rug pulled and no longer is free for non commercial
| use, but so far it has been fine.
| turnsout wrote:
| The thing is, I'm still running FreeNAS 9, not even
| TrueNAS. If they rug pull, not only will there be forks,
| but the old versions should just continue to work!
| Aurornis wrote:
| > What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is
| quite technical
|
| Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different
| company that made popular consumer products and had
| leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went
| through a period of trying to lock down the platform for
| profits, which everyone hated.
|
| The root cause was that the technical leadership had started
| to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to
| the brand that they wouldn't leave, and that the customers
| weren't smart enough to recognize that the artificial
| restrictions had no real basis in reality.
|
| I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a
| decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for
| consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved
| it. "Can you believe that? They'll buy anything we tell them
| to." was the paraphrased statement I remember.
|
| Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard.
| Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the
| CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back
| to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with
| Synology.
|
| Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me
| during this period to open Hacker News and see threads
| complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred
| a job search for me.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| > a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits,
| .... their customers were so loyal to the brand that they
| wouldn't leave
|
| Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the
| cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't
| need to be locked in.
|
| You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are
| planning on turning customer hostile.
| glenstein wrote:
| A good habit to practice is to see how far you can go
| reconciling apparent contradictions with charitable
| interpretation. I think in this case, I can see "brand
| loyalty" on a continuum ranging from "feels good about
| product" to "so completely loyal that lock-in would be
| redundant". The furthest extreme would produce an
| effective contradiction, but anything short of that can
| make sense of the term while leaving space to understand
| lock in as a rational, or at-least non-contradictory
| action.
|
| I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing
| with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of
| the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is
| staged, and profits flow (for better or worse).
|
| The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes,
| which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines.
| They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far
| as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a
| costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But
| people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping
| on.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises
| the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition)
| don't need to be locked in.
|
| In this case, the customers were loyal to Synology for
| the NAS but not the hard drives.
|
| By locking them in further, they thought they could
| capture their customers' hard drive purchasing, too. They
| thought the brand loyalty would allow it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat
| at the table," would've prevented technically competent
| leadership from testing customer hostile business
| decisions?
|
| > Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me
| during this period to open Hacker News and see threads
| complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it
| spurred a job search for me.
|
| Indeed. I believe that if you're a _shareholder employee
| owner_ , you are likely incentivized to not kill the golden
| goose versus folks at the top making decisions
| unilaterally, but you also need some ability to say no to
| bad decisions. Like Costco, employee and customer happiness
| first, profits after.
|
| (big fan of employee ownership and control contributors,
| aligning incentives and outcomes and all that jazz)
| yabones wrote:
| Absolutely agree. I'm a huge fan of co-op type ownership
| structures for this reason. They might not be moonshots
| or unicorns, but they always have longevity.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Do you think more employee ownership and control, a
| "seat at the table," would've prevented technically
| competent leadership from testing customer hostile
| business decisions?
|
| The only peers at the company who were enthusiastic about
| the decision were the ones who were buying more company
| stock and wanted it to go up. They thought that anything
| that increased the bottom line would increase the stock
| price, and therefore they were on board.
|
| So, no, I don't think increased employee ownership solves
| anything.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Do you think more employee ownership and control, a
| "seat at the table," would've prevented technically
| competent leadership from testing customer hostile
| business decisions?_"
|
| Employee control doesn't reduce investor pressure for
| increased profitability. Employee ownership just means
| that the employees are now the ones exerting the investor
| pressure and if anyone thinks employees will be willing
| to take less total compensation (why? "Loyalty to the
| company"? "Solidarity"?) instead of hopping to a new job,
| well, good luck with that.
| walkabout wrote:
| Careful about reading too much into "employee ownership".
| It can be and at least sometimes (I suspect usually, at
| least in the US) is structured such that it doesn't
| really work the way you might think.
|
| 1) The shares can be _non-voting_ shares. LOL.
|
| 2) Only a relatively small portion of the overall "pie"
| has to go to employees for them to be able to say they're
| "employee owned". There can still be non-employee owners
| involved to a large degree.
|
| 3) That slice of the pie will tend to be weighted so
| heavily toward those near the top of the org chart that
| in practice it may be more like "upper-management owned"
| anyway.
|
| I think the main reasons companies in the US choose it
| are:
|
| 1) Propaganda. "You're an owner!" It's a way to trick
| unwise employees into working harder for (effectively)
| nothing extra, and even into exhorting others to do the
| same.
|
| 2) Probably some kind of tax-avoidance reasons.
|
| 3) As a vehicle for a kind of stock-compensation system
| without having to take the company public or do
| occasional odd maneuvers with investors for that stock to
| be _de facto_ liquid for employees.
|
| IME there's zero percent more meaningful "ownership"
| involved than, say, Google folks who receive stock as
| part of their comp (and nobody calls Google "employee
| owned"). It's a misleading name for the structure.
| kortilla wrote:
| Employees are just as stupid as the CEO. The CEO is an
| employee owner as well and has compensation very highly
| tied to company equity.
|
| There are advantages to employee ownership. Preventing
| bad business decisions is not one of them.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not a fan of employee ownership. It's the antithesis of
| diversification. You're now depending on one company for
| both your salary and your investments.
|
| Work for a salary. Invest in a diversified portfolio
| that's not tied to your employer.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Being a partial owner of the company you work at doesn't
| preclude you from managing your own investments. Employee
| ownership doesn't mean an ESPP.
| gopalv wrote:
| > would've prevented technically competent leadership
| from testing customer hostile business decisions?
|
| Technically competent doesn't always mean empathetic.
|
| The decisions can sometime look like the xkcd cartoon
| about scientists[1].
|
| [1] - https://xkcd.com/242/
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > Can you believe that? They'll buy anything we tell them
| to.
|
| Sounds very much like "doing a Ratner":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or a Zuck.
| wnevets wrote:
| > "Can you believe that? They'll buy anything we tell them
| to." was the paraphrased statement I remember.
|
| Apple is only company that is allowed to get away with
| that.
| calenti wrote:
| Complacency about customers requires a monopoly, which
| Synology does not have.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| Sonos?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I almost bought their junk. I went to a store nearby that
| was promoting them (I live within 10 km of their
| headquarters and felt like supporting the locals). That
| didn't really work out though: cloud not optional. For a
| bunch of speakers. Account required. So, no sale.
| Salesguy was all pissed and I should 'get with the
| times'. No thank you. My hardware is mine.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I'm assuming it was Sonos, I know you can't confirm but it
| fits pretty well. Hope you landed somewhere with management
| that isn't stupid.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding
| which seems like a baffling position to take given their
| audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265
| and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology
| OS because they remove the transcoders.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| You have to pay for the licenses if you intend to ship
| those, they have decided they'd rather not.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| So, they're at the phase of clawing back customer value
| to increase their profits.
|
| Enshittification is a bold strategy when you have solid
| competition.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| This is why I don't use NAS from them. I don't understand
| why I would want to be limited in these strange ways. I
| have multiple NAS that I have created myself for myself, my
| family and my friends. If I want to have h264, h265, AV1,
| or whatever I just install it.
|
| I have zero respect for software patents and will not be
| structuring my life differently to respect them.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically
| because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a
| happy decision so far.
|
| When reading up and watching videos for what I should get,
| everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS
| products." But everything I looked at showed they were
| coasting on their status and had actively worsened their
| products in recent revs.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Oh, so they _are_ the Apple of NAS products. /s
| mszcz wrote:
| Same here. I recently started thinking about upgrading my
| Synology NAS to something newer they offered. When I read
| about the hard drive restrictions I thought no-one would be
| _that_ stupid. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be
| 100% true. I mean, what the fuck?
|
| So, I started to look around and landed on Ugreen. They
| offered a NAS with more RAM (and the ability to upgrade),
| better connectivity (2.5GbE + 10 GbE), faster CPU, ability
| to install custom OSes (like TrueNAS), the OS resides on a
| separate, user-replaceable M.2 NVMe drive. All that for
| less money. Plus, since I control the OS, there's no way
| they can push some garbage it's-for-your-own-good-wink-wink
| update down my throat.
|
| Bought it, didn't even start their OS and put TrueNAS Scale
| on it and I've never been happier. The caveat here is that
| I use my NAS as a NAS - no apps, no docker, no photos app.
| All that is on a separate box in the rack.
|
| For me to ever trust Synology again I'd have to see some
| punitive action towards the idiots there that thought that
| whole HDD restrictions mess was a good idea. Even then, now
| that I've had a look around what else is available, I'm
| pretty sure I'll stay clear for a couple of years.
| markstos wrote:
| AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet,
| either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct
| their course.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| They probably concluded at this point it wouldn't mean much
| and they are somewhat right. Every day they fail to address
| the situation that apology needs to be a lot bigger and it
| can only get so big.
| raintrees wrote:
| I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a
| convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very
| simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up,
| versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the
| decades.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago,
| and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically
| unusable on the anemic CPU it came with-- it would spend
| multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for
| a few gigs of digital photos.
|
| After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the
| other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which
| quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.
|
| I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm
| pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices
| are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be
| something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but
| built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS,
| CoreOS, Talos, etc.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is
| quite technical_
|
| As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical
| people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making
| decisions a pointy haired boss would make
| ddtaylor wrote:
| > What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is
| quite technical
|
| They probably used bad data to make the decision. They
| probably thought they had accurate and high quality
| information that led them to believe nobody cared about this.
| My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of
| customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-
| benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little
| bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge
| margins on vendor lock-in drives.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Technical leadership is no different than any other
| leadership. Data is used to justify a decision that's
| already been made, not make the decision.
| edem wrote:
| What are the alternatives that you are considering?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less
| charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so
| many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to
| troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off
| and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a
| real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually
| working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires
| a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual
| contact with the support people in your organization to
| understand this. If the people answering phones and chats
| didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make
| more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or
| whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers
| who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to
| work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in
| advance to test with.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Are you saying Synology's move to support first party drives
| was a good thing? Plenty of companies deal with unpredictable
| hardware and, in fact, Synology has for years, in part thanks
| to standards.
| izacus wrote:
| No, the person you're responding to isn't saying that at
| all.
