Synology requires self-branded drives for some consumer NAS systems, drops full functionality and support for third-party HDDs
Synology requires self-branded drives for some consumer NAS systems, drops full functionality and support for third-party HDDs
"third-party HDDs"
In my day we just called these... HDDs. Anytime something so ubiquitous has to be labeled third-party, you know who the bad guy is instantly.
Third party ram, third party motherboard, third party cmos battery...
well after hearing this. when I buy a NAS i'll be going with any brand except synology
Same! I was actually just looking at them. Glad I saw this first
I really love my Synology NAS (DS220+). I don't anticipate needing to replace it anytime soon, but given how well it's treated me, I would almost certainly replace it with a 2024 model instead of a newer one if I had to, given this new limitation.
This decision from them seems short-sighted, I hope they reverse it.
Some companies make it too easy to choose their competitors.
Okay I guess I'll start scouring the internets for a quiet, low energy build
The end result of sniffing your own farts too much.
Well they've been a shit company for awhile. This just seals it for me. Garbage ass product anyways.
Congratulations on the spineless, disgusting piece of shit who imposed this decision. I will look forward to burn my NAS and let them know my opinion, for fucking sure.
Well, at least they have put 2 links on their product page, to the Compatible Drives page, suggesting that other drives might not work.
For me, that only puts them in the "never buy" list and not in the "a crusade is coming" list.
Y'know, I was seriously contemplating a Synology for my first NAS this year.
Was.
I am very happy with my Terramaster running Truenas Scale.
So glad I'm just using my PC
Turns out my next NAS will be a custom after all.
Looks like I'll have to treat my current Synology like I treat my Brother printer. Reverently.
I bought a U-Nas case a while ago. Just a small NAS-style PC case with eight 3.5" disk bays. I built it up and played around with it, but never put it into service in my homelab. It just sat there (off) with Truenas or something on it for testing. Well, it was a good thing I never did anything with it as I needed it the day my Synology died last year. It was a DS1518+ on (a lot of) borrowed time having lasted nine years. I mentally toyed with buying a new NAS, but the idea of spending a few thousand dollars didn't excite me (or the wife).
So, I loaded up Xpenology on a thumb drive and plugged it into my U-Nas. It did not take me long to see how easy this was to load up a Synology DSM and hit the ground running. Then, once I loaded all my disks in, it saw everything and asked if I wanted to upgrade the OS. Sure, why not?
So, all data intact and running a mostly generic set of hardware as a Synology only a couple of days later. Zero extra cost for me as I already had everything. But you can do this too with hardware you might have laying about. I highly recommend it.
oh no what did brother do
Qnap has been pretty good so far.
Can confirm, love my QNAP NAS
The enshitification will continue until revenues improve...
Glad I built my own OMV
I'm not familiar with the term OMV, could u enlighten me?
I believe they're referring to https://www.openmediavault.org/
I saw it early on when I started my homelab journey a few months ago, ended up going with proxmox instead though.
I was a little worried about the "user friendly" aspect as that usually implies it's more limited.
That’s a shame. Building your own NAS it’s not that difficult and a valuable learning experience.
I built my own nas back in the day and it is not worth it. trying to remember an the mdadm commands, setting up Cron jobs for scrubbing and smart tests, setting up email notifications if the tests fail, flashing the firmware on my hba, setting up dynamic DNS, fail2ban (later a private key whitelist), borg etc etc. it's not too bad if you're an experienced Linux user but it's still a lot of time out of your day, meanwhile if you're a new Linux user then you're basically just playing russian roulette with your data. building a jellyfin server is a good learning experience but for a nas I would pick an off the shelf appliance every time
What do you buy for the chassis? Seems like that (with hot swappable drives and two color LEDs next to each) is the main reason you'd buy something like synology
Their low power compute hardware, very compact form factor, and OS/apps are the selling points.
There are both commercial and DIY alternatives, but I am not aware of any that really check all three boxes quite as well.
When my disk station eventually dies I'll go the DIY route but that doesn't mean I'll be excited to do so.
That’s a big fuck-up.
Hey maybe the Sonos app guy can help them out.
Will avoid. Thanks for the heads up.
Feeling real good about learning TrueNAS Scale now.
Any tips on dealing with ACL?
As the poster above stated, permissions and the way things are explained for those permissions or the settings in general are vague as fuck to someone who has just now dipped their toes into the OS. It's a headache to learn, but once you get it setup (I recommend using Obsidian to keep some notes for your future self on how you set it up) it does relatively work absolutely fine.
