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.

So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.

It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.

I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages.

RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that?

I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.

I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.

-----

As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.

It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.

For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.

It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.

And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.

But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're going to resync the array anyways.

I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and reliable storage in a very small footprint.

What are you thinking of, here? Just a scary feeling?

Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology.

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html

They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives.

Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.

Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying another Synology product.

In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.

For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.

LOL, clearly an amateur. That's longer than it took me to build Dropbox. /s

I spent five hours debugging a strange behavior in my shell with some custom software this morning and submitted a bug report to a software vendor that was not the expected cause of the issue. I feel great about it. I used to feel great about my Synology NAS, too.

Qnap, Ugreen, whatever else, we'll see when my current model is due for replacement. Synology will have to perform pretty much miracles before then for me to consider them again after three generations of their hardware that were all very satisfactory. What a major mistake.

They weren't perfect, but they were perfect for my needs. Not anymore.

DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.

Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.

Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.

All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.

You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!

Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585048

https://www.auvik.com/franklyit/blog/vendors-clock-signal-fl...

I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.

And actually a good reminder for me to eBay up another cold spare, because I totally forgot to.

Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel? I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.

What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.

A friend has a Synology NAS and I have a QNAP NAS. In my experience, QNAP's QTS (QuTS Hero if you want ZFS) is directly comparable.

Also for whatever reason when you use Drive files don’t go into the regular recycle bin. They go into the Drive recycle bin…but only if you have file backups (whatever they call them, where it saves copies of files if they’re changed) enabled. I didn’t, for that folder.

Poof go 15 years of raw photo files.

The kind of person who wants to do that is squarely outside their market. And you’d be paying a real premium for nothing.

Debian has docs on installing on at least one model of their arm boxes: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology

I run Debian on a few different models of qnap because their hardware occupies a niche of compact enclosure, low noise, and many drives.

If you want a device to tinker with, this is the wrong product for you.

Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.

For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured.

For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course).

For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it.

For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.

And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly).

And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.

For $300 I could get an ITX to run.

So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.

What's the gain of running 12 RPi, exactly? Do you do research work requiring distributed low-cost computing?

My server is repurposed desktop hardware in a desktop tower case and is nearly silent except for the subtle hard drive noises. The hardware cost next to nothing and is far faster and more capable than any pi (except the pio of course which wouldn’t be used anyway).

At the very least you want the case and psu. At which point the question is which cpu+motherboard+ram combo do you want in that case. The rpi is one of many such options and is actually quite expensive for the amount of cpu+ram you get for the price.

After looking at lots of small board options, I got a NUC for $110 to be the brains of my NAS.

They still fill a niche for me, just not a server niche. The easy-to-access GPIO in a close-to-vanilla Linux system really doesn't have a competitor at its price point. For a fourth grade science project last winter, I had a pi 4 already (but it'd have been about $40 at my local microcenter if I hadn't). We were able to source a few $2 sensors off Amazon. I showed her how to look up the pinouts, figure out which GPIO pin to connect the dupont connectors to, and helped her write a python program to log the data from the sensors to a spreadsheet. She had fun with it, learned some stuff, and it really sparked her interest.

I don't think anyone has outcompeted them in accessibility for that kind of tinkering and learning. Or, if they have, they haven't caught my attention yet, and I've usually got my eyes open for that kind of thing.

Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.

And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".

Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.

So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.

Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box):

Coffee table Digital Touch map.

Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiPo battery.

ADSB receiver also powered by solar and a battery.

Arcade Cabinet that sits on a bar top with a bill reader.

Mini JukeBox at the local hacker space.

Sailing autopilot using NMEA2000 connectors.

Wearables.

Playing with high density distributed computing. (More than 5 machines)

Where the mini pc really shines is:

Storage. (NAS included)

Media PC (TV sold separately)

Gaming Console

Personal Cloud (docker + nfs + caddy + <insert personalized preferences>)

General Autopilot (sensors that need GPU support).

You have left over old PCs and don’t want to open your wallet…

I was commenting in the context of why people choose them for servers but I recognize that I did not make that clear.

