Synology restricts choice of hard disks for new Plus NAS

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Since 2021, Synology has also been selling hard disks under its own name, which are manufactured by Toshiba and Seagate, in addition to NAS devices. Since then, the company's compatibility lists have been getting shorter and shorter, with the company's own drives being recommended for rack-mounted enterprise devices in particular.

For upcoming NAS of the Plus series, which are also intended for private use and small and medium-sized companies, there is now an important change: If hard disks that are not on the lists are used in these devices, the entire system loses some of its functions. According to a statement from Synology, this applies to all Plus NAS to be introduced in 2025 and beyond. However, the company has not yet provided specific model numbers.

Firmware updates only for recommended hard disks

However, it states that the restriction only applies if drives other than "Synology's own hard drives and third-party hard drives certified according to Synology's specifications" are used. If such non-approved drives are installed in the NAS, they will no longer be provided with automatic firmware updates, among other things. Synology's announcement does not mention that this also applies to the operating system of the NAS, which would hardly make sense due to the security vulnerabilities that are repeatedly found for devices that can also be accessed from the Internet on request.

But other functions are also missing with non-certified hard disks. Synology writes: "The use of compatible and unlisted hard disks will be subject to certain restrictions in the future, such as the creation of pools and support in the event of problems and malfunctions caused by the use of incompatible storage media. Volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis and automatic hard disk firmware updates will only be available for Synology hard disks in the future."

No storage pools and lifespan information for third-party drives

This includes two particularly unpleasant functional restrictions. If, for example, the capacity of an existing storage pool is to be expanded or a defective hard disk is to be replaced, this is apparently only possible with the drives listed by Synology. What the company means by "Lifespan analyses" is not entirely clear in this formulation.

In the worst case, this could also refer to the SMART self-tests of the drives, which can be used to report defects before they fail completely – even if SMART does not protect against all problems with a hard disk. Previous versions of Synology's proprietary NAS operating systems were sometimes able to monitor at least the SMART data of drives that were not on the compatibility lists. Detecting aging hard disks before they fail is actually one of the basic functions of a NAS.

Detour via older NAS for unsupported hard disks

Synology itself reveals in its announcement that the withdrawal of functions for third-party drives is not a hardware-related restriction. If a non-certified hard drive has been initialized in a NAS from the manufacturer, it can also be used in the upcoming Plus models. This means, among other things, that the migration of drives to a new NAS should remain possible. Anyone who wants to continue to rely on Synology would therefore be well advised to keep an older device, even if it is only for initializing unlisted hard drives.

Synology's move is all the more annoying because the price of hard disks advertised as NAS drives has become increasingly unattractive in recent years. The enterprise hard disks for large servers, which used to be significantly more expensive, are often cheaper for the same functionality. If Synology should now no longer test these either, and almost only recommends its own hard disks, this is a clear limitation.

(nie)