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.

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.

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?

NOT true. They have NOT fully reversed on this. Please read:

https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Fantastic that people managed to make reverse (or even just postpone) this awful decision. A good example of people voting with their money!

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

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.

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:)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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.

I think it would be pretty cool if Framework made a TrueNAS targeted NAS box.

Is Synology owned by some evil equity fund? A healthy NAS company would have predicted the outcome before attempting to squeeze customers like this.

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"

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.

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.

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

Too little, too late. You'd have to be nuts to willingly go back into their walled garden now.

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.

This was the motivation to swap out my old, reliable Synology for a new Ugreen setup. Pretty happy so far.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good, but I lost my trust in them, so my next NAS will be something else.

Damage is already done.

It takes decades to build consumer trust, and one stupid MBA driven idea to ruin it.

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.

> 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?

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?

I'd imagine UGreen - trying to break into this market - probably sent them a thank you gift.

What a wild unforced error...

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.

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

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... 500€? Not even all the disks worth that much

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!

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.

Customers lost tend to stay lost.

So, was anyone held accountable for this?

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.

Too late. The damage is done and the trust is gone, I won't be coming back.

This is the reason then that many YT influencers are making Synology shorts...awful original decision but at least they backtracked which is good!

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.

Not super different to buying a server from Dell, HP etc. Very different target market however.

It’s so incredibly easy to build a TrueNAS box these days I don’t know why anyone would go the Synology route.

Bose first, Synology second. Bad execs need to go.

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.

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.

Nobody could have seen this coming. Nobody at all.

Vote with your wallet.

Always works.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

It shouldn’t be enough for companies to just reverse some lousy decision, they’ve got to show some goodwill for it.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

How many will still think this is the policy regardless of its reversal? Good job Synology.

I'm glad that I've graduated from Synology to a proper Debian server with ZFS around 6 years ago. Fuck these people.

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.

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.

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...

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.

It's too late. They can't be trusted. They have fucked themselves.

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.

Yes! Resist the enshittoscene!

It was a bald strategy move, but market was just not ready for the innovation

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.

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.

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.

FA ... FO