Earlier this year, popular NAS vendor Synology announced it would start requiring some of its more expensive models to only use Synology-branded drives. It seems the uproar this announcement caused has had some real chilling effect on sales, and the company just cancelled its plans.
Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives. The policy, introduced earlier this year, made third-party HDDs from brands like Seagate and WD practically unusable in newer models such as the DS925+, DS1825+, and DS425+. That change didn’t go over well. Users immediately criticised Synology for trying to lock them into buying its much more expensive drives. Many simply refused to upgrade, and reviewers called out the move as greedy and shortsighted. According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced.
↫ Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D.com
If you want to screw over your users to make a few more euros, it’s generally a good idea to first assess just how locked-in your users really are. Synology is but one of many companies making and selling NAS devices, and even building one yourself is stupidly easy these days. There’s an entire cottage industry of motherboards and enclosures specifically designed for this purpose, and there are countless easy-to-use software options out there, too.
In other words, nobody is really locked into Synology, so any unpopular move by the company was bound to make people look elsewhere, only to discover there are tons of competing options to choose from. The market seems to have spoken, and Synology can only respond by reversing its decision. Honestly, I had almost forgotten what a healthy tech market with tons of competing options looks like.
I know it doesnt fit the narrative, but synology share price has increased by 15% this year. Including over the period the policy was introduced.
Since this flip back change in policy its moved the inter-day by only 2%. So its not really affecting their bottom line at all.
What it Is doing is generating press on sites like this one. I think this is more “not worth the hassle for some extra HDD sales that barely have a margin”.
People who Want the extended support of branded HDD will pay for it. Those that dont never would anyway.
Most of the outcry are from the later camp.
Adurbe,
What Synalogy tried to do is changing their target market, while trying to push the existing “hobbyists” to the higher tier.
If they offered this as an option, or only in their enterprise offerings, that would be a different thing. They could even tie this to longer term support contracts (I’m sure Dell/EMC, hp and other do similar things with their storage servers, though they might not need to as SAS are already expensive)
Now, whether the hobbyists will come back is another questions, but as you mentioned this does not have an effect on the higher end, deep pocket customers.
Synology has been shifting to enterprise for a while now. They have grown beyond the hobby market. For better or worse.
The margins on 2/4 bay NAS has basically fallen through the floor with Aoostar and UGreen entering the market.
They see the consumer market as the BeeStation/BeeDrive now.
Adurbe,
True UGreen exists, but they are also disliked by many. I would gladly pay a premium for a quality NAS (“prosumer”) if I didn’t already have one.
Synalogy seems to be strong in small to mid size business (not larger ones, which can easily afford $100k per array or more).
But those would also have similar concerns. If I am a business that is budget constrained, and choose Synalogy for this reason, I would also want to be able to choose my drives as well.
I would dare to say it fits the narrative perfectly, most actions that benefit the shareholders are customer hostile. Go figure…
You said 2 things in the same breath that don’t really go together – “bottom line” and “share price.” I know that the stock is often the real product, but it’s unusual to refer to the share price as the “bottom line” which is usually reserved for actual profits. I guess this is a sign of the times though… Welcome to technofeudalism.
What share price? Synology AFAIK is privately held, there are no public shares available.
I personally was interested to see what the impact was on these decisions but all research showed it was privately owned so I imagine no sales data can be obtained to independently review the decision impact.
Perhaps the best we would get is marketshare percentage dropping and/or customers stating they would consider alternatives to Synology?
That’s the kind of decision that I can only imagine a 3rd generation nepo baby would make. That’s BONE HEADED. Seriously. Who in their right mind could ever have thought that would work?
They dont release specific sales breakdowns. So anything saying that it affected sales is pure conjecture.
Shares are a reflection of that to an extent. If the market thought they were bleeding money, you would expect the intrinsic value of the company/share price would also fall, wouldnt you? Instead during that period the expectation was the company had growth or potential growth and the change in policy didnt change that direction.
It’s all about shares now. Nobody actually want to sell value to their customers anymore. They all want just to create fuzz and buzzwords for imbeciles in the financial market to dump money in their shares and make their managers, who are rewarded with this share crap, happy.
For some reason this scenario reminds me of a comment that I read a while back from somebody who does consulting for businesses. Many of the businesses encounter a scenario where they see a sudden drop off in customers after a price increase and ask her how to fix it because simply lowering back to the old price doesn’t work. They thought the market would just react to their pricing and if they went too far they could dial it back after getting the message and be fine. She tells them that they passed a silent threshold of trust some time ago after earlier price increases that caused their customers to start thinking about alternatives in case there are further price increases, and now there’s no way back.