“Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems,” a Synology representative told Ars by email. “Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues.”
Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology’s German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist.
↫ Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica
I’m honestly surprised it’s taken Synology this long to start nickle-and-diming its users. I’m sure the “Synology-branded” drives will carry substantial markups over regular drives, despite the drives being otherwise identical. Charging insane markups for expansion options is a tried-and-true way to increase your margins, with Apple being the classic example of charging insane prices for basic RAM or SSD upgrades.
I think most of us here on OSNews could easily build our own NAS, as it’s not a particularly complex project. The various software options could be a bit more complicated to navigate, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable for most of us. Normal, average people, though, would most likely do best to just buy an off-the-shelf NAS for their storage and local back-up needs, and it’s those kind of people who Synology is aiming this policy at. They’ll be easily fooled into thinking Synology-branded drives are somehow special, and not just a generic drive with a fancy sticker.
This is how the world works, but that doesn’t make it any less unpleasant.
Nobody *needs* to buy a NAS, but they are very convenient, compact and easy at what they do, which is why I have some of them.
TrueNAS is a great idea, but where are you going to get a compact, optimised hardware platfrom to run it on?
For the time being, the solution to the nonsense from Synology is Qnap.
I set up my first NAS this year. I chose to use the open source TrueNAS. I’m glad I made that choice.
I’m happy enough with a repurposed desktop. I would imagine some off the shelf hardware would work.
My NAS is an AOOSTAR WTR Pro, it’s perfectly sized, more than enough drive bays for my simple needs serving media and backing up my other systems, and it costs less than most comparable “plug and play” proprietary NAS systems. I threw the existing storage disks from my previous rack-mounted build into it, moved the NVMe OS drive over, and it booted right into my existing setup with no issues. I gained 2.5G LAN speed and lost a ton of unnecessary bulk (it’s about the size of one of my studio monitor speakers).
I hate to sound like an advertisement but it really is the perfect DIY NAS foundation in my experience. I also have experience setting up a UGreen NAS for a friend, and it is similar though it comes with its own NAS software, which actually is pretty great. It has built in Docker support and excellent options for setting up the drives in RAID or JBOD schemes, and the web interface feels like it’s a desktop OS making it easy enough for even casual users to get around and understand. For my own use the AOOSTAR machine is more suitable and open to custom OSes, but the UGreen series are a good alternative to the big guys and their move towards proprietary everything.
I appreciate the ad as I had not seen that before. Is it loud? The thing is half fan.
It was extremely quiet until I added a somewhat loud HDD to it for additional storage. I chose a datacenter-class HGST drive as my third drive for local backups, and when it’s doing its thing there is a low ticking sound from the drive (not the click of death just a noisy drive mechanism). The machine itself is whisper-quiet otherwise. The fan runs at a low enough RPM to be inaudible to me.
That looks excellent! Thanks for the tip.
I have one NAS coming up for replacement, and will certainly be giving this a very close look.
Is this the N100/N150 version or the Ryzen 5825U version? Very interested myself, do you know what the power usage is in idle, with disks spun down?
It’s the N100, I bought it a month or so before they announced the Ryzen version or I would have waited for the latter. I haven’t measured the power use, whether at idle or when hammered, but being based on the N100 it’s probably under 30 watts at idle. It comes with a 120W power supply that barely gets warm even during heavy use.
What a lousy thing to do. They’re definitely following apple’s lead: spend money and engineering resources to make stuff proprietary and less reparable for completely selfish reasons rather than focusing on customer needs. Bleh.
It’s really regressive and I hope that enough people use their heads and boycott this so it doesn’t become more prevalent.
I bought a synology NAS last year. Not because I dont have the skills to.build my own, but because I found the cost to build something using hardware in a similar form factor would cost me just as much, yet still be a little more dated.
Then I went to buy more RAM for it. Synology don’t officially support 3rd party RAM and the stuff they were selling was something like 400% more than 3rd party. I went for 3rd party and guess what? It works just fine, although it did bleat at me that the RAM wasn’t supported or something to that effect. They may refuse warranty if I ever needed it, but hey, I’ll just put the “genuine” stuff back in. Then I went to buy drives and the same experience. Their “own” branded drives were ridiculously expensive. I just went for Seagate Exos Enterprise drives for a fraction of the price. They work just fine.
If they’re going to enforce their outstandingly overpriced clones, it will be the first and last Synology NAS I ever buy.
dexterous,
I don’t mind it as much if customers ultimately have the right to choose, it’s when they start to engineering the NAS to deliberately deprive customers of a choice that it crosses the line into anti-consumer behavior. If this is actually Synology’s plan, then they deserve customer’s wrath and hopefully there is enough ruckus to have them fail. People need to be educated and warned about this. Synology could actually have descent sales on their proprietary stuff in order to help sway customers initially, but make no mistake the leashes they are engineering will absolutely haunt customers in the long run.
Dell did this with some of its PERC RAID controllers on their PowerEdge servers quite a few years ago – they would refuse to include any non-Dell branded drive in any RAID array. They quickly had to back down from that after an outcry, but they still put up a warning about non-Dell drives in their OMSA/iDRAC interfaces I believe. Like Synology, Dell massively overcharges for Dell-branded drives (which basically have a Dell label and a Dell vendor string in the firmware, but are otherwise usually something like a Seagate – Dell do not make their own drives) – a factor of 5 is not uncommon! They do the same with RAM (also rebadged from Micron or Samsung), but at least don’t warn or block if you use third party RAM.
Great, another company trying to lock people in.