Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

This sounds like the company from Cory Doctorow’s most recent novel, Picks & Shovels

I'm in the market for my first NAS. Synology made the choice a bit easier.
Thank you.
- You picked an excellent time (in terms of consumer choice on NAS's). I've been using a DS920+ for the past few years, and the software is solid (e.g. the core apps like Drive, Photos, etc). Synology is (was?) also always number one in terms of security. But honestly, there's little to no reason to expose your NAS to the internet these days since tools like Tailscale make life a lot easier (and safer).
  That being said, I also was a beta tester for Ugreen's NAS(es) last year. Their software sucked at the time, but it's gotten way better. The hardware itself is gorgeous, and they don't skimp on parts. The one I have is one they never intended to sell in the US: DX4700 (they sell the DXP4800). This one has an Intel N5105 (predecessor to the N100), 8GB RAM, and dual NVME slots (for cache or for storage). Plus they listened to us testers when we told them to allow third party OS installs without voiding the warranty (e.g. OpenMediaVault, etc).
  Point is, no matter who you go with or if you build your own, it's a good time (minus tarrifs).
  
  Hmmm so you're telling me to go with Ugreen, got it

Hold up. Let me get this straight - Synology is trying to make their NASs only work with their own proprietary hard drives? Do they not realize that there are boat loads of other companies out there making NASs and Hard Drives?
Who the hell is going to want to buy a Synology NAS now? Ffs, some of these companies are so delusional...
- It’s one of those really myopic decisions that sink companies. But god bless em, they just keep trying lol
  
  Short term profits reign king once again
  Gotta make the imaginary money line go up somehow
- Is there a reason to think all the other companies couldn't start doing it to?

This sucks as a long time Synology customer. They really should know their audience better.
Oh well. Back to proxmox to handle everything

So glad I went with asustor. Synology lost their god damned minds

Consumer NAS devices is a lost plot point either way.
Buy a 2nd hand thinkpad or a gaming PC for basically the same price as synology tray and you'll have not only a NAS but a full home server that'll last you a decade and play video games as an extra.
- That's fine for us techy people, but my parents would not be able to do that.
  
  Not sure if proprietary NAS tools are any easier tbh
  I think the IT consumer culture is just lazy. If you don't know how to fix your sink you'd call in a plumber but if your home server breaks ppl just sit and whine how tech is too hard rather than you know paying someone to do the job for them.

Broadcom released a free VMware again, Synology is locking down their products,... Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?
This is seriously 'how to kill your brand and customer good will in one easy step' type nonsense.
Synology does not have the respect in Enterprise that someone like Dell or HPE does. They exist in Enterprise because of admins who use it at home and then bring the knowledge to work.
All this does is make sure nobody will buy one for the home anymore. There are too many other good options. And various open source NAS OS choices becoming more mature by the day.
If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They'd sell a ton of them.
I also wouldn't be surprised if a Synology 'jailbreak' to load a third party OS comes out.
- QNAP, Asustor, UGreen, Unifi, and many others already offer lower cost NASes from 2 to 8 bays (some might offer even more)
  
  Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I'm at, at this point if I go somewhere else I'm going to want open source most likely.
- If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They'd sell a ton of them.
  There's no shortage of alternatives to Synology hardware. People buy Synology because of the software.
  
  Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I'm not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I'm not aware of any little toaster type boxes.
- Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?
  Well, Citrix's CEO was Broadcom' software boss
  And also hasa place at the US treasury, he's DOGE-affiliated as well: https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2025/citrix-parent-ceo-krause-on-doge-role-we-re-applying-public-company-standards-to-the-federal-government
  
  My employer uses Citrix to run our proprietary apps. Every "upgrade" they issued just made it worse to the point that it was crashing multiple times and day. Since we're a 25/7 operation we had to have IT on standby all the time to reboot the servers every time they crashed. Citrix support said there was nothing in the logs other than the crashes so it must be our brand new hardware.
  It got so bad that corporate paid the IT team extra to build a web based version as a backup. It's slower than Citrix but at least when Citrix crashes we have a fallback that works.
  Thankfully corporate has given the green light for a custom built system, so now we're all just waiting for the corporate machine to go through the bidding process so we can start working with whoever they pick.
- Well,
  Broadcom released a free VMware again
  should be taken as a bait to lure in unsuspecting users before later stage enshit tactics happen. Synology seems to be at some other point in their enshit process, but enshit nevertheless.
  
  Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good
- Hey, that's not entirely true! Our place brought them in because it was also a cheap solution! Honestly, it has done fine for our storage solution, which is mostly backups related. Then again, we came from Baracuda, which was super expensive, super locked down, and did break a lot.

This is the silliest thing I've ever heard, do they even know their audience.

