The manufacturer Synology has radically changed its internal policy in recent months, there are more and more complaints from business and home customers with the new policy on hard drives and NAS servers. If you have an old Synology NAS server, you will surely have no problems, however, the new 2022 models are affected by this new policy that forces its customers to use their own brand’s hard drives, which are much more expensive than the typical Seagate or WD among others. Today at RedesZone we are going to explain everything about this big problem that is already affecting thousands of its customers.
Synology’s new policy if you don’t use its hard drives
The manufacturer Synology currently has several models of hard drives and SSD drives for use in its servers, both home and business. However, these brand hard drives are much more expensive than the competition. For example, buying a 18TB Seagate Exos costs approximately €320, however, the same hard drive but Synology brand costs approximately €800. In other words, Synology hard drives are much more expensive than the equivalent at Seagate or WD, around more than twice the price for the same (and even slightly worse).
Aiming to force its customers to buy their own hard drives, Synology is forcing customers of its latest NAS models to buy them if they don’t want to have “incompatibility” issues with the NAS. There are already companies like Cloudata that have publicly complained on social networks, and this is a very significant additional cost, we must bear in mind that the price difference is enormous.
From Cloudata we cannot be more against the decision of @Synology_en to limit the compatible disks in their 2022 units. We can do little, but at least we have put it on the record. pic.twitter.com/RjVxFYTDHh
— Cloudata (@Cloudata_ES) July 5, 2022
In the case of using hard drives not certified by the manufacturer, in this case if we do not use Synology hard drives, we will see an error in the storage control panel. Specifically, we will get an error such as that the hard drives are not verified, in addition, the status of the storage group is “critical” although it really is not, simply by using hard drives from other manufacturers we will get this error, something surreal in a NAS. These problems are present in current models such as the DS2422+, something totally unacceptable, both for advanced home users and also for SMEs. Forcing these users to buy hard drives that are worth more than twice as much as Seagate or WD models is cheating their customers and trying to force them to buy their own HDDs.
In the following image you can see the list of hard drive compatibility in the DS2422+ that we have indicated before, a NAS that came out this year. There is only one supported WD model, all other hard drives will give errors in the system “health” state.
Although there are these problems, users are not reporting any other added problems, but if in the future we need support from the manufacturer, they will not help us at all, since we are using an “unsupported” hard drive model, and it is in the incompatibility list because they have not wanted to certify it to force their users to buy their own hard drives. In the following image you can see this notice perfectly:
“Synology will not provide technical support if your device is not on the Synology Products Compatibility List.” Therefore, if you are a company and you are dedicated to storage, you are going to have many problems if you install a hard drive that is not on the compatibility list since it is not “verified”, and as we have explained before, in the new models We only have certified Synology drives.
What will happen if we install some hard drives today and in 2 years we change them for others with greater capacity? Well, if they are not in the compatibility list, we will have the same problems, we will have a critical error in the health panel of the storage pool. Although the hard drive will technically work, if it is not on the compatibility list, it will return an error.
Some YouTube channels are beginning to echo this problem, especially with the DS2422+ model and the disk compatibility list, then you can see their opinions from minute 13:
It is clear that this imposition of Synology will bring a lot of criticism, and companies and home users will think twice before buying their equipment, because it is forcing them to also buy their much more expensive hard drives.