| mixermachine wrote:
| We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3
| (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface. No product is perfect but
| these interfaces are very well tested and billions of
| machines run as expected with them. The move from them was
| purely for money reasons.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Based on my experience dealing with SFPs I highly suspect
| they looked at their bug tracker and concluded that 13% of
| the sketch-ass mystery drives were causing 50% of their
| labor expenditure.
|
| And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases
| where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle
| out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the
| fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up
| handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to
| code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if
| the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
|
| Of course, the money side of things almost certainly
| motivated them to see it one way...
| seg_lol wrote:
| Everyone claiming it was support driven is 100% making
| stuff up.
|
| Show this was anything other than a money grab so the
| Synology was the sole supplier for drives.
| jerf wrote:
| This is 21st century American business. Synology wasn't
| going to choose their drives for maximum reliability
| after a long, hard, and most importantly _expensive_
| benchmarking period, they were going to stuff the
| cheapest drives they could buy from suppliers in there
| and charge more than any other drive. There 's a very
| reasonable chance this would have produced lower quality
| outcomes and more support calls in the long run than
| random drives purchased on the open market.
|
| Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors
| were earned the hard way, you might say.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 21st century Taiwanese business.
| mixermachine wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't SFP evolve pretty heavily
| here? The newest version is from --2022-- 2016. There are
| also quite high data-rates involved. SATA and Smart are
| stable for a long time. Smart has some special commands
| depending on manufacturer but the core set of functions
| always work.
|
| I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list"
| of HDDs that are well known to cause problems. "Model X
| of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something
| else."
|
| They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to
| buy our own overpriced drives". TBH this is quite sad. I
| recommended Synology to some people before... Feels like
| I have to walk back on my word.
| kapone wrote:
| Your experience with SFPs does not translate to hard
| drives. Hard drives are very, very, very standardized.
| SFPs are not. Yes, all SFPs have a standard hardware
| interface, but the optics coding varies wildly.
|
| Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money
| grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't
| work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware,
| even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com
| and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.
|
| HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to
| work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces
| (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.
|
| Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got
| greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the
| customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that
| unique".
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Open source alternatives such as OpenMediaVault are able to
| support virtually any hardware. That's no excuse for a
| company like Synology
| jlarocco wrote:
| It helps that they can tell people to debug the problem
| themselves.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| I've been using them for 4 years across enterprise level
| HDDs, personal HDDs, portable HDDs, never seen any issues
| or differences in experience other than speed.
| gertop wrote:
| From every success story like yours, how many people have
| tried it but given up and returned to a commercial
| solution because of a bug in OMV and absence of support
| except for a community forum filled with rabid (and
| usually clueless) fanboys?
|
| I know I'm one of those people.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| So can Synology. "I'm sorry, sir, but your XYZ drive
| doesn't appear on our list of recommended/supported
| drives. I'll need to refer you to XYZ Corp for this
| issue. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
|
| That's all they ever needed to say. Instead, they said,
| "Fuck you, pay me."
| varispeed wrote:
| > That feeling of being ignored despite having given this
| company your everything for many years.
|
| People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder,
| never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't
| fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment
| spreadsheet says no.
| teekert wrote:
| I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require
| a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open
| source some important component (or make ssh work normally?).
| Show that you do really listen. Repent.
|
| It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after
| they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people
| apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License
| Free". So that's more in-touch.
|
| I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with
| poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba
| over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys.
| Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of
| quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key.
| I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal
| Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong
| assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call
| actually.)
| stirfish wrote:
| What if you were to run your guest ssh in a container with
| the relevant volumes attached? I can't recall how the base
| ssh works with Synology DSM, but everything interesting I do
| with my NAS is done with containers.
| teekert wrote:
| I usually run containers by writing some yaml (and then use
| podman/docker compose), I've started and then quit trying
| to use whatever interface Synology offers, call me stupid
| but I find it intimidating.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| There are way too many companies where higher ups and marketing
| will refuse to listen to the engineers about what people
| actually like about their products.
|
| See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into
| software that doesn't need it
| alphazard wrote:
| This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions
| before a decision is made and before the consequences are
| revealed. Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for
| some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the
| right answer was easily accessible. There's probably some
| people who got this right who could take a shot at running
| things, but you can't know without having the dissenting
| opinions in writing ahead of time.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I'm curious, do you know of examples of companies that lost
| their best engineers despite reversing course on a shitty
| policy?
|
| My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp.
| in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than
| searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more
| senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will
| probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There is a time span between the policy is comitted
| internally and the time that policy is reverted. In
| Synology's case it's probably more than half a year, in other
| companies it could take a full year or more to reverse
| course.
|
| Half a year is plenty enough to move away.
|
| Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they
| don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying
| the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when
| profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is
| usually a good idea.
| kijin wrote:
| At the very least, some people who otherwise wouldn't have
| actively looked for other opportunities might start doing
| so. This can have consequences several months down the
| road, even if they don't quit immediately.
| DerpHerpington wrote:
| It's this level of out of touch with their market that gives me
| zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their
| Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times
| according to their package manager, rather than offer users the
| option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done
| over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor
| lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They deserve their
| own downfall, utter corporate stupidity.
| devilbunny wrote:
| > killed their Videostation product ... rather than offer
| users the option of paying to license video decoders
|
| YES, yes, a million times yes.
|
| Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer"
| products are essentially teasers to get the people who select
| the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions
| like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not
| putting your best foot forward.
| mguerville wrote:
| Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that
| the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product
| and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I
| expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to
| achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with
| official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| It's an interesting lesson.
|
| I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:
|
| * This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a _ridiculous_
| cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of
| this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for
| the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for
| the exit '.
|
| * ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the
| _process_ is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny
| extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more
| integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks
| are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as
| brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I
| think it 's a bit misguided, but there is _an_ explanation
| available that has little to with 'cash grab /
| enshittification' principles.
|
| Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're
| right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're
| right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the
| necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until
| you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.
|
| So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.
|
| If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on
| communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd
| hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.
|
| But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and
| they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily
| serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of
| "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.
| kapone wrote:
| The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right
| way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from
| whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers.
|
| See the problem there...?
| gosub100 wrote:
| To me it's obvious why they initially chose to use validated
| hardware:
|
| 1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted
| untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their
| brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their
| Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working
| array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity
| in the process.
|
| 2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used
| market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or
| swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of
| support.
|
| 3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist.
| Their customers generally are willing to spend more in
| exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this,
| especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who
| want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it
| every day), it made sense to control the quality of the
| drives.
|
| However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being
| exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and
| they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology
| has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support
| for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it"
| techies.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Horowitz talks about this in-depth in "What you do is Who You
| Are." There are waypoints in a company's life that can change
| their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees,
| their family and company's existence on your shoulders, it's
| easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your
| culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn't happen.
|
| https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/
| ponooqjoqo wrote:
| We shouldn't normalize referring to managers as leaders.
| Leadership didn't make this decision, management did.
|
| High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are
| not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I also believe that this peek into the mentality of the
| organization leadership makes doubt in customers if the
| organization can be trusted again. I, personally, will think
| more than twice before choosing them again. This will be
| several years of recovery for the reputation, if it ever
| happens at all. Synology is in the box called 'squeezing
| cutomers for money' and the customer has no incentive to spend
| any time or money to test if the classification is still valid.
| Will stay there, despite this step. There is doubt that they
| changed their way of thinking. They only reacted to the
| repercussion to THIS specific action of theirs, that became
| measurably very bad for THEM. It was not like they revised
| their action after the outcry, no. They had to bleed, they want
| to stop THEIR bleeding, not making it good again for the
| customer. benefit for the remaining customers is just a
| coincidence here. I am not hopeful for their change of
| mentality. Which could be something disappointing to hear for
| faithful employees.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > it also severely impacts internal morale.
|
| I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of
| unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset
| me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
|
| The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played
| I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
| dheera wrote:
| The ship has sailed. I'm eyeing the Unifi UNAS 8 which ships
| this month.
| pfexec wrote:
| Would you say the same thing about Apple?
|
| The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and
| will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate
| choice.
|
| Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working,
| Mac to provision it.
|
| The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the
| criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on
| Mac fan sites).
| dheera wrote:
| Because if you say something bad about Apple you get
| downvoted to oblivion.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Synology has equivalent competition. Apple doesn't.
| setgree wrote:
| "That feeling of being ignored despite having given this
| company your everything for many years" is a strong argument
| against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you
| loose in a minute.
| liquid_thyme wrote:
| Lock-in actually helps internal development. If you're
| targeting fixed hardware, writing software gets a lot easier.
|
| Your "guess" is not logical.
| dstroot wrote:
| In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the
| leadership who did this _not being impacted or punished_ is
| even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see
| leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale
| rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it's much worse
| for morale.
| supportengineer wrote:
| If their branded hard drives are so good, they needn't be
| afraid of their customers having a choice.
|
| If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter
| problems, that's on them.
|
| Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the
| pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make
| change.
| asdff wrote:
| Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a
| careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to
| understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions,
| but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This
| can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing
| chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud
| services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are
| really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled
| garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that
| garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards
| technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in
| marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are
| building their own NAS because they will just see the spec
| sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is
| nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very
| performant to begin with.
|
| And while this doomed business is existing, something new
| emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100
| nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with
| spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of
| people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
|
| Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a
| bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
| devjab wrote:
| I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who
| would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace
| where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was
| cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's
| the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I
| used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because
| it's easy.
|
| If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it
| was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology
| is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously
| try to push their own HDD's.
| asdff wrote:
| It is also competing for simple solutions like an old mac
| mini and DAS. Now that would truly be an "iphone" like
| experience for someone already in the mac ecosystem since
| time machine lets you choose another mac on LAN as a backup
| endpoint with little fuss, and now you can make use of
| Airdrop for mobile devices. AFAIK backing up to a linux box
| is not nearly so trivial at least with still using Time
| Machine.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| This really feels like they hired a study from one of the big 3
| and this the recommendation they came up with.
| haunter wrote:
| Is there a decent (budget) NAS with 2.5" HDD support? I have like
| ~30 1TB 2.5" HDD sitting on my shelf and would love to put
| together at least one NAS with them but a Synology slim is
| like... 500EUR? Not even all the disks worth that much
| indigo945 wrote:
| Buy any NAS and a bunch of 3.5" installation frames for 2.5"
| disks? They're like a dollar each, or you can even 3D print
| them.
