Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

Synology isn't about the NAS hardware and OS. Once setup, it doesn't really matter as long as your config is reliable and fast, so there are many competitive options to move to.

The killer feature for me is the app ecosystem. I have a very old 8-bay Synology NAS and have it setup in just a few clicks to backup my dropbox, my MS365 accounts, my Google business accounts, do redundant backup to external drive, backup important folders to cloud, and it was also doing automated torrent downloads of TV series.

These apps, and more (like family photos, video server, etc), make the NAS a true hub for everything data-related, not just for storing local files.

I can understand Synology going this way, it puts more money in their pocket, and as a customer in professional environment, I'm ok to pay a premium for their approved drives if it gives me an additional level of warranty and (perceived) safety.

But enforcing this accross models used by home or soho users is dumb and will affect the good will of so many like me, who both used to buy Synology for home and were also recommending/purchasing the brand at work.

This is a tech product, don't destroy your tech fanbase.

I would rather Synology kept a list of drives to avoid based on user experience, and offer their Synology-specific drives with a generous warranty for pro environments. Hel, I would be ok with sharing stats about drive performance so they could build a useful database for all.

They way they reduce the performance of their system to penalise non-synology rebranded drives is bascially a slap in the face of their customers. Make it a setting and let the user choose to use the NAS their bought to its full capabilities.

I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.

Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensitised to warnings. I submitted this to them at least four times, and they reply that this is fine, it’s already decided to be like that, so we will not change it. Another stupid thing is that notifications about low disk space are sent to you via email and push until it’s about 30 GB free. Then free space goes below 30 GB and reaches zero, yet notifications are not sent anymore. My multiple reports about this issue always responded along the lines of “it’s already done like that, so we will not change it”.

Most modern, especially software companies, choose not to fix relatively small but critical problems, yet they actively employ sometimes hundreds of customer support yes-people whose job seems to be defusing customer complaints. Nothing is ever fixed anymore.

I'm going to buck the nerds and say I wish Drobo was back. I love my 5N, but had to retire it as it began to develop Type B Sudden Drobo Death Syndrome* and switch out to QNAP.

It was simple, it just worked, and I didn't have to think about it.

* TB SDDS - a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three 'types' of SDDS I and a colleague discovered - "Type A" power management IC failures, "Type B" unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and "Type C" failed batteries. Type B units' SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.

Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home. I have completely lost patience with maintaining local hardware like this. If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective. This feels like smuggling cargo on a federation starship, which is way cooler to me than filling up a bunch of local disks.

I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.

Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.

I have some sympathy for this. With the disasters of the WD 'Green' series and the recent revelations on how used disks were being sold for new. Synology doesn't want to be lumped with other companies problems.

They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.

Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.

> When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon.

In a way this is a valid point, but it also feels a bit silly. Do people really make use of devices like this and then try to overnight a drive when something fails? You're building an array-- you're designing for failure-- but then you don't plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.

I wish 1 or more HD manufacturers would get together and sell a NAS that runs TrueNAS on it. Or even an existing NAS manufacturer (UGreen, etc)

All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.

I bought a Synology last year and then had to return it because it didn't support two of the enterprise drive model revisions I have (but worked with the others, even one that's the same make).

For the same hardware cost I got a random mATX box that can hold 2.5x more hard drives, a much much beefier CPU, 10x the RAM, and an nvme. And yea it took an hour to set up trueNAS in a docker image, but w/e.

Same exact hard drives working perfectly fine in fedora. If it weren't for hard drive locking I'd have stuck with the Synology box out of laziness.

I have a 8 bay nas from synology and i’m now considering a move out when i’ll have to replace my nas.

Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.

I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers.

However...

Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.

[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)