Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

Posted by motiejus 4/19/2025

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move(www.servethehome.com)

653 points | 403 commentspage 2

miek 4/22/2025|

Synology provided more info to the owner of YouTube channel NASCompares, who then posted it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1k53gk0/official_...

It starts with "Synology's storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model." As a long-time user, all of this collectively moves Synology from "highly recommended" to "avoid."

crazygringo 4/22/2025||

I'm confused.

It sounds like only certain features will be unavailable for non-Synology drives:

> Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled.

It sounds like you can still use non-Synology drives just fine, but not do certain advanced things with them?

So why is this being called "locking"? I use Synology at home just as very basic RAID. Am I correct that this wouldn't affect me at all?

And are there any reasons why this is justifiable (e.g. hard drive manufacturers lying about health information) or is it just a cash grab?

kstrauser 4/22/2025|

Not automatically applying firmware updates to 3rd-party drives is reasonable.

Disabling filesystem features when using them is insane.

Whats next — no encryption if you're using a Seagate?

crazygringo 4/22/2025||

It sounds like deduplication is already a pretty advanced feature requiring Synology SSD's:

https://kb.synology.com/en-me/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/vo...

It might be more about performance, that they'll require their own drives with custom firmware that works better?

That's what I'm trying to understand here. Is Synology really removing important basic necessary features, or is this more about high-end consistency and performance?

kstrauser 4/22/2025||

The former. They say it’s the latter but almost no one else in the space makes those goofy claims. If I buy an SSD that's too slow, that's on me. And if I deliberately buy a slower one because the cost:performance ratio is better for my needs, then that's my choice. There’s no technical reason why their rebranded devices should capable of doing things the competition can't, other than low-level things like installing firmware updates.

trumpeta 4/22/2025||

The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR "filesystem", where you can continue adding heterogeneously sized disks after constructing the FS and it will make the most use possible out of the extra capacity in the new disks. When I researched it ZFS did not yet have the resizing feature merged, now it does, though I think it is still not able to use this extra space.

I'm wondering if anybody has any better recommendations given the requirement of being able to add storage capacity without having to completely recreate the FS.

mgiampapa 4/22/2025||

BTRFS doesn't care how big the disks are and you can just tell it to keep x number of copies of each data / metadata / system block and it will do the work of keeping your copies on different devices across the file system. Much like SHR, performance isn't linear with different sized devices, but it's super simple to setup and in tree where ZFS has a lot more complexity and is not baked into the kernel.

Snapshots are available, but a little more work to deal with since you have to learn about subvolumes. It's not that hard.

Edit: TIL, SHR is just mdadm + btrfs.

dur-randir 4/22/2025|||

Any Linux with LVM. You don't need fancy proprietary OS for that.

iam-TJ 4/22/2025||

To expand on this with an example. Adding a new device we'll call sdz to an existing Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Volume Group (VG) called "NAS" such that all the space on sdz is instantly available for adding to any Logical Volume (LV):

  pvcreate /dev/sdz
  vgextend NAS /dev/sdz

Now we want to add additional space to an existing LV "backup":

  lvextend --size +128G --resizefs NAS/backup

*note: --resizefs only works for file-systems supported by 'fsadmn' - its man-page says:

"fsadm utility checks or resizes the filesystem on a device (can be also dm-crypt encrypted device). It tries to use the same API for ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS and XFS filesystem."

If using BTRFS inside the LV, and the LV "backup" is mounted at /srv/backup, tell it to use the additional space using:

  btrfs filesystem resize max /srv/backup

fc417fc802 4/22/2025||

How are redundancy and drive failure handled? The only capacity mix-and-match scheme I have familiarity with is btrfs.

cvubrugier 4/22/2025||

Synology SHR is btrfs (or ext4) on top of LVM and MD. MD is used for redundancy. LVM is used to aggregate multiple MD arrays into a volume group and to allow creating one or move volumes from that volume group.

fc417fc802 4/22/2025||

Comment I responded to was using LVM on its own and I was wondering about durability. The docs seem to suggest LVM supports various software raid configurations but I'm not clear how that interacts with mixing and matching physical volumes of different sizes.

ycombinatrix 4/22/2025|||

Same here, went with synology for SHR.