Similar to anything running in SMM (System Management Mode) on X86/AMD64 since the times of the 386SL. Be it BIOS, APM, ACPI, UEFI, or whatever.

I repeat: "It's just an illoooshn..." (There is now raw iron/silicon for consumers)

To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless.

I am much more concerned about data center power usages, especially in the age of LLMs.

Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept preaching we should stop using electric kettles because it's bad for the planet. While the 3 plants in her hometown amounted to ~83% of all power usage and ~92% or all pollution. Boy, was she unhappy when I did that research and pointed it out to her.

Pi-s / SBCs are I suppose very good for computing out there in the meatspace, where you might need a battery because sometimes power stops for 6 hours? Could be that.

She was, shall we say, disappointed with the response.

Also this was some 15 years ago.

power draw. running 24/7 it makes a huge difference in overall power usage, and by switching from a repurposed desktop mobo & cpu, to a dedicated low power saved me thousands in electricity costs every year.

that fact that in EU power isn't cheap... is also a main reason for keeping total power draw as low as possible.

The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology.

Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.

It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity.

Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.

I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.

I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.

I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...

[1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...

Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be.

Broadcom BCM2712

Having used both, I can't help but notice how NAS' routinely run just fine without it.

How do you verify your data to confirm that?

I currently manage four NASes (two primary, two backup replicas). Only one has ECC RAM. And I'm okay with my setup.

ECC is great to have, but it is oversold by some as being absolutely required for all storage devices, IMO.

How many files have you personally seen gone corrupt on non-ecc?

ECC originated first out of server grade servers. Self-hosting rarely hits that level of demand.

I'll share any more that come to mind.

The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?)

Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available.

This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own.

For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.

I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.

But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z.

They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions.

For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.

If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.

1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality

2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy.

I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer.

My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.

It's literally the "Why would you buy Dropbox when I can glue it together with rsync" level of ignorant comment, completely ignoring how behind most of those solutions like TrueNAS are in time cost.

For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't.

But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box...

And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.

External drives were on sale, I bought several and setup with a RPI. Lots of headaches. It took effort to iron out all the USB and external disk issues. Had to work out alternative boot. Had power adapters fail for the RPI. Had to enhance cooling. etc. Kept running into popular Docker containers still not having aarch64 variants.

I finally replaced the RPI with a used Dell SFF. Kept the USB drives and it's been solid with similar power draw and just easier to deal with all around.

Though I am considering going back to a tower, shucking the drives (they're out of warranty) and going back to SATA.

With a proprietary on-disk format you can't exactly hook them up to any random controller and expect it to work: either you find a new one from the same controller family, or your data is gone.

You say that like it’s a mystery why people by then but NUCs are fantastic little PCs.

The power adapter is just hidden under the desk whereas the NUC is sat on the desk (or behind the monitor/TV).

It’s the same as with Mac Minis and Apple TV. And other devices of that ilk.

There seems to be a Windows-only update tool available that might fix it, but that's rather inconvenient when it's used as a server running Linux! No update available as a standalone boot disk or via LVFS. So I haven't gotten it fixed yet because doing so involves getting a second SSD, taking my server offline to install Windows on it, just to run a firmware update.

The Mac Mini sits on your desk and there’s nothing under it.

It's of course more work to set up than synology, and if you want a neat box, you have to figure that out yourself

However, in my experience with a Pi 4, the issue is encryption. The CPU simply isn't fast enough for 1Gbps of AES! Want to use HTTPS or SSH? You're capped at ~50Mbps by default, and can get it up to a few hundred Mbps by forcing the use of chacha20-poly1305. Want to add full-disk encryption to that? Forget it.

The Pi 5 is supposed to have hardware AES acceleration so it should be better, but I'm still finding forum posts of people seeing absolutely horrible performance. Probably fine to store the occasional holiday photo, but falls apart when you intend to regularly copy tens of gigabytes to/from it at once.

