Synology walks back controversial compatibility policy for 2025 NAS units — third-party HDD and SSD support returns with DiskStation Manager 7.3.

[Lone Crusader]

News By Kunal Khullar via Tom's Hardware

The company has removed restrictions on third-party drives​

Synology has backtracked on its controversial self-branded drives-only policy, restoring the ability to use third-party and certified HDDs and SSDs on its 2025 Plus series NAS units. With the launch of its latest DiskStation Manager 7.3, users can once again use 3.5-inch hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs from brands like Western Digital and Seagate, without losing out on crucial features.

Earlier this year, the company had restricted core functionality for third-party and non-certified drives, including support for storage pools, health monitoring, deduplication, and firmware updates. The company made Synology-branded and Synology-certified drives compulsory, claiming that users of the Plus series NAS models would benefit from higher performance, increased reliability, and more efficient support.

In a way, the company forced users to rely solely on Synology-branded disks to unlock full capabilities. This reportedly resulted in community backlash, which eventually allowed rival brands to take advantage and promote their own hardware as more open and flexible alternatives.

For context, Synology does not manufacture its own hard drives. Instead, the company uses rebranded drives from popular vendors such as Seagate, Toshiba, or Western Digital, and applies a custom firmware. This firmware effectively acts as a form of digital rights management (DRM), which ensures that only these specific drives can access the NAS system’s full range of features and performance options.

With the latest update, Synology has restored some crucial features and aligned newer NAS models, including the DiskStation DS925+ and DiskStation DS1525,+ closer to how its NAS systems worked before introducing the policy. The company is also said to be working with major drive manufacturers to broaden the range of officially certified storage options.

With the latest update, Synology has restored some crucial features and aligned newer NAS models, including the DiskStation DS925+ and DiskStation DS1525,+ closer to how its NAS systems worked before introducing the policy. The company is also said to be working with major drive manufacturers to broaden the range of officially certified storage options.

Notably, the change does not apply to M.2 storage drives, meaning that creating storage pools still requires drives from the official Hardware Compatibility List.

Apart from restoring third-party drive support, Synology’s DiskStation Manager 7.3 introduces important upgrades focusing on performance, security, and flexibility. According to the official release notes, users will get access to intelligent data tiering for better storage efficiency, new security indicators for improved threat detection, support for native exFAT for external devices, email moderation for MailPlus, and enhanced collaboration tools like shared labels and advanced file locking in Synology Drive. The update also adds AI integration through the Synology AI Console with data masking and filtering.

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[Lone Crusader]

Yeah, I have the Synology DS418play and because of Synology's move to do that in the first place just rubbed me the wrong way, and so I bought one of those new Ugreen NAS units, the NASync DXP4800 Plus. I hate steering away from Synology, I've had several of their NAS units, and I've been so happy with them, but now I can't trust them, who knows what they're gonna pull off next.
In case anybody was curious, yes, I found this out the hard way when I ordered a new Synology DiskStation DS925+ and inserted my drives from my older Synology DS418play, a popup said they were not compatible and that I had to use Synology's proprietary hard drives which in case you were curious, there more expensive than Seagate or Western Digital drives. I looked online and found a similar article to the one above and ended up sending it back and did more research and found out that the UGreen NAS is actually better, the only caveat is that they don't have as many apps as the Synology does, but given time and they will.

 

[Lone Crusader]

I highly recommend a NAS to anyone that uses cloud services because with a NAS you can still remotely log into it from anywhere in the world. I with the utmost agency warn you at not using cloud based services, especially Dropbox in particular. Furthermore, I had a Dropbox account and kept all my photos in their cloud services and then one day just out of the blue I was just banned from using them because according to them, I did something against their terms of service and no mater how much I pleaded with their tech support they would not budge. I even went over their ToS line by line and I never broke any of them. They would never tell me what it was that I did wrong. I was completely locked out of Dropbox and my photos and videos of most importantly my children from the very day they were born and in their mother's arms after birth gone in a flash and every photo and video taken of them up until the present gone. All my family photos of family members dating back decades also gone. These photos were all I had, and I backed them up to the cloud because the cloud service claimed to be the best solution because having your photos backed up to the cloud was the most secure way to protect those kinds of things. Never again have I relied on cloud services, I back everything on the NAS now after that, which I should have done in the first place because I can access it from anywhere. Don't ever rely on cloud services because you never know if there is some reason they think you've done something wrong and all the pictures of your loved one will be gone in an instant.