Synology is implementing DRM for storage drives in some of their NAS Units!

[Gdfelt]

(edit: this was discussed on wan show, hadn't seen it yet, and no post was on the forum, so I'll leave it here anyway).

Summary
 Synology's new Plus Series NAS systems designed for small and medium enterprises and advanced home users can no longer use non-Synology or non-certified hard drives and get the full feature set of their device. Instead, Synology customers will have to use the company's self-branded hard drives

 

Quotes

Quote

The company told ComputerBase [machine translated] that it made using Synology-branded and Synology-certified drives compulsory because of the success it saw with its high-performance NAS systems, and that users of the upcoming Plus Series models would “benefit from higher performance, increased reliability, and more efficient support.”

Furthermore, Seagate, one of the bigger manufacturers in the storage industry, has recently been rocked by a fraudulent HDD scandal that affected its NAS drives. So, it’s likely that Synology wants to ensure that its customers do not get affected by uncertainties such as this.

 

My thoughts

 This is setting a dangerous president, we are already seeing a trend towards not owning your own hardware, this action might not be with ill intent, but they sure are riding a dangerous line, and should not restrict their customers like this.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds
and Louis Rossman:

 

[OhioYJ]

Companies were just starting to experiment with this when I was looking into my NAS options. However it wasn't quite as heavy handed yet. It was why I decided to go the TrueNAS route.

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, Gdfelt said:

This is setting a dangerous president, we are already seeing a trend towards not owning your own hardware, this action might not be with ill intent, but they sure are riding a dangerous line, and should not restrict their customers like this.

 

Technically you do still own the hardware. They are just requiring you to use their drives or 3rd party drives that are certified. Cable companies do the same thing with Modems. You can either use the supplied gateway or modem. OR you can use your own Gateway or modem thats as long as it's on their supported device list. At least thats the way Comcast (Xfinity) does it. Does it suck? Yes. But are their alternatives? Yes. As @OhioYJstated, you have a DIY solution and if you dont want to put up with Synology and their Bullshit, then thats likely the route you will have to go down. 

 

25 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

It was why I decided to go the TrueNAS route.

I looked at building a NAS a while back. Then someone explained ZFS to me and I figured out quickly I didn't want to deal with it. 

[Bitter]

I've got 50TB of lightly used SAS 12 drives in my basement just waiting on the time for me to learn the software side of things. I looked at buying a lightly used NAS without drives but none of the units had all that I wanted and I have all the hardware mostly so... down the rabbit hole I go. A simple turn-key solution is appealing but I want to do  few things that aren't so easy to do with consumer stuff.

[dogwitch]

2 hours ago, Bitter said:

I've got 50TB of lightly used SAS 12 drives in my basement just waiting on the time for me to learn the software side of things. I looked at buying a lightly used NAS without drives but none of the units had all that I wanted and I have all the hardware mostly so... down the rabbit hole I go. A simple turn-key solution is appealing but I want to do  few things that aren't so easy to do with consumer stuff.

there a point depending what data that need to be saved. turn key less hassle then constant babysitting

[porina]

I have to wonder if this is because people were putting low cost low performance drives in them, then complaining to Synology that performance sucked. 

 

From an enthusiast perspective, I never got these off the shelf NAS units as their cost and lack of capacity is too limiting. It could make sense for a not so technical small business use case. Many times in business you want something that just works and move onto more important things. Spending a bit more to save time is a good trade off.

 

For those thinking about TrueNAS, once I decided what to set up it went smoothly and just works. The hardest part was deciding what I wanted in the first place. Too much choice. Understanding the mechanisms available, and if they should be used or not. Limitations in future expansion compared to Unraid.

[leadeater]

11 hours ago, Gdfelt said:

Furthermore, Seagate, one of the bigger manufacturers in the storage industry, has recently been rocked by a fraudulent HDD scandal that affected its NAS drives. So, it’s likely that Synology wants to ensure that its customers do not get affected by uncertainties such as this.

They aren't really fraudulent HDDs or HDD models, they are fraudulently new. Literally the same thing can be done with Synology branded HDDs, nothing stop anyone selling them as new and erasing the SMART runtime hours on them.

 

11 hours ago, Gdfelt said:

This is setting a dangerous president, we are already seeing a trend towards not owning your own hardware, this action might not be with ill intent, but they sure are riding a dangerous line, and should not restrict their customers like this.