Even if the drive prices are not raised to unreasonable levels, if ever Synology decides to stop selling these drives the NAS you have purchased will become useless. Think I'll pass.
- It doesn't become useless, it just misses out on a bunch of useful features for the drives.
  Still ridiculous, of course
- Well shit… I don’t even think about that.

Fixed: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db
- Fixed
  Worked-around, you mean. And that hack seems temporary.
- Yup, been using that from the start, since none of the 20TB drives were "verified" when I bought them.
  It's a bit annoying that you have to do that, but ultimately a non-issue.
  
  A non-issue??? That is absolutely an issue, because 90% of consumers won’t know about this fix. It’s outrageous that a consumer facing brand introduces such arbitrary vendor lock-ins, especially without reason. It’s just like HP with their ink lock. An absolute dick move and should not be supported in the slightest.

I switched from a HP MicroServer with TrueNAS (the BSD one) to a Synology 8-bay system because of convenience, mostly (DIY 8-bay with hot swap, low idle power and all seems hard to come by).
Hopefully it'll last for years to come but if I ever need to replace/upgrade it it's not gonna be another Synology with this type of extreme vendor lock-in.

That is sad to see. I’ve moved on to Raspberry Pi + hard disk enclosure (with incredible performance) but it’s still upsetting to see Synology go this route.
- One point: if it matters to you, you might want to confirm your enclosure's behavior under power-loss conditions. I had one that did not come back to a powered on state or have an option to do so when power was restored. Not something I'd thought of, since I'd assumed this behavior. Eventually, after some looking, found an enclosure with a mechanical-toggle power switch that did restore prior state.
  
  It does matter to me and I live in an area with frequent power outages. Unfortunately I didn’t check this out before purchasing so I’m pretty annoyed by this behavior.

I bought a Terramaster instead. Better hardware specs for the money and you can overwrite the OS with Linux which is way better than any stock OS.
- This is what I’ll replace my DS415+ with, too, once it dies. The TerraMasters are basically bog-standard Intel NUCs with a storage adapter. And there’s HDMI output and an internal USB drive which you can just replace (or overwrite) and install OMV or TrueNAS or whatever.
- Their website looks pretty sketchy, ngl
  
  Sketch? Nah bro, that is exactly the kind of "This looked sick in the early 2000s and we haven't bothered updating it since" level of design that I want to see from a hardware vendor. That's a company that's just sitting there quietly trucking along, making nerdy devices for nerdy people. That's a website that was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than a 30+ year old sysadmin who owns at least one beard grooming product.
- I have one, but I feel pretty burned by them since the model I bought was immediately outdated because the next hardware version after mine was a new cpu arcitechure, and the new software updates don't support the old architecture. I think they moved from arm to x86 or something like that. So I'm stuck with old software that's no longer supported, only a year or two after I bought the up to date model.
  And, yeah, as the other commenter noted, it does feel quite like you're using knock-off software. Remoting into it doesn't really fill me with confidence. Maybe it's fine but it just looks/feels like the cheap and shitty version of something more reputable. And it's not even running a proper version of linux that I could customise - it's a stripped down version of arch that I can't install anything on unless it's on their official app store, which doens't even work half the time, and when I do install the official version of plex/etc the cpu is so wimpy that it can't even direct stream untranscoded video directly off the disk. My raspberrypi 5 is literally 10x (!!) faster than it in cpu benchmarks. You're probably right that I could probably overwrite the os with something better, but then what's the point in buying an expensive NAS when you could just buy a pi with much more power, community support, packages, etc, plus a dumb external usb enclosure for half the cost? Maybe the more recent ones with the updated cpu architecture are more powerful and have better apps, idk, but now I just use it as a dumb hard drive enclosure and do any smarts, such as plex or scripts I need to run, on my pi anyway.
  So, I'm considering just moving all my NAS/plex data to an external drive attached to my pi.
  
  but then what's the point in buying an expensive NAS when you could just buy a pi with much more power, community support, packages, etc,
  Exactly, what's the point?
  
  Mine has an internal USB so you can open it up pretty easily and install any version of Linux you prefer. Not sure what model you bought, but I would assume you can too.

I have an Asustor that is running Debian. It's just a PC in a NAS enclosure so why should it not.
- That's all a NAS has ever been, just a PC that specializes in storage. "NAS" isn't a specific product, either - it's whatever hardware you set up to function as such. My own NAS is a 2014 Mac mini running OMV (Debian 12 based) with a 4-bay locking drive dock attached to it. Works great.
  I took images of my gaming PC drives (500GB, 2TB) onto a 4TB spinner, then shoved that spinner into my NAS's dock. With 2 minutes of point and click configuration, I can access those images from my gaming PC's new Linux install over the network to copy whatever data I might need. Easy peasy. No Synology needed for that.