| calini wrote:
| HA HA HA HA HA I really hope the C-suite that decided this gets
| no bonus and hopefully a salary cut this year. Stupid, anti-
| consumer measures like this need proper consequences so they stop
| happening. Until then, let's keep boycotting companies with anti-
| consumer practices.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| You obviously dont understand capitalism. They'll probably get
| an increase in bonus with company layoffs occurring.
| esskay wrote:
| Too little, too late. You'd have to be nuts to willingly go back
| into their walled garden now.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Critics say the entire episode has damaged Synology's
| reputation. The company seemed to believe that after QNAP's well-
| known ransomware troubles, it could tighten control of the market
| without losing customers._
|
| Granted that there might be some bias at work as a Synology
| customer, but I heard a lot more about Synology's lockdown
| efforts than I heard of QNAP's ransomware troubles.
| sschueller wrote:
| Damage is done, will take a lot more on their end than just
| reversing a decision they may implement again in the future.
|
| Maybe open source your code or do something that is the exact
| opposite to vendor lock in in addition to the decision reversal.
| julcol wrote:
| After 17 years I dropped Synology recently. I sold my 2 NAS.
| Company changed focus. Did not like the walled garden and old
| linux base.
|
| I moved to a second hand beefed-up laptop and a terramaster disk
| pack connected vi USB. Same wattage.
|
| It does take some effort, but now it is done. I like to tinker
| anyway. I pulled up Proxmox with a bunch of containers doing
| SMB/SNF per share.
|
| Just like with Synology, I just look a regular emails with
| successful backups. edit: typos
| xd1936 wrote:
| Plus, a built-in UPS!
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I wish the article put actual numbers or evidence of declining
| sales. I agree that reduction of sales is the most likely cause,
| but if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it
| becomes poor journalism.
| baobun wrote:
| Hmm, I couldn't find a source for that elsewhere, just slop
| rereporting in loops.
|
| If they had insider leaks I would imagine they mentioned that
| aspect so it's possible that this part is derived from
| speculation.
|
| I just went ahead and editorialized the title with the
| insertion of an "allegedly" since the sales drop part is
| unsubstantiated.
|
| > if they say that sales plummet without actual proof it
| becomes poor journalism
|
| Proof is a high ask. Evidence would be great. But here yeah,
| waving the premise of the article away with "some reports say"
| is hardly journalism.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| It's not you, it's just that we've allowed "journalists" to
| get away with this for so long. They essentially write
| opinion pieces as new articles with absolutely no research. :
| Synology is a private company, so I guess they can't use
| stock filings or stock prices, but they should at least quote
| something substantial and add to the discussion.
| ByteDrifter wrote:
| I used to recommend Synology everywhere, but ever since the hard
| drive lock issue, I'm now trying to dissuade people from buying
| it. The policy reversal is a good thing, but trust isn't
| something you can restore simply by "reversing" it.
| ChrisNorstrom wrote:
| Too Late. Synology and Unity are learning a very hard lesson.
| When you screw over your customers, then reverse course, it often
| causes long term damage because people got a chance to see your
| true behavior and feelings towards your customers.
|
| And if you did it to us once, you're capable of doing it again.
| To me personally, the "Synology" brand is permanently tarnished.
| For them to do what they did signals serious moral problems with
| their decision makers, and the entire move sounded desperate for
| profit. Just type "alternative to synology nas" and you'll get a
| whole bunch of options.
| dspillett wrote:
| Sans "we care about your privacy" lie and multiple clicks to
| object to "legitimate interests" in staking you around the
| Internet: https://archive.is/0qhXB
| throw-10-8 wrote:
| Damage is already done.
|
| It takes decades to build consumer trust, and one stupid MBA
| driven idea to ruin it.
| Havoc wrote:
| I'd imagine UGreen - trying to break into this market - probably
| sent them a thank you gift.
|
| What a wild unforced error...
| leakycap wrote:
| What is to say they won't add a subscription feature to access
| your NAS box in future?
|
| Shocking that it took them this long to reverse course on this
| strongly negatively-received move. The leadership should go.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Awesome. That's how it's done. They offer people some bullshit
| take-it-or-leave-it deal, and people leave. I really wish this
| would happen more often. Normalize this.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I mean, I've never come across Synology branded HDDs. I would
| have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate. Doesn't make
| sense to me. They would have had to introduce additional
| identification checks just for "re-branded as ours". Nope.
|
| And part of the magic of a NAS is not necessarily having to have
| matching hardware. In addition to other design basics like using
| drives from different batches to minimise the likelihood of
| multiple failures within data-fatally small time frames.
|
| Monoculture is inherently more fragile; it's antithetical to good
| storage design.
| immibis wrote:
| > I would have assumed they're just re-branded WD or Seagate.
| Doesn't make sense to me. They would have had to introduce
| additional identification checks just for "re-branded as ours".
| Nope.
|
| Correct. They were, and they did. The goal was profit - the
| rebranded drives cost more. Just like printer ink.
| leakycap wrote:
| The article says they reversed the ban, but the release notes
| seem to indicate a temporary change while more _certified_ drives
| are brought into the market.
|
| This doesn't seem permanent.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| After all the complaints and upheaval created after their silly
| management/leadership decision, they finally understood
| something.
|
| As an owner and administrator of many Synology NASes I agree that
| Synology offerings are a bit underpowered compared to what is
| available in the market (from H/W point of view), but the ease of
| use and peace of mind within the Synology ecosystem (DSM
| software, apps) outweighs whatever drawbacks they have.
|
| If Synology management takes the decision to refresh their H/W
| with new CPUs, NICs and more RAM, I'm sure they'll stay on the
| market ;-)
| palata wrote:
| When something like this happens, you fire the CEO. I don't care
| how the decision process works internally, and how much they
| thought it would "help" the customers and were all in good faith.
| The company fucked up, the company has to acknowledge that, and
| the way to show it is to fire the CEO.
|
| To change a company culture, you change the CEO. My view of
| Synology today is that they will pull the rug for their own
| benefit, at my expense. There is no way I trust _this_ Synology
| ever again. Now I 'm on TrueNAS, so I'm already lost to them, but
| I also tell everybody not to trust Synology. And that won't
| change if they don't show me that the company has changed.
|
| Similar to Sonos, I feel.
| submeta wrote:
| Too late. Sold my Synology NAS a few weeks ago and moved on to
| TrueNAS. - I absolutely despise when companies get greedy and try
| to get the maximum out of their customers. Adobe does this. Apple
| does this. And some other companies.
| liquid_thyme wrote:
| If lockin allows you to ship quality software and tight
| integration across your product line, there is probably a
| rationale there. People defend Apple - presumably because of
| this.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I installed Seagate Ironwolf _Pro_ in my Synology last night.
|
| It complained it wasn't compatible.
|
| If _that_ drive isn 't compatible than I don't know what
| legitimate criteria possibly could be.
|
| (Yes, I get the criteria is "what we prioritized to test" but my
| point stands,it's the high end of consumer-available NAS drives,
| not a compute model or a shucked SMR drive:)
| immibis wrote:
| IIRC it was official Synology-branded drives only. And they
| cost about twice as much as the exact same drives without the
| Synology brand.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Yeah, the NAS wants to talk to a customised firmware. Which
| is what made it so transparently a money grab: they were
| reselling drives with a firmware modification at substantial
| markup.
| timmg wrote:
| I think it would be pretty cool if Framework made a TrueNAS
| targeted NAS box.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| The decision to restrict 3rd party harddrives may be part of the
| reason why sales (allegedly) plummet, but i'm guessing lack of
| innovation also plays a big part.
|
| Synology has been resting on the laurels for years. They had a
| "hit" with DSM 6, then did mostly nothing for a decade, released
| DSM 7, and again, nothing but minor things since. On the hardware
| side of things, they're mostly still using decade old hardware,
| but i guess that matches the Linux kernel they're using, which
| was also EOL close to a decade ago.
|
| Meanwhile the NAS market has been flooded by viable alternatives
| with better hardware, equal or better software, and usually
| cheaper. UGREEN and others have released more or less drop in
| replacements, and Ubiquiti released the UNAS line, and while it
| doesn't work as an application server, will run around circles
| any similarly specced (drive wise) Synology in raw file transfer
| performance, for half the price.
|
| I'm guessing the 3rd party drive removal was simply just the
| final push that caused many people to switch to something else.
| Transcoding removal was likely also a big driver, as many people
| also use their Synology NAS as a Plex server.
| layer8 wrote:
| Exactly that. Their hardware and software hardly improved over
| a decade, instead they dropped features. The whole HDD ordeal
| and researching alternatives also made me realize that I'd
| rather have ZFS (even at the price of less flexibility with
| mixing drive sizes). Synology reversing course on the
| proprietary HDDs therefore won't win me back.
| eecc wrote:
| Oh nice, thanks for mentioning UGREEN. I had a quick look at
| the website and it looks fairly cheap. I wouldn't trust their
| software but the base system comes on an MMC, does it mean I
| can flash it with TrueNAS or Unraid?
| its_notjack wrote:
| Yes, their units come with a HDMI out, and you can connect
| them up to install onto them like any other server - but if
| you ever want the (admittedly very, very good) factory
| software back on them I'd recommend imaging the internal
| storage first as I couldn't find a way to get their OS
| installed back afterwards.
| neogodless wrote:
| While I'm using UGOS happily, yes you can install other OSes.
| For better or worse they have a very active Discord server
| with a ton of great information.
|
| The base software is modified Debian Bookworm and it's been
| stable and pleasant to use.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, see here: https://nascompares.com/guide/truenas-on-a-
| ugreen-nas-instal...
| f4uCL9dNSnQm wrote:
| It is 100% normal x86 mini-PC, just with HDD bays.
| crtasm wrote:
| Can you run Unraid on MMC? Its licensing is tied to the GUID
| of a USB stick.
| nolok wrote:
| Their btrfs is using a very old branches with tons of change,
| which is probably a strong reason why they're locked on that
| old kernel.
|
| They need to do something about it urgently.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| They're too busy using an EOL Docker engine that hasn't seen
| a security update in 16 months.
| coisnepe wrote:
| As someone else mentioned here, I'd wager a large part of
| Synology customers were people who'd have had the technical
| ability to setup their own NAS server but didn't want to
| bother, instead electing a "setup and forget" solution. I know
| that's who I was when I bought my first Syno DS several years
| ago.
