WTF?! Synology recently introduced a new compatibility policy governing the drives that customers can install in some of its network-attached storage appliances. Select NAS products now only support specific Synology-branded drives, and the company appears eager to capture significant profit margins on what are, in many cases, relatively low-spec components.
Synology recently started selling a new line of branded NVMe SSDs designed to "supercharge" its latest DiskStation Manager NAS models. The SNV5420 series comes in three capacities, with the 1.6TB model currently listed at a hefty $535. Despite the price, the SSD's specifications are significantly outdated, though Synology claims the drives are optimized for data-intensive environments.
The SNV5420 offers sequential read speeds of up to 3,000 MB/s and "sustained" sequential write speeds of up to 1,000 MB/s. These are standard PCIe 3.0 speeds – unimpressive in a market that is rapidly shifting toward PCIe 5.0. Even more concerning is the 1.6TB model's endurance rating: just 2,900 TBW and 3 million hours MTBF, which falls short compared to many cheaper, higher-performance SSDs on the market.
Synology states that the SNV5420 series has undergone extensive validation for use in DSM NAS appliances. The drives' firmware and components have been tightly controlled, stress-tested, and vetted to meet the "high" quality and reliability standards set by the company.
Earlier this year, Synology began requiring customers to use its branded HDDs and SSDs in select NAS models, claiming the change would deliver improved performance, reliability, and compatibility. However, the newly introduced SNV5420 SSD series reinforces criticism that the company is attempting to overcharge users by selling older hardware with increasingly outdated specifications.
Fortunately, customers still have alternatives. Most other NAS manufacturers do not impose such restrictions on the types of drives users can install. Even Synology's own latest DSM units can be configured to accept "non-compatible" drives, as detailed by German tech site ComputerBase.
Drive compatibility in Synology NAS systems is enforced via a locally stored database. Users can bypass this restriction by running an open-source script that allows them to whitelist unsupported drives. The script also offers additional features such as disabling automatic database updates and suppressing compatibility warnings for older WD drives.
While Synology insists that customers should now rely on its proprietary ecosystem of certified storage media, the company does not manufacture these drives itself. Instead, it rebrands products sourced from established third-party vendors like Toshiba and Seagate.
Synology is selling outdated "proprietary" NAS SSDs at unrealistically high prices
