I am very disappointed to see that. I've been using Synology NASs for the last, oh, 14 years or so, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. Most importantly, their software works and requires nearly zero maintenance in the long term. I care a lot about this: I have too many things in my life that require my attention and impose on me. I am OK with paying more for things that Just Work, and Synology has been in that category.

The locking-down is disappointing and unnecesary. Sure, give me the option of using "certified" drives, but don't take away the option of using any drive I have.

So if I don’t use Synology’s own drives, my NAS gets slower on purpose? That sounds kinda unfair?

It's the dumbest move they could make. No one, _no_ one, in a position as the decider on enterprise gear going for a NAS solution in their company is going to buy Synology. They aren't even #last on the list. Only corpos have the deep pockets required and historical "the way it is" mindset on being fleeced wrt vendor lockin BS. Synology just does not have the brand cage to pull that off. So corpos that already aren't buying their shit are still not going to buy it and homelabers/soho types are gonna go elsewhere because they've either ideologically opposed to being fleeced or just can't do it even if they don't know any better due to being priced out.

I hope they implode and some even more evil and incompetent predatory corp consumes them and guts what's left of their brand name. The only time I'd wish the Broadcom treatment on a company. Synology deserve it.

Apparently no one remembers that a while back Synology already "locked" a whole bunch of people their drives, by ripping out BTRFS support on their NAS budget models. And they pushed this update without warning ahead. Your disks just suddenly up and stopped mounting.

Their answer to your drives no longer mounting is "connect them to a PC, pull the files and reformat". Where you are supposed to intermediate 20TB of data is left up to the customer to deal with.

Fuck Synology.

How might Synology’s decision to lock its 2025 Plus NAS models to only support its own branded hard drives impact long-term reliability, upgradeability, and customer trust—especially when compared to more open alternatives like QNAP or TrueNAS?

As someone who switched about a year ago from FreeNAS to Synology, this is extremely disappointing. Synology has been a great experience up to this point. I have pools, one on supported WD Reds, and the other on a hodge podge of drives I had collecting dust.

Both pools have been very reliable so far. But if they continue down this path, I'll seek a different solution.

I have a DS920+ for home lab purposes that I'm very happy with, but this sort of bullshit is going to make me drop that brand from any future recommendations or purchases.

I'm likely to go down the BYO NAS path going forward. Just a stupid customer punishing policy. A real slap in the face.

I bought a N100 based device from AliExpress that supports two drives for my backup server. its a cracker and runs debian wonderfully. Very smooth and responsive. runs quietly and transfers data fairly quickly.

just chiming in, I have 3 synology products, recommended them for a decade. As they've betrayed me, and I'll never buy another one, and I'll help friends move to whatever I move to. Thinking rock64 appliances with TrueNAS, will start donating to that project.

I don't know what sect of leadership (MBAs?) sees continual enshittification as the strategy but I'll fight this economic warfare forever.

Time to move to Truenas.

The only moat Synology have is their software. How far is Truenas from catching up?