[mgsouth]

I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers.

However...

Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.

[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)

[thomasjudge]

For an entertaining/terrifying perspective on firmware, obligatory Bryan Cantrill talk "Zebras All the Way Down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE

[gh02t]

Synology is consumer and SMB focused, though. High end storage that level of integration makes sense, but for Synology it's just not something *most of their customers care about or want.

[cm2187]

That being said, there aren't many major HDD manufacturers anymore, nor do they have many models. Synology is using vanilla linux features like md and lvm. You don't think those manufacturers have tested their drives against vanilla linux?