Sort of, certified hardware only isn't new, it has been standard practice since basically forever and it's usage hasn't become more or less common overall. The higher end hardware you go the more likely this is to be the case. You can't buy any HPE, Dell, Lenovo etc low end storage array or NAS that will accept any HDDs other than directly from them. It's why I keep around OEM branded HDDs so I can put them in such systems whenever I get my hands on them.

 

Consumer low end NAS's are basically the exception rather than the standard, those have always accept any old HDDs but these are also the only products on the market that do so. Everything else does not.

 

One of the reasons for the above, as to why non certified hardware cannot be used, isn't solely around support which is a huge factor and actually is a large reason for the next thing I'll mention. Software features like deduplication are actually very I/O demanding and only work properly with HDDs that don't just claim to work with features like NCQ or TLER but actually do so and to spec as well as support other NAS firmware optimizations so when you start putting in non-certified and not fully NAS supporting hardware then such features start having issues and then customers start creating support tickets that root cause end up being they are using a WD Green and not a WD Red (now Red Plus).

 

So the only option companies like Synology are left to do when they start offering more advanced software features and to not be overwhelm by support requests is to move to certified hardware only. At least Synology hasn't fully done that and you can use non-certified hardware but all the new software features aren't able to be used which also mitigate the former described issue.

 

Basically there isn't zero reason behind something like this and it's not necessarily a good or even bad reason but reason does exist. If it's not to your liking buy QNAP or some other brand instead, I've always rated QNAP better anyway (better hardware for same money and more models support PCIe 10Gb add-in cards and M.2).

[LAwLz]

I think it is very important to note that we do not know how this will play out.

 

The wording isn't that specific, so this might just be blown out of proportion, or it could be a very big deal for Synology users.

 

I will be hopeful and assume you will be able to keep using third-party drives, but there might be some minor things that won't work. Like maybe some monitoring function will not work.

 

Edit: Oops, should have read the sources a bit more carefully. This is what will go missing if you use third-party drives that are not certified:

Quote

Hardwareluxx [machine translated] reports that you’ll lose several critical functions, including estimated hard drive health reports, volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analyses, and automatic firmware updates. The company also restricts storage pools and provides limited or zero support for third-party drives

It doesn't sound too bad to me if you are a home user.

 

It's not good to lose access to these things, but it isn't the end of the world. It seems like Synology are pretty good at certifying drives as well, so chances are you will have drives that work just fine.
It is important to highlight that this is not a blanket "use Synology drives or nothing will work", like I have seen some people interpret it.

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

It doesn't sound too bad to me if you are a home user.

Well loosing health reports which more than likely means SMART is a huge issue, plus it will constantly will display an orange exclamation mark regardless of health status just because of the drives.... 

[ewitte]

7 hours ago, porina said:

I have to wonder if this is because people were putting low cost low performance drives in them, then complaining to Synology that performance sucked. 

It is any drive not just "low performance drives".  I started with 12TB WD Red but the last two I changed to WD Red Pro 12TB drives.

[dogwitch]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

Well loosing health reports which more than likely means SMART is a huge issue, plus it will constantly will display an orange exclamation mark regardless of health status just because of the drives.... 

that has been the biggest complaint on the matter!

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

Well loosing health reports which more than likely means SMART is a huge issue, plus it will constantly will display an orange exclamation mark regardless of health status just because of the drives.... 

Unfortunately SMART for HDDs isn't all that a reliable health indicator, of failure or predictive failure. Most HDDs fail outright before SMART can report any meaningful pre-failure indicators, same with SSDs too btw. When you do get SMART indictors like uncorrectable read errors then it is sadly already too late if that HDD ability to read the data is important in any way to migrate or rebuild data/array. If your NAS system isn't carrying out full patrol reads of every drive and completing those properly then getting those errors during reading of client access equates to doom.

 

Preventative maintenance through hardware lifecycle is the most reliable way to protect data long term.

 

If you can't pull up the SMART values manually some way that is a bit of a problem but the only time I've ever looked at those is also after an HDDs is already faulting and HPE is requesting it as part of a support case of proof of fault. Otherwise I generally have no interest in SMART at all, hardware RAID patrol reads or software data scrubs are the more accurate and reliable detector of issues.

 

SMART is better than nothing, not something to solely rely on.

