I dislike writing these articles, but here we are. According to HardwareLuxx, Synology is on a rough course with generations-old sub-par NAS hardware and now appears to be locking its NAS units to its own branded hard drives in its upcoming 2025 Plus models. This is a shame since a few years ago, Synology had neat hardware.
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
In 2021, we covered how Synology launched an Enterprise Hard Drive Line and started locking Drives for New NASes. That was in a higher-end segment. Realistically, it became hard to recommend that type of solution. QNAP and iXsystems (TrueNAS) pushed ahead with ZFS support and better hardware, but it did not impact the majority of users.
Translating a relevant bit for our readers.
“…since an estimated hard drive health report is essential for both private and professional use, this creates a compulsion to use Synology’s own or equivalent drives. Additionally, certain features such as volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates for third-party devices will be disabled. There are also restrictions on the creation of storage pools, as well as, of course, support in the event of failures, which are not further specified.” (Source: Translated from HardwareLuxx)
Changing this to require Synology branded drives in the “Plus” line is silly. There are only a handful of hard drive manufacturers, and Synology does not have anywhere near the scale to compete at hard drive manufacturing. Consolidation in the hard drive industry was driven by huge economies of scale benefits. Without scale, and a library of patents, it is a very hard market to enter. As a result, Synology must be simply re-branding drives. Labeling drives as a “Dell”, “NetApp”, “HPE”, or other big vendor drive has been going on for years (decades?) on both the hard drive and SSD sides of storage. Realistically, there is usually very little that gets changed in vendor firmware from the drive manufacturer firmware. When we see some changes, it is usually in conjunction with a branded storage controller that also has corresponding firmware changes. Firmware tweaks very rarely target the built-in PCH or SoC SATA controllers on Intel, AMD, and Arm platforms in the mainstream server and storage market.
Let us just call this what it is. It is a grab for extra margin dollars. The challenge is that it is bad for Synology’s customers. For example, the Synology Plus series only scales to 16TB currently with the HAT3310-16T. Synology’s enterprise series scales to 20TB. WD Red Pro drives are already pushing 26TB. Or in other words, in an 8-bay desktop NAS segment to use Synology’s branded drives with Synology’s full feature set has a maximum raw capacity of 128TB. For a QNAP or TrueNAS 8-bay, that is 208TB of raw capacity.
We just looked at the drives on Amazon, to see when they would be available and their pricing.
- Synology’s HAT3310-16T has an estimated delivery date of May 6 to May 28. (Amazon Affiliate link)
- WD Red Pro 16TB has an estimated delivery date of April 25 to April 29 (Amazon Affiliate link) while being $10 less expensive
- Toshiba N300 Pro 16TB has an estimated delivery date of May 4 to May 9 (Amazon Affiliate link) while being $11 less expensive
- Toshiba N300 16TB (CMR) is showing overnight availability so April 19 (Amazon Affiliate Link) and is $35 less expensive
- Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB is showing same day availability so April 18 (Amazon Affiliate link) but is $10 more expensive
When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon.
For Synology customers, the challenge of being vendor-locked into using Synology branded drives is not just about alleged firmware improvements. It is also about being able to keep data secure while finding easy replacements. A NAS in 2025 needs to work with any NAS rated hard drive because frankly there are not that many vendors out there. If a particular model was found to have a very high year 2 failure rate, you would naturally want to start replacing drives with a different model. Vendor locking features to specific Synology drives prevents this, but it also allows Synology to use different vendors behind the label without telling its customers.
Additionally, there can also be concerns about drive availability in the long-term. If your NAS is vendor-locked to only use Synology drives, then as owner of that NAS you are fully dependent upon Synology’s survival as a company and that they would continue manufacturing drives in the capacity points that you want. Sure, they make 2TB and 4TB model Synology drives today, but what about four years from now when you need a replacement drive? What if Synology sells or merges with some other technology vendor, or goes out of business? This move creates concerns within the Synology ecosystem that did not exist before, and that is not good for customers.
Final Words
Many will notice that Synology devices have been largely absent from STH even though Synology is a very popular NAS solution. That is not by chance. While I actually like the company’s software, Synology’s NAS hardware feels extremely dated to the point that it feels like most of the solutions are running generations old hardware. The combination of neglecting hardware refresh cycles and now vendor locking features to only using Synology drives will ultimately hurt users. I cannot imagine recommending a NAS solution where I could not get a replacement drive in under 24 hours, if at all, and that makes Synology extremely hard to recommend in 2025. If the situation changes, then I am happy to have our team review more Synology gear. In the meantime, there are plenty of other options out there.