1293685061 bytes (1.3 GB, 1.2 GiB) copied, 5.14336 s, 252 MB/s

which is good enough for me on magnetic disks

It apparently hit 387MBps for a few hours while running the montly raid scrub. I run luks on top of mdraid though so the raid scrub doesn't have to decrypt anything.

scp to write to the encrypted disk seems to get me something in the 60 - 100MB/s range.

What you are describing is a hobby item for enthusiasts who want to enjoy tinkering, setting something crazy up and constantly debugging it. That is very much NOT the market of people who buy Synology products.

Synology is not a JBOD RAID. It is an appliance that does many things (storage, services, web access, etc.) and can automatically keep itself up to date with no additional contact necessary. It can be hooked up to a UPS for resilience. If you have a problem there are support forums and online articles. It can be synced to other Synology devices at other sites. Etc., etc.

A pile of RPi is none of that.

The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.

You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing.

If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid.

Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR.

Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS.

Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market.

Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.

Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.

So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.

"There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

    I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."

There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.

Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated.

The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.

I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.

Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.

Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.

> Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.

Indeed. I believe that if you're a shareholder employee owner, you are likely incentivized to not kill the golden goose versus folks at the top making decisions unilaterally, but you also need some ability to say no to bad decisions. Like Costco, employee and customer happiness first, profits after.

(big fan of employee ownership and control contributors, aligning incentives and outcomes and all that jazz)

The only peers at the company who were enthusiastic about the decision were the ones who were buying more company stock and wanted it to go up. They thought that anything that increased the bottom line would increase the stock price, and therefore they were on board.

So, no, I don't think increased employee ownership solves anything.

We're going to need a fact-check on this. I'll bet the failure rate of co-ops is well beyond those of standard business structures.

1) The shares can be non-voting shares. LOL.

2) Only a relatively small portion of the overall "pie" has to go to employees for them to be able to say they're "employee owned". There can still be non-employee owners involved to a large degree.

3) That slice of the pie will tend to be weighted so heavily toward those near the top of the org chart that in practice it may be more like "upper-management owned" anyway.

I think the main reasons companies in the US choose it are:

1) Propaganda. "You're an owner!" It's a way to trick unwise employees into working harder for (effectively) nothing extra, and even into exhorting others to do the same.

2) Probably some kind of tax-avoidance reasons.

3) As a vehicle for a kind of stock-compensation system without having to take the company public or do occasional odd maneuvers with investors for that stock to be de facto liquid for employees.

IME there's zero percent more meaningful "ownership" involved than, say, Google folks who receive stock as part of their comp (and nobody calls Google "employee owned"). It's a misleading name for the structure.

I’m unaware of any tax avoidance advantages but I should ask my accountant (pretty sure he’ll say no though. :D )

I’ve actually considered various ways of assigning non-voting shares in the past as a way to grant employees some skin in the game without ceding control or permanently diluting ownership. It’s not a ‘startup’ in the HN sense so handing out shares willy nilly doesn’t make sense.

There are advantages to employee ownership. Preventing bad business decisions is not one of them.

Work for a salary. Invest in a diversified portfolio that's not tied to your employer.

Technically competent doesn't always mean empathetic.

The decisions can sometime look like the xkcd cartoon about scientists[1].

[1] - https://xkcd.com/242/

Do you think there's some magical moral/ethical line that gets drawn between employees and executives, where the former are naturally "good" and the latter "bad"?

>Like Costco, employee and customer happiness first, profits after.

This is such a strange myth. Do you go to Costco? There's nothing great about the customer experience. It's a discount store of decent quality that pays the employees decent wages. It's better than Walmart and Amazon, but nobody dreams of working there.

Apple is only company that is allowed to get away with that.

Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in.

You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are planning on turning customer hostile.

I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is staged, and profits flow (for better or worse).

The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes, which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines. They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping on.

In this case, the customers were loyal to Synology for the NAS but not the hard drives.

By locking them in further, they thought they could capture their customers' hard drive purchasing, too. They thought the brand loyalty would allow it.

You see this a lot when a company’s founders leave and are replaced by MBAs. Customer goodwill isn’t a tangible asset, so the MBAs burn it to produce more quarterly revenue. It works great for a while until the customers wisely decide never to let that company burn them again.

