As a Synology user, I don’t just feel a huge letdown by such a short-sighted company but I’m compelled to boycott them. And it’s not about the money but the major lock-in and nonsense decisions. My DS1821+ is full, no more purchases from Synology, no further expansions, and no good publicity.
That's understandable. It's a genuine betrayal. Synology, QNAP, et al. exist as a response to the traditional storage vendor lock-in, gouging and rent seeking.
Synology seems to have been on the wrong track for a while now:
- They completely missed the NVMe transition. The vendor is still very much focused on the HDD world. Yes, NVMe/SSDs in the consumer space don't yet offer the same capacity as HDDs, but the technology is evolving rapidly. It feels like being a music executive in 2007 believing CDs were the future.
- They dropped detailed S.M.A.R.T. access from the main UX, which is also the standard for NVMe health reporting. I personally run scrutiny, but Synology's built-in health reporting system in recent DSM versions feels not up to this fundamental task.
- DSM updates around 7.2.2 negatively impacted H.265/HEVC codec support, affecting a large user base relying on their NAS for media [1].
- Synology is fundamentally a hardware company. While DSM is polished, their hardware is the centerpiece, and it has been lagging behind for a while now (NAS refreshes, CPU choices, Ethernet speeds, etc.).
- Even package updates seem slower and further apart (e.g., Docker was stuck on 20.10.23 until relatively recently in the DSM 7.2.1 cycle).
I have had a Solaris ZFS filer that I've ran for a long time (due to historical reasons, I jumped on OpenSolaris when it came out and never had a chance to move off Oracle's lineage). I moved to Synology about three years ago b/c I was sick and tired of managing my own file server. Yet, I feel like at this point the cons of Synology are starting to outweigh the manageability advantages that drew me in.