However I did notice that the performance was substantially worse when using heterogeneous drives, which makes SHR somewhat less valuable to me.

simondotau 4/23/2025||

SHR is just Linux MDADM and LVM.

imiric 4/22/2025|||

In addition to the alternatives already mentioned, I've been very happy with SnapRAID+MergerFS for a few years now. I don't have to worry about a magical black box as with btrfs or ZFS, I can expand the array with disks of any size, if one disk fails I only lose the data on that disk while the array remains usable, and it's dead simple to setup and maintain.

The only drawback, if I can call it that, is that syncs are done on-demand, so the data is technically unprotected between syncs. But for my use case this is acceptable, and I actually like the flexibility of being in control of when this is done. Automating that with a script would be trivial, in any case.

trefoiled 4/22/2025||

I was disappointed when I fully understood the limitations of SHR after purchasing my Synology box, and subsequently failed to install MergerFS on it. It's the only thing I miss about my old self managed server.

vin047 4/22/2025|||

- mergerfs: https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs - snapraid

Not used either but these were 2 options that came up when I was researching few years ago.

niuzeta 4/22/2025|||

I'm in exactly same situation myself.

TiredOfLife 4/22/2025||

Windows storage spaces

RedShift1 4/22/2025|||

It's all fun and games until your volume shows up as RAW and you're dead in the water.

lostlogin 4/22/2025|||

I don’t think that is comparable with a good NAS.

p_ing 4/22/2025|||

NAS? No, but SAN or DAS, yes. It provides similar features, plus any bog standard x86 application you wish to run.

TiredOfLife 4/24/2025|||

Why not?

bob1029 4/19/2025||

Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home. I have completely lost patience with maintaining local hardware like this. If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective. This feels like smuggling cargo on a federation starship, which is way cooler to me than filling up a bunch of local disks.

I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.

Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.

xyzzy123 4/19/2025||

S3 or glacier? Glacier is cost competitive with local disk but not very practical for the sorts of things people usually need lots of local disk for (media & disk images). Interested in how you use this!

20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay for any data transfers.

fodkodrasz 4/19/2025|||

Did you factor in the resilience and redundancy S3 gives you and you cannot opt out from? I have my NAS, and it is cheaper than S3 if I ignore these, but having to run 2 offsite backups would make it much less compelling.

Dylan16807 4/22/2025|||

They probably factored RAID1 into that price, which you can skip if you're setting up three copies. (At least I hope they did, their hardware prices must be dire if $2000 only gets you a tiny NAS and two 10TB drives.) If I do napkin math based on US prices, a mini PC and a 20TB external drive are a bit under $500 total, and a 2 bay NAS and a 20TB internal drive are a bit over $500 total, so that's about $1500 for the triple-NAS option and $3000/year for the S3 infrequent access option. Still extremely compelling.

xyzzy123 4/20/2025||||

Agree, they are not the same thing. Yes, S3 provides much better durability. I just can't afford it.

For my use-case I'm OK with un-hedged risk and dollars staying in my pocket.

ornornor 4/20/2025||

I backup my nas to rsync.net, it’s very cost effective using borg backup.

remram 4/23/2025||

$0.01/GB/mo, that does not seem better than Glacier, is it?

ornornor 4/23/2025||

Except it’s not glacier speeds, there are no bandwidth costs, support is on a completely different level than aws (you can actually reach an actual knowledgeable human), and you can use anything that speaks ssh. They also have an expert price at 0.008$/gb/mo here https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

cm2187 4/22/2025|||

Yes and no. I have been using NAS for a long time, and I use older drives as offline/offsite backups. So the cost is mostly amortized already. Those machines are off except once a week (local)/ once a month (offsite), to do an incremental backup. So this is a good use of some older drives.

bob1029 4/19/2025|||

> S3 or glacier

This is the same product.

> 20TB

I think we might be pushing the 1% case here.

Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

For me, knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes.