[Kisai]

19 hours ago, Gdfelt said:

 

 

My thoughts

 This is setting a dangerous president, we are already seeing a trend towards not owning your own hardware, this action might not be with ill intent, but they sure are riding a dangerous line, and should not restrict their customers like this.

 

My mind was already made up on NAS. FreeNAS (BSD) based or don't bother. All these proprietary "boxes" wind up being underpowered for what they are used for, or stop being "a NAS" by adding other stuff on it. I sure hope someone forked FreeNAS once Xi stopped wanting to using it.

 

Look, Linux is fine, but ZFS is only good on FreeBSD, not Linux. I would not recommend building a NAS around a ZFS filesystem using Linux. That reads like a recipe for misunderstanding the capabilities of the hardware when it's actually the way FUSE in Linux kneecapping the performance of ZFS (and likely all file systems.) 

 

When it comes to NAS systems, Enterprise systems are an entirely different situation, as drives often don't just exist inside the computer, but inside entire racks of nothing but drives, which involves additional hardware designed around it. Those are generally not using Linux either.

 

So I don't know what Synology is thinking here. Are they trying to appeal to enterprise leasing BS? Because that's what ultimately all these SaaS things boil down to, tax breaks. Or is their enterprise products division calling the shots and don't realize those 2-8 drive NAS systems are likely home/prosumers who have other options? Including rueNAS and XigmaNAS (continuation of FreeNAS) which are free to install on any hardware.

 

The entire "certifying" and custom firmware is a nonsense direction, and we will likely find out that they're just sticking WD Red drives with that foolish OptiNAND feature instead of CMR drives with no flash timebomb. 

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Unfortunately SMART for HDDs isn't all that a reliable health indicator, of failure or predictive failure. Most HDDs fail outright before SMART can report any meaningful pre-failure indicators, same with SSDs too btw.

Outside of the cheap-o ssds (like verbatim) it worked like a charm for me more often than not. I just had a drive report a self-test fail but continue to function until a replaced it (kingmax 128GB, 212TB written). Maybe it does not work all the time, but it is not useless IMO.

 

 

26 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Look, Linux is fine, but ZFS is only good on FreeBSD, not Linux. I would not recommend building a NAS around a ZFS filesystem using Linux.

Sure, and iX are just a bunch of dabblers who dont know any better...... /s

/EDIT
Just to add some meat to my post:

It is not as black and white as you seem to think.......

Edited April 22 by jagdtigger

[Quackers101]

well more stuff with DRM is not great, great to avoid though. unlike when TV's monitors and cables tries to push even more DRM onto us, and not a lot of choices.

[LAwLz]

6 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Well loosing health reports which more than likely means SMART is a huge issue, plus it will constantly will display an orange exclamation mark regardless of health status just because of the drives.... 

I can probably count the number of times I've went into my NAS and checked the SMART data on one hand, and I don't think I've ever had a dead drive actually notify me that it was dying through SMART.

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't think losing that is a big deal.

 

Also, keep in mind that this is just for drives that aren't certified compatible. The list of certified drives is quite extensive. Again, I have seen people say this applies to "third-party drive" but that does not seem to be the case at all. 

I went and looked up the most popular Synology disk station on Amazon (the DS224+) and it is officially compatible with 60 different third-party drives.

The second most popular, the DS620slim, is officially compatible with 143 different drives. I went through the list of best-selling HDDs on Amazon and basically any drive that is made for NASes (WD Red, Seagate IronWolf and Toshiba N300) are compatible.

 

While I think this is a bad move, it does seem like people are drastically overreacting to this in my opinion.

There is a very big difference between "third-party drives won't work anymore" and "if you use some third-party drives that aren't designed for NASes then you will lose some functionality that isn't too critical", and I want to just highlight that difference.

[StDragon]

SMART is only useful for trending bad / uncorrectable blocks. There's statistical algorithmic decision making that can be had with this data, but for the most part it rarely serves any purpose as it's the controller that often abruptly fails, not the storage media (NAND or platter). In fact that's why donor boards are used to necro a failed storage device.

 

I would prefer to have a 2 bay TrueNAS Core box similar to a Synology with ECC memory support and a 2.5 or 10gig NIC. I'm probably asking for a unicorn, but there's a reason Synology and QNAP are popular; the hardware is easy to setup, maintain, and actually have a good app catalog to choose from.

 

Fact is, Synology can get away with being choosy about what HW to support because they can be. For all the huffing and puffing, it won't move the needle in popularity.

