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.
What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.
I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent.
It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.
I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)
I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.
Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are building their own NAS because they will just see the spec sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very performant to begin with.
And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual contact with the support people in your organization to understand this. If the people answering phones and chats didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in advance to test with.
There are way too many companies where higher ups and marketing will refuse to listen to the engineers about what people actually like about their products.
See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it
Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?
I'm curious, do you know of examples of companies that lost their best engineers despite reversing course on a shitty policy?
My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
"That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years" is a strong argument against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you loose in a minute.
Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn’t happen.
This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to. The reality is that often such leaders can come out net positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to the ground because they extracted out everything in a short term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But at least the company and its products disappear. It's evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some kind of internal hero.
I also believe that this peek into the mentality of the organization leadership makes doubt in customers if the organization can be trusted again. I, personally, will think more than twice before choosing them again. This will be several years of recovery for the reputation, if it ever happens at all. Synology is in the box called 'squeezing cutomers for money' and the customer has no incentive to spend any time or money to test if the classification is still valid. Will stay there, despite this step. There is doubt that they changed their way of thinking. They only reacted to the repercussion to THIS specific action of theirs, that became measurably very bad for THEM. It was not like they revised their action after the outcry, no. They had to bleed, they want to stop THEIR bleeding, not making it good again for the customer. benefit for the remaining customers is just a coincidence here. I am not hopeful for their change of mentality. Which could be something disappointing to hear for faithful employees.
Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O
This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions before a decision is made and before the consequences are revealed.
Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the right answer was easily accessible.
There's probably some people who got this right who could take a shot at running things, but you can't know without having the dissenting opinions in writing ahead of time.
In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the leadership who did this not being impacted or punished is even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it’s much worse for morale.
I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a bad decision (or even a decision that’s seen to be bad)? In my experience internal morale often suffers before the customers catch on.
It's this level of out of touch with their market that gives me zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times according to their package manager, rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They deserve their own downfall, utter corporate stupidity.
> That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years.
People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:)
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] osivertsson|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 months ago|reply
I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
[+] [-] rickdeckard|5 months ago|reply
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
[+] [-] teekert|5 months ago|reply
It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch.
I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)
[+] [-] anal_reactor|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|5 months ago|reply
And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it.
Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
[+] [-] potato3732842|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisRR|5 months ago|reply
See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it
[+] [-] INTPenis|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] behnamoh|5 months ago|reply
My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
[+] [-] luca4|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] setgree|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ec109685|5 months ago|reply
https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/
[+] [-] bonoboTP|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mihaaly|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mguerville|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alphazard|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] liquid_thyme|5 months ago|reply
Your "guess" is not logical.
[+] [-] pfexec|5 months ago|reply
The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice.
Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it.
The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).
[+] [-] dstroot|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|5 months ago|reply
I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee.
The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
[+] [-] supportengineer|5 months ago|reply
If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them.
Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.
[+] [-] ponooqjoqo|5 months ago|reply
High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.
[+] [-] dheera|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] OptionOfT|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DerpHerpington|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|5 months ago|reply
People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.
[+] [-] 8fingerlouie|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aborsy|5 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Fischgericht|5 months ago|reply
https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Drive_compati...
[+] [-] bayindirh|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AJRF|5 months ago|reply
Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.
[+] [-] jeffparsons|5 months ago|reply
Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
[+] [-] tristanperry|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bapak|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] StillBored|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshstrange|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] InsideOutSanta|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fasteo|5 months ago|reply
I honestly can’t believe anyone at Synology thought this would turn out differently.
[+] [-] InTheArena|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rwmj|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] calini|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|5 months ago|reply
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:)
[+] [-] NewsaHackO|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stego-tech|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] julcol|5 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ByteDrifter|5 months ago|reply