Espressosaurus 4/22/2025|||

20 TB isn't that out of reach when you're running your media server and taking high resolution photos or video (modern cameras push a LOT of bits).

I'm the last person I know who buys DVDs, and they're 2/3s of the reason I need more space. The last third is photography. 45.7 megapixels x 20 FPS adds up quick.

S3's cost is extreme when you're talking in the tens of terabytes range. I don't have the upstream to seed the backup, and if I'm going outside of my internal network it's too slow to use as primary storage. Just the NAS on gigabit ethernet is barely adequate to the task.

SteveNuts 4/22/2025||||

> knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes

Until Amazon inexplicably deletes your AWS account because your Amazon.com account had an expired credit card and was trying and failing to renew a subscription.

Ask me how I know

squigz 4/19/2025||||

20TB isn't all that much anymore, especially if you do anything like filming, streaming, photography, etc. Even a handful of HQ TV shows can reach several TB rather quickly.

3eb7988a1663 4/22/2025|||

Additionally, 20TB is only going to run you $300-400 for a consumer drive.

imtringued 4/22/2025|||

Yes. 20TB isn't a NAS. It's the HDD acting as bulk storage in your desktop.

frontlodjkgi 4/22/2025|||

It's wild consumer drives are so much more expensive than enterprise Exos drives with better performance, reliability and warranty

itstheporn 4/19/2025|||

[flagged]

Hamuko 4/22/2025||||

>This is the same product.

Confusingly "Glacier" is both its own product, which stores data in "vaults", and a family of storage tiers on Amazon S3, which stores data in "buckets". I think Glacier the product is deprecated though, since accessing the Glacier dashboard immediately recommends using Glacier the S3 storage tiers instead.

Dylan16807 4/22/2025||||

> Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

Okay, I'm curious now. When you were talking about "a bunch of local disks", what size disk did you have in mind?

Right now the best price per TB is found on disks in the 14-24TB range.

bambax 4/22/2025||||

I currently store 10 TB on my NAS, and growing. The data is live, I access some of it every day, sometimes remotely. I have 3 rotating "independent" backups in addition to the NAS (by independent I mean they're made with rsync and don't depend on any specific NAS OS feature), stored in an old safe that would probably not be very effective against thieves but should protect the drives in case of fire.

There are no recurring costs to this setup except electricity. I don't think S3 can beat that.

lurking_swe 4/22/2025||||

hardly 1%, i’m sure anyone that works in the film industry or media in general has terabytes of video footage. Maybe even professional photographers who have many clients.

queenkjuul 4/22/2025|||

20TB is a single drive

viraptor 4/19/2025|||

> If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective.

This is not the perspective of actors working on longer timescale. For a number is agencies, preserving some encrypted data is beneficial, because it will be possible to recover in N years, whether any classic improvements, bugs found in key generators, or advances in quantum.

Very few people here will be that interesting, but... worth keeping in mind.

bob1029 4/19/2025||

The point of encryption in this context is to defeat content fingerprinting techniques, not the focused resources of a nation state.

frontlodjkgi 4/22/2025|||

The only thing making S3 a no-go for me is their outbound traffic costs at $90/TB, which at 100TB restore would make out $9K just to transfer the data back once

akho 4/22/2025|||

> You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home.

You can’t be serious.

disambiguation 4/20/2025|||

How much does S3 cost these days? I've been burned by their hidden surge pricing before and hesitate to rely on them for personal storage when self hosting is fairly cheap.

dmoy 4/22/2025|||

Disk hosting cost isn't much

Bandwidth to get all of that back down to your system is much pricier, depending on how much you use that data.

mystifyingpoi 4/22/2025|||

Storage cost is nice, data transfer costs are often prohibitively high.

cm2187 4/22/2025|||

For large datasets, the cost of that is like rebuying your NAS every 9-12 months.

3np 4/22/2025|||

3-2-1 says you want both. Can be convenient to centralize backups on a local NAS and then publish to the cloud from there.

romanhn 4/22/2025||

Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.

mschild 4/22/2025||

I've been looking into a NAS myself.

I think self-built is the best bang for buck you're going to get and not have any annoying limitations.