[Donut417]

7 minutes ago, StDragon said:

he hardware is easy to setup, maintain, and actually have a good app catalog to choose from.

Thats part of the reason I went with a QNAP. Because looking at building one seemed to be a daunting task at the time. Then I learned about how ZFS worked, and all I saw was dollar signs. All I needed at the time was a network drive I could use with my Laptop that was running Plex, as the NAS wasn't strong enough to handle the few transcodes I needed. Then I had some storage where I could keep important files so I had multiple copies. 

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

 

Sure, and iX are just a bunch of dabblers who dont know any better...... /s

Did you notice where I said "Linux" and not specifically iX

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zfs-linux/+bug/1906476

 

Linux users want ZFS, but the implementations they get in common Distro's like Ubuntu is buggy and disastrous.

 

Considering that NAS's need to run headless and not randomly update and go offline because of some bad patch from a different distro that cascades into other distros. 

 

FreeBSD is extremely stable and those servers have run for years without needing updates. That is what people expect from a NAS, not to have sudden security issues because you decide to run a minecraft server on it.

 

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Outside of the cheap-o ssds (like verbatim) it worked like a charm for me more often than not. I just had a drive report a self-test fail but continue to function until a replaced it (kingmax 128GB, 212TB written). Maybe it does not work all the time, but it is not useless IMO.

The most common SSD fault is failure of the drive controller on the SSD which SMART has no real play in. It'll be working then instantly not working, really sucks. That's how all my SSDs have failed. SMART for SSDs is really only useful to monitoring write wear which hardly matters now days for them.

 

SMART isn't useless, that's not what I said. It's not reliable for usage of faults and predicting faults like it's being made out. Basically it is a bad idea to be sitting on a 5+ year old HDD with zero SMART indictors of issues and think you are safe and that HDDs will run for many more years, it could fail instantly next week or year. HDDs can run for 15 years mind you but you're playing a highly risky game intentionally trying to achieve that.

[dogwitch]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

The most common SSD fault is failure of the drive controller on the SSD which SMART has no real play in. It'll be working then instantly not working, really sucks. That's how all my SSDs have failed. SMART for SSDs is really only useful to monitoring write wear which hardly matters now days for them.

 

SMART isn't useless, that's not what I said. It's not reliable for usage of faults and predicting faults like it's being made out. Basically it is a bad idea to be sitting on a 5+ year old HDD with zero SMART indictors of issues and think you are safe and that HDDs will run for many more years, it could fail instantly next week or year. HDDs can run for 15 years mind you but you're playing a highly risky game intentionally trying to achieve that.

that is true.

that being said some samsung and wd black drives do have very poor write wear  since covid supply chain issues. both internal and external.

[jagdtigger]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

Did you notice where I said "Linux" and not specifically iX

You said linux distro, of which includes TN Scale...... As for freebsd, well it is on its way out. There is a reason why iX "abandoning ship".

 

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

The most common SSD fault is failure of the drive controller on the SSD which SMART has no real play in.

Well outside the mentioned cheap brand ssds didnt had any that could be chalked up to that. Most of my SSDs are either still working, or worked but warned that there are no more spares....

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

SMART isn't useless, that's not what I said. It's not reliable for usage of faults and predicting faults like it's being made out. Basically it is a bad idea to be sitting on a 5+ year old HDD with zero SMART indictors of issues and think you are safe and that HDDs will run for many more years, it could fail instantly next week or year. HDDs can run for 15 years mind you but you're playing a highly risky game intentionally trying to achieve that.

And this is why redundancy and backups exist... Also my recorder HDD started getting bad sectors after 8 years of power on time, and it was not the heads because it could still read the unaffected sectors during restore (the rest was restored by ZFS from the parity data)......

[jagdtigger]

Looks like it will be a full-on vendor lock-in without 3rd party drives:

 

[LAwLz]

15 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Looks like it will be a full-on vendor lock-in without 3rd party drives:

 

I haven't watched the video but if it says only first party drives will work then it's wrong. They will still support drives from other vendors. 

[jagdtigger]

17 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I haven't watched the video but if it says only first party drives will work then it's wrong. They will still support drives from other vendors. 

Well supported page shows otherwise and initialization (1st setup) allegedly wont work with 3rd party drives.... Maybe later 3rd party will work as well but it is unknown the burden of certification is on which party, if they really will support 3rd party which is up in the air i think ATM.

Edited April 23 by jagdtigger