|
| A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into
| the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpriced,
| outdated hardware that weren't worth DSM's ease of use. Got
| Ubiquiti's UNAS with a couple of HDDs, a Beelink mini PC, and
| for a little time and roughly the same budget of a DS, got
| something far superior in specs and basically matching in ease
| of use.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Similar, but slightly different story for me. I ended up
| buying it as an enthusiast 'Apple-grade' product where UX was
| there to do something I would be able to do on my own. Then
| they got high on their own supply and started to believe they
| can be as restrictive and up charging as Apple, forgetting
| that they're still a product for primarily fairly technical
| people.
|
| Also, for all server needs I'm running a Raspberry Pi at a
| single digit fraction of the ongoing power use of my
| Synology, and it just no longer makes sense to have this
| weird rare platform as my base when I could just be running
| things on Debian and systemd.
|
| More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have the
| mental capacity and willingness to maintain something like a
| Synology. The only large content I back up are my family's
| photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider
| that to be money well spent.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have
| the mental capacity and willingness to maintain something
| like a Synology. The only large content I back up are my
| family's photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I
| consider that to be money well spent.
|
| I'm more or less in the same situation.
|
| I no longer use a NAS for my "daily driver", and as such it
| made sense to skip Synology and instead go for the cheaper
| option, which in my case was the UNAS Pro (only model
| available at the time).
|
| Next to it sits an "old" Mac Mini M1, which hosts my Plex
| server, with storage provided by the UNAS over 10Gbps
| ethernet.
|
| Everything else i might at some point in time have used the
| Synology for, has instead been delegated to iCloud.
| Documents, photos, and everything in between is stored
| there, and each laptop makes a backup with Arq backup to
| the NAS as well as another cloud provider.
|
| My NAS today is literally just an advanced USB drive
| attached to a server, and that was also part of my
| considerations at the time, just getting a DAS and plugging
| that into the Mac Mini M1, but ultimately the UNAS Pro
| (with 10Gbps networking) was cheaper than a Thunderbolt
| DAS, and i already had a switch capable of 10Gbps.
|
| I made a similar "journey" some years back, where i removed
| pretty much everything cabled from the network, and instead
| moved everything to WiFi, and instead doubling down on
| providing "the best" wifi experience i could, which today
| means WiFi 7 with 2.5Gbps uplinks, hence the 10Gbps switch.
|
| My network is 100% private. I don't expose ports to the
| internet, meaning maintenance is no longer a "must do"
| task. The only access is via Wireguard, which can be done
| with an always on profile that routes traffic for that
| specific subnet, but more realistically is mostly never
| used. The most remote streaming is done via a site to site
| VPN from my summerhouse to my house, where i can stream
| Plex over.
| al_borland wrote:
| > I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to
| be money well spent.
|
| I use iCloud Photos for my photos, so I don't have to
| manage storage on my phone, while always having access to
| everything. I quite like it.
|
| I also have a Synology NAS for other things.
|
| A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me to also
| backup my photos to the NAS, because I have no idea how
| Apple is backing things up. I might be willing to pay for 3
| copies for just my photos, but is Apple going to do that
| for all users of iCloud without advertising it? Probably
| not.
|
| I'm not sure the best way to go about doing an initial
| backup to the NAS, or the ongoing changes. I think it also
| gets a bit messy with Live Photos... which is another
| reason why iCloud Photos is so appealing, if it can be
| fully trusted.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Apple uses a mix of Google Cloud and AWS, as well as
| their own data centers. As for Google and AWS, they are
| using multi geographic redundancy, and I can only assume
| they do that for their own data centers as well. The data
| in the 3rd party data centers is encrypted.
|
| That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data
| is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data
| center, but in multiple data centers, so that if one data
| center completely vanishes, your data will still be
| available.
|
| That being said, it's always good to make a local backup.
| I use a tool called Parachute Backup
| (https://parachuteapps.com) on my Mac to automatically
| export photos from Apple Photos to my NAS. It also works
| on "iCloud optimized storage", so it won't just backup
| size optimized photos.
|
| I've tested it against Photosync (https://www.photosync-
| app.com/home) as well as a manual export of unmodified
| originals, and in a library consisting of 180k photos and
| videos, I had 300 compare errors, most of which were Live
| Photos, that are not exported identically.
|
| Both Parachute and Photosync offers the ability to export
| unmodified originals along with AAE files, so that if you
| need to rebuild your Apple Photos library, everything
| including undo history is preserved (AAE files contains
| edits).
|
| Tools like Synology Photos and Immich (and more) only
| exports the "latest" version, whatever that may be,
| meaning if you have edited the photo on your phone, that
| edited version is exported, and if you later restore from
| your NAS backup, there is no undo history. In other
| words, they apply the edits in a destructive way.
|
| For backing up from the NAS to another location I use Arq
| Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com), which also supports
| backing up iCloud Drive files that are cloud only.
| al_borland wrote:
| Parachute Backup looks very promising, thanks. I'll have
| to spend a little more time later checking it out and
| seeing if that's the direction I'll go.
|
| I do have my NAS backed up to Synology's cloud backup
| service. I don't love it, and it seems expensive, but it
| was easy to setup at the time and gave me some peace of
| mind for that data. The big issue I see is that I feel
| like I'd be stuck buying another Synology to restore of
| my current one fails.
| qmmmur wrote:
| I just backup the entire photo library with kopia. Is
| that as good as what you do?
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| It depends.
|
| Do you use iCloud optimized storage, or do you download
| originals to your machine ? Kopia only backs up what it
| can see, and in case of iCloud optimized storage, it only
| backs up size optimized miniatures and not the original
| files.
|
| Second, I haven't researched this, but iPhoto used
| resource forks and extended attributes quite extensively
| for its library, and if the same is true for Apple
| Photos, Kopia will not pick up those, but Arq will. That
| was the very feature that caused me to purchase Arq all
| those years ago.
| bitdivision wrote:
| They did have a bug that corrupted images on import I
| think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45274277
|
| So maybe don't fully trust it.
| dagmx wrote:
| You're talking about completely different aspects of the
| product though?
|
| The second top level comment also suggests that this the
| cameras manual suggests the camera itself might be
| corrupting things.
| bitdivision wrote:
| Sure, it's a different part of the product, but still
| worrying that it may have happened at all.
|
| Looking at it further though, you're right, this probably
| wasn't apple's fault.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| The nightmare scenario is that Apple locks you out of
| your Apple ID for some reason.
|
| Luckily, Apple also provides a pretty easy backup path
| that lets you have a local copy, if you have a Mac and a
| NAS:
|
| - setup your Mac's photos app and iCloud to download
| everything locally
|
| - setup Time Machine backups from your Mac to a NAS
|
| That's it. You get 3-2-1 (your Mac, iCloud, and your NAS)
| and can get a copy of your data even if your Apple ID
| gets locked out.
|
| Standard disclaimer, only the Time Machine copy is a true
| backup (ex if you delete a file by mistake, only Time
| Machine can help you restore it; iCloud is a sync, not a
| backup). That said, for me personally, this scheme (local
| copy + cloud copy + NAS backup via Time Machine) takes
| basically 0 work to maintain once setup and gives me
| peace of mind.
| al_borland wrote:
| I thought about going this route, but I have 73GB of
| photos currently, which will only continue to grow over
| time.
|
| While not the biggest library, it's approaching the point
| where I'd need to start buying upgraded storage on any
| new Mac I buy, or use external storage for my Photos
| library. One of the things I like about iCloud Photos is
| my computer doesn't need much local storage, Photos will
| manage it, downloading full res images on demand and
| purging them as needed.
|
| I'd want a backup solution that is optimized for this, to
| allow for backups of the originals, without having to
| have them all downloaded all the time.
| lostlogin wrote:
| A large library becomes hard to manage.
|
| The family one is somewhere around 759gb. Having this
| stored locally fills a decent size drive so it needs to
| be on network storage. Macs don't love doing this, and
| somehow it's difficult to keep a file share mounted 100%
| of the time on macOS (though it's 100% reliable on an
| Ubuntu vm _hosted on that same mac_ ).
|
| I concocted a vile script to download iCloud Photos and
| then save them to a Synology.
|
| I'm looking hard at UGreen or Ubiquiti do my next NAS.
| The Synology thing where you can put same or larger
| drives in the array is probably the only bit I'd miss at
| this point.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Can't say anything about UGREEN, but UNAS with Unifi
| identity endpoint is magic on a Mac. You install it, sign
| in with your UI credentials, and it automatically mounts
| all shares you have access to whenever you're on a
| network where the NAS is reachable.
|
| It works on my LAN, but also over my site to site VPN
| from my summerhouse, as well as my road warrior wireguard
| VPN.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Makes sense. Unfortunately closest thing I've seen is
| https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd but that
| requires turning off Advanced Data Protection which is a
| nonstarter for me
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| This works as long as you have enough storage locally.
| Our photo library is ~3TB split over 2 users, and while
| you could theoretically use an external SSD for storage,
| that kinda cuts down on mobility. You could leave the
| drive attached and drag it around, or detach it and lose
| access to your photos on the go.
|
| For a long time, I had a Mac mini running 24/7, where
| each user was logged in (via Remote Desktop), and that
| would synchronize photos to an external drive, and the
| Mac would then make backups (via Arq) to my NAS as well
| as a remote location.
|
| I don't count the Mac copy in my 3-2-1 as it is basically
| sync (each side, iCloud and Mac, are sync), and without
| versioning, ie APFS snapshots, if one side goes bad, so
| does the other.
|
| I've since switched to using Parachute for day to day
| backups, and every ~6 months I make a manual full export
| of the photo library in case Parachute missed something.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I have to wonder how much to 3 new NAS systems from Ubiquiti
| played into this. They seem pretty targeted at Synology at a
| great price. I have the original UNAS pro and it has been
| fantastic.
|
| Sure I can't run apps on it, but how much do people really run
| apps on their synology vs just use it as a basic NAS to begin
| with? I never found any of the apps really all that great to
| begin with. The only one I kinda liked was synology sync but
| really don't need something like that with freesync.
| gh02t wrote:
| In my mind app support is the main reason to pick Synology.
| They may not always be as capable as the best self hostable
| and/or commercial alternatives, but they are easy for people
| with intermediate skills to set up and maintain. That makes
| them a good deal for prosumer homes and SMBs without a
| dedicated IT guy. And with the way the Synology apps are
| designed you're then somewhat locked in.