There's plenty of motherboards with integrated CPUs (N100 same as cheaper Ugreen ones) for roughly 100. Buy a decent PSU and get an affordable case. For my configuration with a separate AMD CPU I'm looking at right around 400 Euros but I get total control.

And as far as software is concerned, setting up a modern OS like TrueNAS I find about the same difficulty as an integrated one from Ugreen.

asmor 4/22/2025||

Just keep in mind that Intel is keeping the total PCIe bandwidth out of those CPUs very constrained on purpose.

cm2187 4/22/2025|||

The best solution in my opinion is to buy 5y old, used, server motherboards and CPUs (like AMD Epyc 3 right now). They are fairly cheap, it is durable products designed to work 24/7, and it comes with a huge number of PCIe lanes and extensibility. Same with enterprise SSDs for home usage, which is usually very little write. A used enterprise SSDs with a ton of endurance and very little writes is probably the best bang for your bucks. Wouldn't do that with hard drives though.

donatzsky 4/22/2025||

Power consumption is at a completely different level, though. The N100 gives you pretty good performance with very low power draw.

Dylan16807 4/22/2025||||

Ark says 9 lanes of PCIe 3.0?

For a NAS, I don't think I'd need more than 1-2 lanes for any single device. That sounds fine.

freeAgent 4/22/2025||

Yeah, I assume most home users these days are never pushing a NAS beyond 1Gbe, and 99% of people who have faster networks are still probably just doing 2.5Gbe (still just talking about home use). This wouldn’t make that PCIe bandwidth sweat.

mschild 4/22/2025|||

Absolutely. This particular setup is meant more for your bog-standard home NAS.

iriomote 4/22/2025|||

I backed the Ugreen NAS on Kickstarter and I'm using it since. The Hardware is great, it is build like a tank. But the Software is not there after almost a year. No iSCSI support as of yet and snapshots work in some weird way. I can only access snapshots over the WebGUI and I am not able to get a simple list of available snapshots.

Shoutout to openmediavault. Just yesterday I installed it on my DXP8800 and now it works like a charm. But to install another OS you have to deactivate the watchdog timer in the BIOS, otherwise it resets the NAS every three minutes. Press CRTL + F12 to get into the BIOS and look for something like "watchdog" and disable it.

Magma7404 4/22/2025|||

That's the first time I have heard about them but it looks very interesting and pretty. Synology has become way too expensive for me as I only need a 4-bay NAS and Ugreen is cheaper than the Synology. My only concern would be the software itself, and if they can avoid all the security holes that plagued some brands like Qnap.

Last but not least, they seem to have Docker support which was restricted to more powerful Synology models, and it's a nice bonus for self-hosting nowadays.

Hikikomori 4/22/2025||

Had to replace my old micro server recently and was hard not to buy an ugreen, hardware looks nice, decent n100 CPU, software seems ok but wanted to run Linux myself.

Ended up buying a terrmaster DAS instead and connected it with usb to my NUC.

Also considered a NAS enclosure with an n110 mini itx board, would allow you to upgrade it in the future.

m4r1k 4/22/2025||

As a Synology user, I don’t just feel a huge letdown by such a short-sighted company but I’m compelled to boycott them. And it’s not about the money but the major lock-in and nonsense decisions. My DS1821+ is full, no more purchases from Synology, no further expansions, and no good publicity.

topspin 4/22/2025|

That's understandable. It's a genuine betrayal. Synology, QNAP, et al. exist as a response to the traditional storage vendor lock-in, gouging and rent seeking.

m4r1k 4/22/2025||

Synology seems to have been on the wrong track for a while now: - They completely missed the NVMe transition. The vendor is still very much focused on the HDD world. Yes, NVMe/SSDs in the consumer space don't yet offer the same capacity as HDDs, but the technology is evolving rapidly. It feels like being a music executive in 2007 believing CDs were the future. - They dropped detailed S.M.A.R.T. access from the main UX, which is also the standard for NVMe health reporting. I personally run scrutiny, but Synology's built-in health reporting system in recent DSM versions feels not up to this fundamental task. - DSM updates around 7.2.2 negatively impacted H.265/HEVC codec support, affecting a large user base relying on their NAS for media [1]. - Synology is fundamentally a hardware company. While DSM is polished, their hardware is the centerpiece, and it has been lagging behind for a while now (NAS refreshes, CPU choices, Ethernet speeds, etc.). - Even package updates seem slower and further apart (e.g., Docker was stuck on 20.10.23 until relatively recently in the DSM 7.2.1 cycle).

