Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

Summary

Synology HAT5300 And Enterprise NAS Cover I dislike writing these articles, but here we are. According to HardwareLuxx, Synology is on a rough course with generations-old sub-par NAS hardware and now appears to be locking its NAS units to its own branded hard drives in its upcoming 2025 Plus models. This is a shame since a few years ago, Synology had neat hardware. Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move In 2021, we covered how Synology launched an Enterprise Hard Drive Line and started locking Drives for New NASes. That was in a higher-end segment. Realistically, it became hard to recommend that type of solution. QNAP and iXsystems (TrueNAS) pushed ahead with ZFS support and better hardware, but it did not impact the majority of users. Synology DS920 Plus Cover Translating a relevant bit for our readers. “…since an estimated hard drive health report is essential for both private and professional use, this creates a compulsion to use Synology’s own or equivalent drives. Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled. There are also restrictions on the creation of storage pools, as well as, of course, support in the event of failures, which are not further specified.” (Source: Translated from HardwareLuxx) Changing this to require Synology branded drives in the “Plus” line is silly. There are only a handful of hard drive manufacturers, and Synology does not have anywhere near the scale to compete at hard drive manufacturing. Consolidation in the hard drive industry was driven by huge economies of scale benefits. Without scale, and a library of patents, it is a very hard market to enter. As a result, Synology must be simply re-branding drives. Labeling drives as a “Dell”, “NetApp”, “HPE”, or other big vendor drive has been going on for years (decades?) on both the hard drive and SSD sides of storage. Realistically, there is usually very little that...