By that stage the MBAs have scored even higher paying jobs at bigger companies based on how much they boosted profits, so I guess it continues to work for them afterwards too.

Sounds very much like "doing a Ratner": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

Enshittification is a bold strategy when you have solid competition.

I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.

When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.

So, I started to look around and landed on Ugreen. They offered a NAS with more RAM (and the ability to upgrade), better connectivity (2.5GbE + 10 GbE), faster CPU, ability to install custom OSes (like TrueNAS), the OS resides on a separate, user-replaceable M.2 NVMe drive. All that for less money. Plus, since I control the OS, there's no way they can push some garbage it's-for-your-own-good-wink-wink update down my throat.

Bought it, didn't even start their OS and put TrueNAS Scale on it and I've never been happier. The caveat here is that I use my NAS as a NAS - no apps, no docker, no photos app. All that is on a separate box in the rack.

For me to ever trust Synology again I'd have to see some punitive action towards the idiots there that thought that whole HDD restrictions mess was a good idea. Even then, now that I've had a look around what else is available, I'm pretty sure I'll stay clear for a couple of years.

After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare.

I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.

As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make

They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.

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...

In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)

"Why didn't you put that in the patch notes?"

Because you wouldn't read it anyway.

</OT>

All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."

Typically you'd want to tier it out

1. Fully supported drives: Synology branded

2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features

3. Unsupported but works: list of drives

4. Does not work: list of drives.

There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.

Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.

> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.

That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".

Not if they follow yason's guidance of:

> All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."

---

Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.

But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.

"The official drives have a MTBF which is X longer which saves you Y amount of time and Z dollars, but the choice and the risk is up to you."

Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.

I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales.

Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he found the "silver bullet"...

Post sales, the feedback comes from customers.

Pre-sales, it might be heard from sales.

R&D and Product might not get real world input or feedback as directly as the actual paying customers.

Maybe it's just me.

As a life long customer support person I disagree.

Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.

But it actually is: because sales must keep growing, so the support burden typically increases linearly - while hiring does not, more often than not.

I've seen this at a few companies now:

* CS teams get built, delivers great support

* sales increase (partially thanks to that support, but there is no way to show it with metrics)

* hiring in CS does not keep pace (because it's largely seen as a cost centre)

* CS teams get overwhelmed and look for ways to downscale per-customer effort.

That's why some big names have literally declared support bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support (google, amazon...).

They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives.

If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.

Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.

Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”

That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.

Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.

Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...

If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.

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.)

And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.

Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...

Show this was anything other than a money grab so the Synology was the sole supplier for drives.

Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.

I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems. "Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."

They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives". TBH this is quite sad. I recommended Synology to some people before... Feels like I have to walk back on my word.

Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.

HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.

Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".

I know I'm one of those people.

That's all they ever needed to say. Instead, they said, "Fuck you, pay me."

See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it

I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.

Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial.

In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.

Blow the dust out of the connector

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...

That's how we all benefit. But if a company wants to benefit more than you, they can. That's how enshittification works.

Source: worked AppleCare

In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.

People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.

Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.

They're a fun bunch.

It could be confidence.

It could be social standing.

It could be that they are not explaining their viewpoint properly to the stake holders.

If the parent is not gaining traction and blaming it on intelligence, likely, the parent can't see others viewpoints either and is not trying to bring the team along...

Engineering is not just systems...

I get paid either way.

I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.

It’s annoying, but either way I get paid.

There's no advancement, just bigger piles of bullshit. The goal is to get paid for shoveling the least.

But sure, even then it’d get super annoying if they always ignored it. At some point it’d be obvious that my business goals don’t align well at all with theirs, so maybe it’s time to find a better fit.

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.

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.

Half a year is plenty enough to move away.

Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.

YES, yes, a million times yes.

Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.

I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where:

* This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'.

* ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it.

So they still messed up, and the damage is now done.

If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive.

But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.

See the problem there...?

1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.

2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.

3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.

However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.

https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/

High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.

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.

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).

Your "guess" is not logical.

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.

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.

If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.