|
| You can get basic network storage more or less anywhere, for
| much cheaper, so in my mind apps and the polished GUI +
| integration are the only reason you would even consider
| Synology unless you're already locked in. Maybe technical
| support contracts at the higher end, but you can get that,
| done better, from other vendors too.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Synology was in the back of my head for years as a
| straightforward home server product, but emphasis on "years".
| The other day I saw a competitor that had a hand grenade sized
| alternative, a cooling with 4 or 8 1 TB M2 SSDs arranged around
| it. And I thought, why the fuck is Synology still top of mind?
|
| I suppose they have plenty of corporate customers still,
| companies that are too small for their own proper servers (self
| managed or hosted) but who do want some central storage and
| more importantly the tech support that comes with it. But those
| would just as likely go to Dell for all their requirements.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think they are for premium segment creators like
| photographers, videographers or musicians. They have the
| money to invest and want a plug and play experience.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part."
|
| Totally. Whenever a company runs out of ideas they pull BS like
| this to increase profits.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| >>> but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part.
|
| It's a NAS. It just needs to be reliable.
| Subdivide8452 wrote:
| If you know what Synology is, you know it's more than just
| network based storage.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| There are plenty of NAS boxes out there with better specs,
| lower power consumption, faster networking, and half the
| price.
|
| Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as "application
| servers", replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as
| various photo management solutions, office suite, instant
| messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host,
| and much more.
|
| In theory they're able to do all that, but out of the box
| they're barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive
| replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and
| requires a RAM upgrade to perform.
|
| Even with upgraded RAM, you're still looking at a low powered
| processor that's a decade old. Yes, it will run home
| assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably
| also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr
| stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they've removed
| transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being
| capable).
|
| And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does "what
| they want" in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in
| a closet, and stop worrying.
|
| If only their apps weren't half baked. Photos runs well,
| rarely stops working, but doesn't backup photos as much as it
| intends to replace whatever photo management solution you're
| using today. Sadly their solution doesn't backup originals
| but only edited versions, and their own software doesn't
| support editing. Their "AI" features are extremely limited
| (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).
|
| Drive works, but it's oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire
| iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload
| it over LAN.
|
| The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed
| to be usable, and once they've reached that stage they rarely
| update them except to fix bugs.
| hedora wrote:
| Regarding lack of innovation: They still haven't made the jump
| to NVMe.
|
| They have things with two slots, which I guess is good enough
| for raid 1, but those models also have HDD bays, which wastes
| space in network closets.
|
| I'd expect them to have something with 4-8 incredibly well-
| cooled m.2 slots by now. The nic is only 2.5G, so the slots
| wouldn't need to be full speed.
|
| I'm happy with my ancient 2TB synology NAS, but it's bigger,
| slower, noisier and hotter than my mini-pc, which also has two
| (toasty) nvme slots.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| IIRC the only devices supported in the NVMe slots are their
| own Synology branded ones at a steep markup. It would be nice
| if they backed down on that too but I bet they won't.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > as a Plex server
|
| Well, Jellyfin. Plex pulled a Slymology long ago.
| oompydoompy74 wrote:
| It's so incredibly easy to build a TrueNAS box these days I don't
| know why anyone would go the Synology route.
| kristofferR wrote:
| It's easy to build the hardware, not easy to build the
| software. Most people aren't aware how feature rich the
| Synology OS is.
|
| You can get something similar if you download and set up 50
| Docker images, but that's not easy. Just look up how you do HDD
| image backups of your computers to your Synology and to your
| TrueNAS for example, it's way more complicated.
| tjpnz wrote:
| How many will still think this is the policy regardless of its
| reversal? Good job Synology.
| scotty79 wrote:
| How many will never touch Synology because they remember that
| this company proved to be capable of making incredibly stupid
| decisions?
| gardnr wrote:
| As a customer, I sent an email saying that it felt like a cash-
| grab instead of a genuine attempt to improve customer experience.
|
| Pretty sure that email single-handedly push the needle on their
| decision. Hah!
| squeedles wrote:
| One week too late for me. Didn't feel like scratch building a new
| machine and finding a low TDP mobo with a bunch of SATA ports.
| Wanted to go Synology but dragged my feet for months watching
| this play out.
|
| In the meantime, I became enamored with the Jonbo cases and
| started seeing white label N100 ITX mobos pop up with a bunch of
| SATA ports. Eventually figured out they were Topton when Brian
| Moses included them (and a Jonbo case!) in this year's NAS build.
|
| So my parts are arriving in a few days and Synology has lost one
| potential new customer.
| aquir wrote:
| This is the reason then that many YT influencers are making
| Synology shorts...awful original decision but at least they
| backtracked which is good!
| numpad0 wrote:
| Is this in response to plummeting sales or is this in response to
| SMR phaseout? IIRC, this began from WD sneaking in DM-SMR drives
| into WD Red Pro products used for NAS and RAID use cases that
| can't possibly work with SMRs. I was looking through HDDs and
| noticed that there aren't many SMR drives at mainstream price
| zone(which is great).
|
| So who's the one holding the towel? Is it Synology, or could it
| be WD/Seagate?
| Neil44 wrote:
| Not super different to buying a server from Dell, HP etc. Very
| different target market however.
| foft wrote:
| It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they
| might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology
| Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was
| bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we
| just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry
| standard expandable memory and storage.
|
| From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking
| to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati,
| storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US
| cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable
| to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far
| is running well.
| dewey wrote:
| I wonder if that's related to UniFi pushing into that market for
| consumers (https://www.ui.com/integrations/network-storage)
| recently. It's still not there yet as there's no way to run
| containers etc. on the appliance itself but this surely will come
| within the next 1-2 years.
| pbronez wrote:
| Yeah that's a really interesting gap in the feature set.
| Ubiquiti's new offerings seem like pretty good network storage
| appliances, but not home servers.
|
| I've gone through a couple iterations of home server. First I
| upcycled an obsolete Dell Power edge. Then a N100 mini PC.
| Neither was as reliable as I wanted.
|
| Now I'm running persistent apps on Railway and compute hungry
| stuff on my MacStudio. Pretty good so far.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I'm glad that I've graduated from Synology to a proper Debian
| server with ZFS around 6 years ago. Fuck these people.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| NOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read:
|
| https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Exec summary for those who think their time is not worth this
| evil madness:
|
| The only change is that they now allow you to use any 2.5" SATA
| SSD. Everything else, meaning: 2.5" SATA HDDs (the by far most
| common thing you would want to use) and NVME SSDs: Still a no-
| no.
|
| No, there was no lesson learned here by them at all.
|
| The liked article specifically is wrong here:
|
| "Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs"
|
| No, not hard drives. 2.5" SSDs only.
|
| Very sorry to spoil the party, but sadly Synology STILL hasn't
| learned the lesson. :(
|
| Let's check again after they have lost 95% of their
| customers...
| avianlyric wrote:
| What are you talking about. This is a quote directly from the
| page you've linked to:
|
| > At the same time, with the introduction of DSM 7.3, 2025
| DiskStation Plus series models offer more flexibility for
| installing third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs when creating
| storage pools.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| I do not know if we are getting served different content
| for the same URL. Content I can see, with server-side
| timestamp of 2 seconds ago:
|
| Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD)
| Series:
|
| FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
|
| Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
| WmWsjA6B29B4nfk wrote:
| Looks like you are indeed getting an older page. Try
| https://archive.is/8aUdC
| Fischgericht wrote:
| As German IT news media has retracted the "Synology
| reverses" story based on the content they are reading in
| the press release link, I suspect there is some Geo-stuff
| involved here (I tested this from multiple German IPs now
| and always get "the other version").
| WmWsjA6B29B4nfk wrote:
| > DS Plus series (DSM 7.3): > HDD > Not Listed > Supported
| for: > New installation and storage pool creation
|
| This is the main change. Other series (not Plus) are still
| locked down.
| vunuxodo wrote:
| Regardless, the fact that this is even a question or has
| ambiguity/uncertainty in any way is enough to get me to never
| use a Synology NAS.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Last self-reply on this, I promise:
|
| If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this
| incorrect story:
|
| AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides
| some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese
| companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option
| to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves
| can not source them.
|
| So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to
| lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible
| to follow their extortion instructions.
| layer8 wrote:
| The article is about the changed actual policy deployed with
| DSM 7.3, that only just started rolling out. Your link hasn't
| been updated in over two months, so doesn't reflect that yet.
|
| Edit: Updated KB article is here: https://kb.synology.com/en-
| us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...
| Fischgericht wrote:
| This is not "my" link. That link is part of their press
| release.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Because I am no longer sure people are all getting shown the
| same content for that URL, here is what is shown to me (no
| local caches or proxies):
|
| Hard disk drives (HDD) & M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD)
| Series
|
| Details
|
| FS, HD, SA, UC, XS+, XS, Plus, DVA/NVR, and DP
|
| Only drives listed in the compatibility list are supported.
| layer8 wrote:
| Here is the updated KB article (note "en-us" vs. "en-
| global"): https://kb.synology.com/en-
| us/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compatibili...
|
| In particular: "At the same time, with the introduction of
| DSM 7.3, 2025 DiskStation Plus series models offer more
| flexibility for installing third-party HDDs and 2.5" SATA
| SSDs when creating storage pools. While Synology recommends
| using drives from the compatibility list for optimal
| performance and reliability, users retain the flexibility
| to install other drives at their own discretion."
|
| NASCompares confirms that no warnings are shown: https://ww
| w.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1o1a32m/testing_s...
|
| I agree that the information is still a bit muddled right
| now.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Ahahaha.
|
| I can confirm that if I change my Accept-Language headers
| in my browser from "en" to "en-US" I get the other
| version of that page. Actually, for everything else I
| tried other than "en-US" I get the evil version.
|
| Synology press team Achievement unlocked: Confuse all
| global IT press outside of the United States.
| j45 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade
| drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have
| serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
|
| Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then
| eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could
| be handled differently.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Just commented here to point out that this news story
| spreading is wrong (and that other IT news outlets have since
| corrected/retracted it), don't have any eggs in that basket,
| but:
|
| Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they
| introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade
| drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models,
| putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers
| identical NAS drive model is then listed as incompatible.