Is there any thing in particular you need info on? I used Kagi Assistant during the moments where I didn't fully understand why things were the way they were, i.e. "I want to use this like I use my Synology, what the hell is an ACL??". I may be able to fumble you along like I did myself! :P
EDIT: I guess I could actually try to answer your question. What I did was create my own admin account and group and named them my name. After creating them, I logged into my newly made account (or tried to!) until I realized I didn't have the same permissions as the TrueNAS_admin account, so I essentially copied those. I then logged in successfully this time, so I made sure I could do what I could do on the admin account. I could, so I then made sure the truenas_admin account was disabled. (or, I believe I did. I may not have, so look into that before you try it). Then I used Kagi Assistant to give me a general overview of what permissions my admin account should have so that I can always access whatever the hell I want on my own setup. I am at work right now, but I wrote down the list of groups that you would add to your Auxiliary Groups. Some that I do remember are: apps, libvert (and the other virt. These are needed for you to use the NAS as a VM, which I did want to try out since my Synology is way too under powered for any real VM tinkering) and whatever groups the truenas_admin account has. If you'd like the full list, I can try to remember to give it to you, but once I am home, I usually have too much going on for me to remember things.
After that, I am actually able to do mostly what I want for my own setup. I'm a single person using it all the time, so your mileage and needs will probably vary. :)
Oh, you mean my biggest problem?!
I've just resorted to using the shell to set permissions on stuff. For the most part everything works but I've had issues with NFS shares. I think some of that was copying from Windows and Windows trying to do things it shouldn't but once I just manually set things up I was able to back all my stuff up.
VMs and apps run in their own little areas so they just happily hum along.
Well I currently own a Synology NAS and it officially will be my last.
Yep same. I bought my 1522+ in 2023 and it should continue to meet all my needs long into the future. But when I finally decide to decommission it, it'll be time to diy an unraid or freenas build
Yep, same, it's even a 1522+! I had some concerns going in, but had a good prior experience with a 216j that someone gave me for free (I still rate the 216j as a small RAID1 box). I heard the spiel that the Synology DSM OS was worth it, but honestly it has shortcomings, uses old technology and is not very adaptable. Fine if you just want to plug and play, but next time I'm going back to Proxmox and will give TrueNAS a go.
They’ve been implementing this for a while with some of their models. There’s an excellent script that is actively maintained to get around their shit policies.
I’m only using a Synology (ds1823xs+) because I got a killer deal. (Sometimes I still wish I went with unraid.) I’ve never encountered any issues using unapproved hard drives with this script.
My man, I wouldn't bet on Unraid not going the same route like Plex.
Imagine making sure customers don't buy your shit.
I don't regret building my home server with Unraid at all. It's great, use any drives, don't even have to be the same sizes.
The pricing is reasonable, but one issue is that they changed their pricing scheme recently to only give a year of updates for all but the costliest license. I was grandfathered in unless I upgrade my license, but it's something to consider.
The nice thing about their new licensing model is the cost of lower tiers goes toward license upgrades, i.e. you can start with the cheapest license and if you ever need to upgrade you're only paying the difference rather than buying a whole new license (assuming they don't change it again before then.) Reduces the upfront cost a bit.
Oh, that's definitely how it should be (but pretty much never is). That's good to hear.
I'm using Openmedievault and it works just fine. No need to spend money out put up with enshittification.
Interesting, I must have missed it when investigating. It seems a little "Linux power user"-y, though - is that accurate? It says for home office, but is it good for movies/music/etc hosting?
https://www.openmediavault.org/features.html
I can figure out how to get things done when I know the goal (I learned plenty of command-line, docker containers, etc setup with Unraid). So not a beginner. But to be honest, I can't even understand if the features on this "features" page are things that are important to me because I don't know enough acronyms and foundational knowledge, so it's a little imposing.
I've never used Synology NASes, but one feature that Synology NASes have that I found interesting and unusual was their ability to glue drives of different sizes together, what they called "hybrid RAID". No single-drive point of failure, but permits for using drives of different size without wasting a ton of space.
While this isn't, internally, all that technically complicated to do --- internally, I understand that it's just slicing the disks up into a bunch of Linux LVM logical volumes and merging those into an md device, keeping in mind where the logical volumes are located. You can build something like it on a Linux machine with LVM and md. However, it isn't something that other NASes that I've seen provided.
