Too late, damage is done. Hope you are happy, Synology Execs.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them. They did it once, they’ll do it (or worse) again when they think they can get away with it.
I wonder what they thought would happen.
They thought they were enough of a monopoly in the consumer and small business market that people wouldn’t have much choice. Management started believing their own marketing propaganda. They forgot that none of their product is unique.
This is what happens when csuite starts huffing marketing’s farts without anyone from CX in the room to explain how this was all gonna end.
Were they anywhere close to being a monopoly? There’s a bunch of other brands selling the same thing. Anyway, I’m actually looking at buying a NAS and I was already explicitly excluding them because of that BS. I’ll probably end up building my own, there’s some nice cases out there.
Starting to think that companies are all competing on a secretive Achievements Global Leaderboard.
Synology finally unlocked: “Hubris - only 99% of other large corporations have achieved this”.
I have an old Synology NAS; which i was considering upgrading.
But…
- They removed Video Station and HEVC support
- Recently moved to remove all hardware transcoding
- This stupid HD restriction
- The decision to once again cheap out on hardware. My Synology is about as powerful as a first-gen Netbook. Newer models aren’t much of a step-up. I’m surprised they opted to upgrade networking to 2.5gbe, probably pressure from competitors.
- Edit: from a comment, the e-waste builds with non-upgradeable RAM
Yes the software is easy and reliable to use, but the fact that I only need to interact with it a few times a year, means it’s no longer a selling point for me.
Look for a used Gen 8 HP microserver. 4 3.5 bays, replaceable cpus from celeron to some xeons. Upgradeable ram. An extra slim CD bay that can be reourposed for an SSD, power sippy, pretty nice looking, not super silent, but replaceable fans,
I really like mine, and it’s running Xpenology, essentially Synology OS
I think it will be a custom build next time. I’ll still use the old one just for backing up photos from my phone.
Do want something that’s quiet and sips power when idle, but can easily transcode any content when needed.
How many people used Video Station instead of Jellyfin in a container?
True. When I first started experimenting with the NAS to stream home media, Video Station worked fine. And I could also access content outside of the home network without messing about. Obviously Jellyfin, Emby, Plex are better.
To be fair, neither runs well on my DS916+. I use the NAS for storage and have a laptop next to it as a Linux server with Docker containers.
I just started playing around with it. I have a DS220+ so it has more horsepower than your ‘16, however a good plugin I found was “disable transcoding” it’ll basically send the stream raw to a device and leave it to the device to deal with. As such it flies on that hardware.
You forgot charging a small fortune for their e-waste boxes. I have the 1819+ and it’s the only device I’ll have ever bought from them. It was reasonably priced at the time.
I made the mistake of buying one where the ram couldn’t be upgraded. 2GB is a joke. Had to send it back.
I hope people will remember that Synology readily changes their mind on this kind of thing, and continues to not buy their shitty hardware.
A proper mea culpa from them could maybe have brought me back, but nope, let’s just quietly pretend we didn’t just try to fuck over all our users and hope no one notices. Complete lack of respect for their customers.
I still wouldn’t. If a company flip flops so readily I wouldn’t want to deal with them.
Yup. Too late.
I’m remembering, I’ve wanted a NAS for ages to replace my WD Book backup drive.
The sad reality is any major corporation is capable of this, they need the profits to keep rising, even if they screw over their employees and customers in the process.
My recommendation, as someone who has basically no experience with NAS, and only just got into it earlier this year (so take it with a grain of salt); build it yourself.
If you don’t care about power consumption you can pick up an old PC for close to nothing (assuming you don’t already have one just sitting around, wink-wonk) chuck some disks in it and call it a day. If you do care about power consumption, you can look around for a cheapo board with a decent low-power CPU.
I have a small NAS running an Intel N100 chip. It has very low power draw and has barely affected my bill. I’m running Unraid right now, but initially I was just running a headless Debian 12 installation. If you go the fully manual route (as in not TrueNAS or Unraid) it’ll take a little bit of manual labour, but nothing that can’t be achieved as a fun weekend project, and once it’s up and going you’re gucci.
This prebuilt corpo crap doesn’t really offer anything you can’t achieve yourself, except maybe fancy spyware apps for your smartphone.
Lol
I bought a Synology after I moved to Germany in a moment of weakness where I wanted a NAS but was dealing with immigrating and wanted something easy.
I wouldn’t say I regret it because it worked out of the box and now I self host a bit. But my next NAS will be custom as I’ve been disappointed with the hardware and the company since.
The HDD restriction was the nudge I needed to finally build my own NAS on Unraid. No regrets, and my DS923+ sold on eBay for nearly the same amount of money I paid for it 18 months ago.
I would have created a brand of Certified “high reliability”, or “durostore” or the like, with an extra year of warranty, and included coupons in the drive box, to make the price “only” about 10% more.
Make the customer believe they are getting a steal for “premium” drives.
Its so easy to give customers less, while having them believe they are getting more…
The value proposition point is something that’s been sorely missing from companies lately. In a true testament to “late stage capitalism”, a lot are trying to jump just straight to capture and maximum extraction.
But what if, we could arbitrary limit users to buying our drives exclusively and disguise it as their own security?
Hohoho, delightfully devilish, Synology.
So many companies are looking for ways to limit their customers from doing what they were doing and making them pay to “upgrade” back to it, it’s absurd.
Today’s message brought to you by capitalism