|
| There is nothing remotely connected to actual technology
| involved in this story at all. This is a sales-strategy-only
| subject.
| j45 wrote:
| I'm not a customer of Synology. I don't agree with
| justifying forced purchase of a relabeled product.
|
| They deserve the result of their decision and not
| understanding their customers - they could just start a
| separate enterprise line if they didn't have one already
| for whatever they wanted to force.
|
| Enterprise brands like HP, etc, to my last experience, do
| sell white-labelled drives, but don't bar you from using
| those same drives yourself.
|
| My lack of trust remains with the parts that will fail the
| most - hard drives.
|
| Hard Drive manufacturers don't have the best history,
| whether it was Western Digital lying to their customers
| about CMR when it was actually SMR. That would be my reason
| for never accepting a forced labelling of a drive.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Nah, not really. They already have a compatibility page of
| known-good drives and they recommend people stick to it. They
| could also have an incompatibility list showing known-bad
| drives, and alerting if you install one of them.
|
| If I put junk tires on my Toyota, I don't blame Toyota. But
| if Toyota used that as an excuse to make it impossible to use
| third party tires, I guarantee you my next car purchase
| wouldn't have that same limitation.
| j45 wrote:
| In no way am I sticking up for Synology. I'm not a customer
| of Synology.
|
| Customers should have absolute control over what drives
| they want, it's their choice to put crappy tires on their
| car or not.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Your Toyota analogy doesn't hold up. If a customer puts SMR
| into their NAS, they are absolutely going to call Synology
| and complain. And they are going to have to re-explain this
| over and over because most people don't understand nascent
| HDD writing modes the way they do a vehicle tire. Even
| then, and appropriate analogy would be a tire that is cheap
| and new but refuses to spin above 25mph vehicle speed.
| kstrauser wrote:
| First, I don't think that's true. It could even be a FAQ
| on their website:
|
| Q: Why is my brand new WD drive so slow in my NAS?
|
| A: Because they lied to you and sold you junk. Here are
| the details...
|
| It would be very easy to push the blame onto the vendor,
| _where it belongs_ , because the defect is 100% with the
| drive and not at all with Synology. They don't have any
| control over it. Synology could even automate this.
| Whenever you insert a drive that isn't on their
| compatibility list, it prompts you with a message to make
| sure you want to proceed. They could very easily make
| that popup say something like "WARNING: THIS HARD DRIVE
| MODEL IS DEFECTIVE. WE STRONGLY URGE YOU TO REMOVE IT AND
| REPLACE IT WITH A DRIVE ON OUR COMPATIBILITY LIST."
|
| But in any case, dealing with those support requests has
| to be way cheaper than the enormous financial and
| reputational loss they seem to be taking from this
| boneheaded move.
| gosub100 wrote:
| SMR drives aren't defective though. They have a capacity
| and they are capable of storing at that capacity. They
| just can't keep up with the throughout requirements of a
| nas. And remember the WD SMR scandal was because they
| weren't being forthcoming about that limitation. I fully
| support Synology's move to lock it drives. I think it's
| the tech crowd that got it wrong... mostly. Synology
| should have sweetened the deal and along with the lock-
| in, offered cheaper prices with proof of purchase of the
| Disk Station.
| kstrauser wrote:
| They're defective by design _when advertised as NAS
| drives_. It was impossible for them to work as users
| expected given their construction. It wasn 't defective
| in the sense that there was a manufacturing flaw that
| made some of them fail, but in the sense that it was
| inherently unfit for purpose. If you design a car's
| brakes to fall off when they get hot so as to protect the
| braking system at the expense of the car, even if it
| works as designed, _it 's still defective_.
|
| I don't know how to reply to the rest. If you think it's
| a good idea for Synology to make their systems not work
| with even known-good drives from reputable manufacturers,
| I don't think there's likely to be a common ground we can
| find to discuss it further.
| j45 wrote:
| Incorrect.
|
| Western Digital deceptively sold and charged a premium
| for the WD Red drives sold as NAS drives that were CMR,
| when they were not.
|
| Western Digital didn't withhold anything about SMR being
| good or bad.
|
| Western Digital confesses some WD Red Drives use SMR
| without disclosure:
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-
| hdds...
|
| I know several folks who bought these drives as NAS
| drives, for NAS use, when they were not all the same.
| Folks could have just bought SMR drives from WD, but
| specifically bought NAS drives.
|
| Western Digital's denial, and the fact it took a class
| action lawsuit, were enough that WD no longer sells WD
| RED, only WD Red+ and WD Red Pro.
|
| SMR drives don't work well for NAS'. SMR is useful for
| things other than NAS storage which is on all the time.
|
| Rebuilding a NAS because things overlap so much takes a
| lot longer with SMR drives, compared to CMR. SMR drives
| used in NAS formation seem to fail more too.
|
| Building any kind of NAS with SMR drives is asking for
| trouble and pain. I guess SMR drives could be proactively
| replaced, would need to factor that into the cost / tco.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| All Synology has to do is pop up a dialog box: "Warning:
| Bad idea. Don't blame us if this drive ruins your life.
| <Proceed> <Cancel>"
|
| That's all they had to do.
| metaphor wrote:
| > _Last updated:Jul 30, 2025_
|
| Appears to be stale documentation.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Incompetency.
|
| Good to get this fact about the Synology organization.
| anilakar wrote:
| Too late. The company is permanently on my personal shitlist and
| I will make sure that the company is excluded from any future
| hardware acquisitions at the workplace based on vendor lock-in
| risk.
| yodon wrote:
| It's not a 1:1 comparison, but anyone have experience running
| Garage[0] as a locally hosted geo-distributable open source S3
| clone in place of a traditional NAS? Garage seems to have simpler
| hardware requirements, native support for geo-replication, and
| for lots of applications S3 compatibility is actually what you
| want.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013004
| bangaroo wrote:
| Nobody could have seen this coming. Nobody at all.
| InTheArena wrote:
| My 918+ was a huge step up from my homebrew homelab server.
| People who advocate for a duct tape solution for systems that
| contain their entire lives on their disks are doing most people a
| disfavor. Having a well baked disk and backup storage system is
| critical.
|
| I switched a year ago to Ugreen UNAS just given the generational
| leap of their hardware and reasonable per-disk pricing over
| synology.
|
| I didn't trust you agree with OS, but that ended up being
| incredibly easily remedy by just shoving true Nas on the system.
|
| All that sad if I had waited another half-year, I wouldn't have
| gone down that path but instead would've picked up a UniFi NAS,
| which is even more optimal from a cost and integration into my
| ecosystem. Since that really is just network attack storage - I
| could just let my old Home lap server act like a server on top of
| a NAS.
|
| The lessons from this are many. First is that hardware is not a
| moat. Thanks to china that's no longer a factor. The second is
| that software isn't a moat anymore either. Synology leveraged
| Linux and then walled garden their solution and decided to not
| innovate. Now open source and in the future AI have made it so
| software is significantly cheaper to work with.
|
| That means we are back to loyalty and brand awareness. Both are
| things that synology has squandered with this adventure.
| Khaine wrote:
| It's too late. They can't be trusted. They have fucked
| themselves.
| seg_lol wrote:
| The people that made and supported this decision need to get
| fired. When companies pull this bs, and then reverse course, they
| don't get a pass, or else they will continue to the pull this bs
| until no one fights anymore.
| j45 wrote:
| Well, this was a pretty myopic decision.
|
| You can't ever buy a NAS without having complete flexibility in
| drives, both in the short and long term, because the claims of
| hard drive manufacturers can't ever be trusted until verified
| individually, per drive model..
|
| Western Digital lied about their drives having SMR instead of CMR
| as their RED drives were marketed for NAS usage:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-class-action-lawsuit-sm...
|
| Add to that how one model of a hard drive from a manufacturer
| will be invincible, while another model next to it will have huge
| issues.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...
|
| I hear Synology has nice gear, it has always been pretty nice
| when I interacted with it. I own a different brand just through
| deciding to have a NAS with more flexibility that I could grow
| into if I wanted.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Too little, too late. The second they made that decision, I
| struck Synology as a partner for both my homelab (gotta replace
| the DS1019+ at some point) and in my purchasing capacity at work.
| That was some NetApp-grade BS and I wasn't going to tolerate it.
|
| I'm just glad the NAS scene saw the opening left by Synology's
| boneheaded decision-making and capitalized on it. Unraid and
| TrueNAS have stormed the battlefield and shown Synology's typical
| plus-line customers that they can get more for less with a bit of
| DIY, and NUC vendors have capitalized on this misstep with NAS
| hardware platforms that just require your preferred software/OS
| to operate.
|
| This singular decision is going to take a decade of good will to
| undo. Astonishing that they footgunned themselves so bad, so
| willingly.
| beart wrote:
| I started with a Synology. I still have it running, but it is
| only used for backups now. My second system was a repurposed PC
| running Proxmox with various services containerized. I was
| impressed with it. However, I got to tinkering with Unraid and
| really love it. It is what synology tries to be, but better in
| every way (IMO).
| figers wrote:
| What is a good alternative that allows me out of the box with no
| extra hardware to install a plex server, connect to Mullvad VPN
| and start / monitor downloads directly from the NAS device web
| interface or mobile App?
| CharlesW wrote:
| QNAP's QTS/QuTS Hero are generally as "batteries included" as
| Synology's DSM in that respect. I threw 32GB of RAM in my
| TS-464 and run ~15 containers (as well as Plex, not in a
| container) on it with no problem.
| figers wrote:
| ah, thanks for the tip
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Hope the CEO realized when this was instigated that it's not as
| simple as reversing the decision, every Youtube video about it,
| every review that mentions it, every tweet that mentions it,
| every reddit post saying "Don't buy Synology" because of it and
| every LLM trained on that data will be there and showing up in
| searches and harming sales for at least a decade.
| John23832 wrote:
| I never understood this. The customer type that wants to run an
| NAS is technically capable. They may choose to run a all-in-one
| NAS like those from Synology or are ubiquity because of the
| convenience but if you then make it inconvenient for them by
| adding these unnecessary hard drive restrictions, they can just
| as easily go to either another provider or run their own.
|
| Talk about not knowing your customer.
| zx8080 wrote:
| So what? It will not restore trust.
|
| I will not spend money on Synology which can make pay me more for
| nothing any time when their management wants some more money next
| time from users.
