I had some 12TB WD ultrastar that I happily replaced with some Toshiba MG09ACA18TE. To my ears at least the toshiba sound signficantly more bearable than the ultrastar were (lower pitch so less disturbing). Due to living in a small apartment my NAS is in my living room so noise matters.

That said, I've since added an ssd and moved almost everything to the ssd (docker, the database and all apps) and it's much nicer in term of noise.

TBF, the picture in TFA only shows rack-mounted Synology devices, where noise is not really a concern.

Synologoy SMB/SOHO NAS devices should not be affected by the drive lockdown (for now).

Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units.

I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement).

Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR).

I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.

So basically buy one of the older models now ?

Will new firmware updates to everything before this require the Synology branded drives ?

Seemingly not, at least not for the moment, based on the experiences of people migrating arrays [successfully] from older units and the massive backlash that would result if they trashed currently working arrays.

If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.

but that's the proposed change, that their Plus lineup which is generally targeted for SMB/SOHO/enthusiast market, will be working only with their drives

Then the photo with the U-factor servers is obvs. a distraction. Thanks for the clarification.

It can't be programmatically identified because manufacturers actively hide them. There are ATA commands for that, DM-SMR drives lie to it.

I wouldn't be sure why Toshiba M-prefixed 7K2 drives would be bad for NAS use cases. They're descendants of what were used in high performance SPARC servers. Hot, dense, obnoxious, but that's just Fujitsu. They're plenty reliable, performant, and perfect for your all-important on-line/near-line data! You just have to look away from bills(/s).

0: https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-r...

1: https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undiscl...

2: https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313