Last I looked, Unraid couldn't do it, and QNAP couldn't do it.
Based on a quick search, it sounds like Unraid still can't do that.
tal, good to see you! I remember you for the "kagis real quick" comments you've left before! I actually started using Kagi because of you, and the assistant was a great help in getting my TrueNAS Scale setup, among many many other things. I actually love searching for things (most of the time) now! Thank you for enlightening me! :)
The thing I like about Unraid that's dead simple, which I'm sure more technically-minded people can do with many solutions, is use drives of different sizes as long as each drive is less than the size of the parity drive(s). Since content shares are automatically distributed across drives, and those drives are different sizes, is that not very similar functionality?
I guess my question is, is the hybrid RAID solution above different only in that the array presents as a single drive to the user, rather than a single (multi-drive-apportioned) share?
According to their site, the OS can only boot from a thumb drive. And if the drive fails you can only move the license to a new one once per year.
Why not allow it to boot from a small SSD or something?
I can't say I understand the reasons for that.
But the flash drive content is very minimal and in 2+ years of using it, anecdotally I haven't had any problems. The cache drive is separate (I use an SSD for that in addition to my 3.5" HDDs), and once booted my understanding is the entire OS is in memory, so it isn't a bottleneck. The OS flash drive is small and just settings, and one-click backup, so I don't have anxiety over data loss.
Synology's new Plus Series NAS
This isn't surprising. SOHO and middle tier business hardware installs have all kinds of these requirements from support vendors. Synology was sort of an outlier on those that just allowed mixed bag and it provide software calculations on hard drive health.
That they want knowns in their machines isn't surprising. I'm actually surprised it isn't a complete drop in any assurances if you BYOD.
These features in this product aren't home or consumer grade and indicating that it's for the "advance home user" is like saying Arch Linux is the advance MacOS. There's a lot of detail behind that statement that's not being addressed.
It is sad to see them go this route, but I cannot say it comes as a surprise. But honestly, if you're a hobbyist and see yourself using the features in this level of NAS, you're likely skilled enough as is to build your own. And honestly, you'll be happier building your own.
I wish your comment was at the top
buying brand name is almost always a bad idea when it comes to computers.
take advantage of their modularity, people. desktops are still popular for a reason.
I love my synology router and had considered buying a NAS. That's a deal breaker for me though. I have a proxmox machine running ubuntu server as a "NAS" right now so I'll stick with that.
Haha wow what an absolutely HORRIBLE descision, wtf?! So glad I went with QNAP!!
Is that really new? My drives are technically "unsupported" but you can just execute a script that will add all installed drives to the supported drive list and then you get all the features.
I've only seen the "non supported drive installed" notification once and in my experience it affected absolutely nothing about the device.
In my experience it blocks out some other notifications that might be interesting.
Also the Synology branded SSDs are like 3x the price of a WD alt.
Crazy how they're just going to make such a nice brand go to shit.
Per the article, I believe this is a change to new 2025 devices. Is yours from 2025?
So, it doesn't affect existing models, just the new ranges of NAS that will be released soon. And if you own an old one you can use it to format non supported drives and migrate to the newer models.
Pretty shit, but at least it's not going to majorly affect existing set ups.
I wonder if Synology will realise how bad of a move this is and one day roll it back. This will kill their consumer level market share, do they have enough of an enterprise market for this to make up the difference?
Anyone know of anyone else with the same level of turnkey NAS solution? I liked synology for its lack of having to fuck around with random bullshit.
Qnap
Can't you just install TrueNAS on a synology?
I'm guessing this is a firmware thing. Ie, if you plug in an unapproved drive it simply won't appear to the OS.
No, others said they patched the Synology OS in software.
My point is that you buy Synology for the hardware. Just like a router or laptop or phone, wipe the OS as soon as it arrives and install the better FOSS OS.
Hopefully the nas ive got holds up for a long time...
This is unfortunate. My first NAS was an ASUS and it sucked balls to the point I made the switch to Synology and was able to get everything I needed working. Storage, external view access, connection to my apps. IDK what ima do when I need to move NAS solutions.
my first NAS was a synology and it sucked so hard I moved to QNAP, which sucked less but still was bad, so I learned to just make and use my own mini server.
I still remember their support telling me to open the SSH port to the public internet for their support team to look at it. fucking clowns.