|
| So now they will make less money and not more users.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| As a person with a DS224+ behind me on my shelf, running my
| backups, I'm glad to see they at least woke up from their
| enshittification.
|
| Prodigal son rules on this one.
| PKop wrote:
| > Synology has quietly walked the policy back
|
| This is disrespectful itself. If you realize how stupid your
| decision was, with such bad results and bad sentiment among
| customers, you publicly admit the mistake not quietly. This also
| raises doubt how committed they are to reversing it if they don't
| want to talk about it.
| etempleton wrote:
| Whenever I hear about a company making a decision like this I no
| longer trust said company. It says the company no longer is
| thinking about their product or consumers at all. Anyone who
| cared about either even a little bit would never even consider
| such an idea.
| Larrikin wrote:
| There needs to be more of a name and shame culture if companies
| want to actually win consumers back. Synology as a company did
| the right thing by reversing this decision, but I still can't
| trust them unless I know the executives and product managers that
| introduced this idea and executed it are fired. If they are still
| lurking around the company, these money over consumers
| psychopaths are just going to introduce another horrible thing
| once sales start to tick back up.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| A ridiculously bad idea, coupled to the fact they are trying to
| sell you Intel Celeron CPUs with 2GB of RAM and SATA only
| interfaces in 2025, for a lot _more_ than the same product cost
| ten years ago.
| Tepix wrote:
| As a QNAP user, I'm not affected. However, even if I've been
| unhappy with QNAP in the past sometimes (overall they're OK for
| me), I would never switch to Synology because of this
| shortsightedness on their part.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Back in August, I specifically chose a UGreen NAS over Synology
| for exactly this reason.
|
| This smelled like "smart" printer cartridges all over again. No
| thank you.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| While we are on this subject, has anyone found good DIY solutions
| for similar hardware? I haven't looked recently, but I have
| always struggled to be able to put together anything that would
| be remotely similar in size to a small 4-bay NAS.
|
| My "NAS" is a 4U short network racked unit. Pretty large by
| comparison, but its also mostly empty space.
| jdhawk wrote:
| https://www.servethehome.com/minisforum-n5-pro-review-an-awe...
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It shouldn't be enough for companies to just reverse some lousy
| decision, they've got to show some goodwill for it.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Last summer a friend needed help building a huge home backup
| system, and though I had no real experience with Synology, it was
| the only brand I was familiar with and some Googling indicated
| that no other commercial product seems close. A DIY box --
| TrueNAS or whatever -- is out of the question, this friend isn't
| technical.
|
| I had heard about the Synology HD policy thing, but had forgotten
| when I ordered the drives. By the time they arrived, the need was
| pressing and I had no window to exchange the drives, so I had to
| just hack the damn system.
|
| Now I have to go out of town to unhack the damn thing so I can be
| sure nothing I did interferes with future updates.
|
| This is the polar opposite of the experience I was expecting.
| This foolishness cost me a lot of time and is about to cost more.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| I was literally reaching out to friends yesterday to ask about
| NAS options and Synology wasn't even discussed, where it would
| have been before this mess.
|
| Even now, after the reversal, it's really not an option. I mean,
| I have no assurance it won't get reversed again, and I don't want
| to invest into something that won't necessarily work long term.
|
| Basically, I want to be sure I can access my data and get
| updates, and right now, Synology is not that from what I see. I'm
| just looking at this as a home user, but unless there is some
| guarantee, Synology just seems to be waiting to pull the rug out
| from you regarding your data.
| piyuv wrote:
| Bose first, Synology second. Bad execs need to go.
| StillBored wrote:
| This is a mixed bag. As someone who worked in the storage
| industry for ~10 years, there are a lot of poorly defined
| behaviors that are vendor/model specific and I can see how its
| easier to just pick a particular model, test it and declare it
| the blessed version having done similar stuff myself.
|
| Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which
| can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a disk
| should be replaced, or the user warned about possible impending
| doom, to simple things like how one sets cache WT/WB and flushes
| the caches (range based flushing is a thing, doesn't always work,
| etc) for persistence.
|
| OTOH, much of this is just 'product maturity' because it is
| possible to have a blessed set of SMART/etc attributes that are
| understood a certain way and test to see if they exist/behave as
| expected and warn the user with something like "this drive
| doesn't appear to report corrected read errors in a way that our
| predictive failure algorithm can use". Or "This drive appears to
| be a model that doesn't persist data with FUA when the caches are
| set to write back, putting your data at risk during a power
| failure, would you still like to enable writeback?"
|
| And these days with the HD vendors obfuscating shingled drives or
| even mixing/matching the behavior in differing zones its probably
| even worse.
| magguzu wrote:
| They could have a list of supported vendors then.
| beAbU wrote:
| So initially I wanted to give you a knee-jerk response about
| how Synology could have gone with a warning rather than an
| outright ban. Then I read the article...
|
| It seems that this was never an outright ban, but non-blessed
| drives either generated a warning or they had reduced
| functionality. What TFA fails to mention is what this "reduced
| functionality" is.
|
| If it's something like RAID rebuilds take longer because other
| drives might not have the requisite SMART attributes or some
| other function that's required is one thing. But halving the
| drive speed just because it's not a Synology drive is another.
| This knowledge would put me in a better position to know if I
| should harshly judge them or not.
|
| I think it's totally fair to raise a warning that a particular
| drive has not been tested/validated and therefore certain
| guarantees cannot be met. I can fully respect how challenging
| it must be to validate your product against a basically
| infinite combinatorial collection of hardware parts. I've
| learnt long ago that just because a part fits does not mean it
| works.
| StillBored wrote:
| I don't know the details of the warnings either, but from the
| original articles it sounds like they had moved to a QVL list
| that didn't include 3rd party devices, only their rebranded
| ones. Which is possibly because they got seagate/wd/etc to
| tweak something in the firmware. Which isn't unheard of for
| large vendors. And it is somewhat fair, qualifying drive
| persistence is probably some ugly unit test that takes hours
| to run, and requires being able to pull power on the drive at
| certain points. So the warning ends up being the equivalent
| of "we don't know if this drive works, lots of them don't we
| are going to disable this aggressive cache algorithm to
| assure your data is persisted" and that kills the performance
| vs the qualified drive. But because some non technical PM
| gets involved the warning shown to the user is "This drive
| isn't qualified".
|
| The other take though, was that it was just a $ grab by
| rebranding and charging more for drives that were
| functionally the same. Which for logical people made sense
| because otherwise, why not say why their drives were better.
| But sometimes the lawyers get involved and saying "our
| rebranded drives are the only ones on the market that work
| right when we do X, Y, Z" is frowned on.
|
| Hard to really know without some engineer actually
| clarifying.
| kstrauser wrote:
| No, it was a pretty complete ban. From a reputable
| reviewer[0]:
|
| > New Installations Blocked for Non-Verified Drives
|
| > As discussed in our NASCompares coverage and testing
| videos, attempting to initialise the DS925+ with hard drives
| that are not on the 2025 series compatibility list will block
| you from even starting DSM installation.
|
| and
|
| > Expanding Existing Storage Pools with Unverified Drives is
| Blocked
|
| > Another key limitation to note is that you cannot expand an
| existing storage pool using unverified drives -- even if your
| system was initialized using fully supported drives.
|
| and
|
| > To test RAID recovery, one of the three IronWolf drives in
| the migrated SHR array was removed, placing the system into a
| degraded state. We then inserted a fresh 4TB Seagate IronWolf
| drive.
|
| > Result: DSM detected the new drive but refused to initiate
| RAID rebuild, citing unsupported media.
|
| You could pull all of your drives from an older Synology and
| put them in the new device, but you couldn't add drives to
| the volume or replace crashed drives. And if you were
| starting with a brand new NAS, you couldn't even initialize
| it when using 3rd party drives.
|
| I'm OK with a warning notice. I'm not even remotely OK with
| this.
|
| By the way, their official drive compatibility list for the
| DS923+[1] shows dozens of supported 3rd-party drives. The
| same guide for the DS925+[2], an incremental hardware update,
| shows 0. So if you bought a bunch of drives off _their
| official support list_ , they're useless in newer models.
| Apparently a Seagate IronWolf was perfectly fine in 2023 and
| a complete dud in 2025.
|
| Oh, and Synology only sells HDDs up to 16TB in size[3], and
| they only have up to 12TB drives (for $270) in stock today.
| That price will get you a 16TB IronWolf Pro off Amazon. If
| you have cash to spend, you can buy a 28TB IronWolf Pro
| there, which is 2.3x bigger than the largest Synology you can
| order from the first-party store today.
|
| [0] https://nascompares.com/guide/synology-2025-nas-
| series-3rd-p...
|
| [1] https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/compatibility?search_by=drive...
|
| [2] https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/compatibility?search_by=drive...
|
| [3] https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/store#product-
| storag...
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Time to move on from Synology. They already showed their
| sociopathic middle finger to everyone. Now that they are walking
| it back they will just do the same thing they all do now. They
| will slowly reintroduce this restriction by removing a few
| compatible drive models at a time until its too inconvenient not
| to buy their drives.
|
| I hope they go out of business even though I used to like their
| product.
| vermaden wrote:
| Vote with your wallet.
|
| Always works.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Unless customers believe that they have no choice - see Windows
| 11 for details
| phoenix3200 wrote:
| Six years ago my box shit the fan. Synology could have recovered
| it for me, but they insisted I "upgraded" to their newest box.
| That was when I realized that I would never buy from them again.
| Thank goodness their hybrid raid is at least MDRAID.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/d3cmq2/ds1512_tha...
|
| Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of
| these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server
| equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at
| idle with no power save mode).