I have had a Solaris ZFS filer that I've ran for a long time (due to historical reasons, I jumped on OpenSolaris when it came out and never had a chance to move off Oracle's lineage). I moved to Synology about three years ago b/c I was sick and tired of managing my own file server. Yet, I feel like at this point the cons of Synology are starting to outweigh the manageability advantages that drew me in.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1feqy62/synology_...

valunord 4/22/2025||

Isn't this a simple solution?: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db

Some of us are using that with great success to eliminate the locking situation.

Shank 4/22/2025||

I personally think if you spend the money on a Synology setup and you depend on this script, you’re playing with fire. If you intend to keep DSM updated, you run the risk of Synology playing a cat-and-mouse game that doesn’t end well. Sure you can do this now, but forever? Who knows how long it will last.

theden 4/22/2025|||

Also https://github.com/007revad/Synology_M2_volume for NVMe M.2 drives (some synology models only allow NVMe drives to be used as read/write caches without this script)

sersi 4/22/2025||

Yes but the worry is that they might get rid of this eventually

emmelaich 4/22/2025||

I have some sympathy for this. With the disasters of the WD 'Green' series and the recent revelations on how used disks were being sold for new. Synology doesn't want to be lumped with other companies problems.

They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.

asmor 4/22/2025||

Slapping Synology stickers on Seagate drives doesn't make them magically immune from being mislabeled out of refurbishment.

This is the same old tired argument Apple made about iPhone screens - complain about inferior aftermarket parts while doing everything in their power to not make the original parts available anywhere but AASPs. Except here we have the literal same parts with only a difference in the firmware vendor string.

emmelaich 4/22/2025||

Of course. But my hope is Synology does a little bit of QA before slapping that sticker on.

asmor 4/22/2025||

Honestly, you should just buy used enterprise drives. That they have hours on them is actually an upside, since most drives die either very early or very late into their expected lifespan. Our NAS is all Exos drives, no problems.

On the other hand, an NVMe drive from Crucial that lied about syncing data caused a write hole in ZFS and the associated pool broke to the point where we could only mount it with lots of flags in read only mode.

cm2187 4/22/2025||

And SMR sold as NAS drives mostly.

niuzeta 4/22/2025||

I've been very happy with my Synology NAS that has served me so well, but forcing this sort of vender lock-in is simply unacceptable. I suppose this means I'll have to look for some other solution.

The problem is - I've formatted my drives with SHR(Synology Hybrid RAID - essentially another exclusive lock-in) and this would mean a rather painful transition to the new drive, since this now involves getting a whole new drives to format and move data to, rather than a simple lift-and-drop.

Ugh.

theden 4/22/2025||

Like the adjacent comment mentioned it's mountable in linux, so I wouldn't call it a lock-in in the normal way https://zarino.co.uk/post/synology-shr-raid-1-ubuntu/

Not sure why people are saying SHR is proprietary in some of the comments I read, it's effectively a wrapper for mdadm — though I suppose the GUI itself could be called proprietary.

beagle3 4/22/2025||

It’s readable / writable in any Linux system if mounted properly - the SHR is just an (extremely well done and convenient) UI for setting up standard raid partitions in a way that uses the entire disk.

codecraze 4/19/2025|

I have a 8 bay nas from synology and i’m now considering a move out when i’ll have to replace my nas.

Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.

QuiEgo 4/20/2025|

Terramaster F6-424. Most of the non-Synology NASes let you install whatever OS you want (but, don't provide any support other than "here's how you install it"). Unraid, TrueNAS Scale, and Open Media Vault are popular OS choices.

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