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't understand. Recovered how? As far as I know, like many
| electronics companies, they don't do repairs period. If an
| enclosure fails under warranty, they replace it. They don't
| repair it.
|
| So if your NAS motherboard died out of warranty and they no
| longer sold that model, it's not surprising they recommended
| you buy the current version of that model.
|
| So I don't know what you were expecting? Hardware dies. What
| did you want them to do?
| phoenix3200 wrote:
| As best as I could understand, the hardware wasn't dead. It
| was "soft bricked" due to no fault of my own. And they
| wouldn't stand behind their product and instead insisted I
| upgrade to a newer and less capable product.
|
| No, I wasn't expecting replacement hardware. I was expecting
| support for a product that they were still releasing software
| for.
| crazygringo wrote:
| How was it soft bricked? Is that a known thing, that
| everyone with that model, it stopped working? So you have
| good reason to believe that?
|
| And if it wouldn't even turn on, what kind of support were
| you expecting to receive?
|
| If a device that is out of warranty fails to turn on, there
| aren't many companies that are going to give it any support
| except to tell you to buy a new one.
| 21Pockets wrote:
| I would say the damage has been done. This policy showed what
| they were willing to do as a company and not listen to their
| customer base which is the whole reason the company exists in the
| first place.
| tristor wrote:
| Every time I've looked at Synology, I've been shocked at how
| anemic the hardware is for the cost. I've always self-built my
| own NAS. I've sometimes felt regret when I have run into an issue
| that required more babysitting than I wanted to do, but when
| considering alternatives, I've always realized doing it myself
| was the right choice. I wasn't aware they'd even done this, but
| the fact they did is just more reason to always build your own
| NAS.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I don't think this matters much anymore. Synology killed
| themselves.
|
| Many were already in the boat of "sure I'll pay it, if it works
| and doesn't give me any BS, otherwise there are many options at
| better prices"
| don_searchcraft wrote:
| Glad they reversed but they could have saved themselves those
| losses if they had an understanding of what their customers
| wanted. Anyone putting together a NAS will want full control over
| the drive selection.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Too little, too late... My current Synology box will likely be my
| last, I might get another 5-bay expansion, but even that is
| really iffy. I just don't like the decisions like this that
| they've continued to make... more lock in, more restrictive
| features, etc.
|
| For that matter, in the 4-6 drive SOHO range, there are a _LOT_
| of NAS products with decent consumer upgrade options and
| alternative OS support with okay compute power. Not to mention
| the prosumer options for software that support these devices as
| well as DIY options are pretty good as well, less than the
| premium that Synology charges for their hardware.
| buccal wrote:
| What should be noted, a cost effective M365 backup solution
| "Synology Active Backup for Microsoft 365" has an external server
| requirement for OAUTH: https://kb.synology.com/en-
| af/DSM/help/ActiveBackup-Office36... That seems to have created
| possibility for quite serious exploit:
| https://modzero.com/en/blog/when-backups-open-backdoors-syno...
| donmcronald wrote:
| Thanks for these links.
|
| I've used Active Backup and never would have guessed it worked
| like that. Although, the MS365 security and permissions are so
| complex that I don't have a hope in hell of understanding them.
| The suggestions to do your own auditing in that post are moot
| because the target audience for something like a Synology
| doesn't have the resources or the ability to do that kind of
| assessment.
|
| For me, I saw the permissions request along with the 'Synology
| Active Backup for MS365' app registration in my tenant and
| assumed everything was local to my tenant and NAS. The redirect
| back to the private LAN IP of the NAS also makes it seem like
| the communication is between the NAS and MS only.
|
| I can't even tell if the issue has been fixed.
|
| Ignoring the security stuff, my experience with Synology Active
| Backup for MS365 as a product hasn't been good for OneDrive
| backups. I have one setup where I reconcile the backup repo
| against a live (paused to get a consistent point in time) data
| set that's synced by the OneDrive client.
|
| The Synology Active Backup for MS365 _never_ reconciles
| correctly. Some files will randomly have things like '(1)'
| appended. Some files are simply missing. It seems to struggle
| with certain characters that Windows and OneDrive allow in
| filenames. For example, dots (.) appear to be problematic.
|
| I monitor it and once it gets to the point where I think we'd
| suffer an intolerable amount of data loss if needing to
| restore, I delete it and restart it.
|
| I would strongly encourage anyone relying on it to take the
| time to reconcile your OneDrive backups against a set of known
| good data. Pause your OneDrive syncing, restore the backup into
| a temporary folder, and use something like Beyond Compare [2]
| to compare the two directories. You can also map a network
| drive directly to storage location on the NAS which makes it
| very convenient to reconcile.
|
| VEEAM used to have the same kind of issues with files missing
| for no reason, but they seem to be better lately if you ignore
| the way they append the version number to name of every
| (versioned) file restored (OMG why?). VEEAM has very slow
| restores and is much more difficult to reconcile due to the
| modified file names on restore.
|
| Microsoft won't take responsibility for data loss "in the
| cloud" and the backup solutions all suck pretty bad IMO. Some
| of the blame for this kind of thing should fall to Microsoft.
| They've made everything too complex to be reliable.
|
| 1. https://oauth.net/2/grant-types/client-credentials/
|
| 2. https://www.scootersoftware.com/
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| So, was anyone held accountable for this?
| drnick1 wrote:
| Are these devices really better than a Samba server on a plain
| Linux distro? I run one on a retired gaming PC and access it
| remotely through a Wireguard tunnel. I feel like any proprietary
| solution is going to be far less elegant or flexible.
| beart wrote:
| Difficult to answer your question. Sounds like you just want a
| simple network share, so obviously would not be taking
| advantage of the other features these systems offer.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| IMHO: No. It's just a Linux box. It may be a Linux box with a
| neat GUI, but it's still a Linux box. It doesn't do anything
| particularly unique.
|
| I run [almost all of] my home's network services on my present-
| day desktop rig, which... these days, runs Linux[1].
|
| ZFS with RAID and snapshots? Backups for intermittently-
| connected stuff like my laptop? Plex and friends? Containers
| (oh my!)? Desktop stuff? Samba stuff? Yep. And other than GTA:V
| Online, it seems able to play everything I try in my Steam
| library with no particular effort on my part.
|
| I don't notice when backups are happening. I don't notice when
| people are using Plex, and they don't notice when I'm gaming.
| It performs fine for absolutely everything that gets thrown at
| it -- concurrently.
|
| I've got an inkling to upgrade the hardware soon. Unlike a
| "dedicated NAS appliance," I can accomplish this by buying bog-
| standard ATX hardware and stuffing it into the existing bog-
| standard ATX case -- just as people in DIY circles did for
| ~decades before PCs became more appliance-like (and/or
| fishtank-like).
|
| Once that's done, I may think about doing some 10GbE stuff and
| turning the old hardware into a more-dedicated NAS. Separating
| the storage from the applications, in this way, sounds fun. But
| it won't improve performance -- it'll just be a homelab
| exercise that I'll live with and learn from (and may elect to
| reverse).
|
| All those words, just to iterate that I have zero interest in
| buying a snaky-feeling Synology box. It doesn't give me
| anything that I want that I'm not already doing.
|
| If your retired gaming PC is doing everything you want, then:
| Keep doing that (unless/until power consumption or something
| else becomes a concern).
|
| [1]: For most of a decade before I decided to go back to using
| a Linux desktop, I still ran Linux -- but always with the
| desktop portion being Windows running in a VM (with its own
| dedicated GPU and USB adapter and...). That was fun, too, but I
| got tired of working primarily with Windows.
| georgehaake wrote:
| This was the motivation to swap out my old, reliable Synology for
| a new Ugreen setup. Pretty happy so far.
| lousken wrote:
| MINISFORUM N5 series look like it totally destroys whatever
| synology has on the market. Also if you don't like their
| software, you can install whatever you want on it. Why bother
| with synology?
| recov wrote:
| This is what I did - microcenter sells it now. Wiped the drive
| and installed fedora and more ram. Such a great deal for the
| hardware you get
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you're looking for a really good alternative: Supermicro makes
| large chassis that will hold a fair number of drives (I have one
| that will take drives). They're usually sold cheap on ebay and
| other such sites when they're written off. If you're willing to
| replace a couple of fans and do your own software installation
| they're unbeatable for value-for-money, and they last just about
| forever. I've still got two Synology diskstations with 12 bays
| each and one extender. But the Supermicro is far more powerful
| and seems much more reliable and better engineered, even if it
| isn't as easy to set up. The downside of the Supermicro chassis
| is that they're not really made for residential use, they're
| pretty loud. But other than that redundant power, lots of CPU and
| RAM for caching.
| Lammy wrote:
| Same setup here with a Supermicro Denverton board except in an
| iStarUSA chassis that I got brand new:
| https://istarusa.com/product/product-detail/?brand=istarusa&...
|
| Though it looks like their SFF-8087 miniSAS chassis are EOL and
| soon replaced with SFF-8643 HD-miniSAS equivalents:
| https://istarusa.com/product/product-list/?brand=istarusa&se...
| beala wrote:
| How's the power consumption? Everytime I look at used server
| deals on ebay that seem too good to be true, the hidden cost is
| usually power. It's fairly normal for these systems to consume
| hundreds of watts idle, and $1/watt/year is a decent rule of
| thumb in the US (but much more in places like CA). And that's
| not factoring in running the AC more if you're in a hotter
| climate.
|
| I'm looking at a NAS build myself and am leaning toward a
| consumer mobo and an older Intel, like maybe a 9th gen i5. 6
| SATA ports is pretty standard, and three mirrored 20 TB pairs
| is a lot of storage for most folks. Boot drive could be a small
| NVME.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I wonder what took them so long to realize that their policy
| would have the result that it did. I'm glad they've reversed the
| policy, and I hope that they've learned something.
| animitronix wrote:
| Too late. The damage is done and the trust is gone, I won't be
| coming back.
| eitally wrote:
| It's nice to see this. Too bad they lost me as a customer. I was
| in the market for a NAS for my photography business and was
| primarily considering one of Synology's 4 bay products, but saw
| they'd just made this change so I went elsewhere. I've made my
| purchase and it wasn't Synology... and I won't need another NAS
| for years to come. Oh well.
| greatgib wrote:
| Fantastic that people managed to make reverse (or even just
| postpone) this awful decision. A good example of people voting
| with their money!
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The Synology End Game_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060920 - Aug 2025 (355
| comments)
|
| _Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706 - April 2025 (403
| comments)
| atoav wrote:
| Cool. But they are now on my blacklist until further notice.
|
| I recommend everybody to do the same. Companies shouldn't just
| reverse feret their way out of trouble. Make stupid decisions
| have consequences.
| blindriver wrote:
| Their biggest sin in my opinion as a multi-Synology-NAS-owner is
| their 2025 generation of NASes didn't have a CPU upgrade. I was
| ready and waiting to get the ds1825+ and when I saw that it had
| the same CPU as the ds1821+, the same as 4 years back, I gave up
| on them.
| mtillman wrote:
| Eventually an open source project will jailbreak these devices
| like they did Nintendo devices with similar enshitification
| tactics.
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