Last week Synology put out a press release on its European website, informing its customers that the Plus Series—which starts with simple two bay devices—will only support its own brand of hard drives, if you want to be able to take advantage of basic NAS features like creating a storage pool or do a lifespan analysis. More advanced features like volume-wide deduplication will also not be available. Synology has already done this on its XS Plus and rack mounted NAS appliances—which in itself wouldn't be acceptable to many considering getting a NAS—but at least these are pricier, high-end devices. Now the company has moved down to the $300 price bracket, which just doesn't sit right.

Admittedly this will only affect new customers, as the company will start to roll out the limitation with its 2025 SKUs and all other models will continue to work as is. The problem here is that Synology isn't a hard drive manufacturer and according to Arstechnica, the company is simply re-branding Toshiba hard drives and charges an extra $50 or so for their basic tier of drives, with higher-end tiers having a much higher premium. Synology obviously claims that this is for the benefit of their customers and you can find the full statement below. However, we doubt many customers will be happy to pay extra for something that was working just fine, until Synology figured out it could charge its customers extra for it. For now, there has been no indication that this will happen outside of the European market, but it's likely to be rolled out globally, as something like this is rarely limited to one market.Following the success of the high-performance series, the company is now also increasingly relying on Synology's own storage media for the Plus series models to be released from 2025. As a result, users will benefit from higher performance, increased reliability and more efficient support.

"With our proprietary hard disk solution, we have already seen significant benefits for our customers in various deployment scenarios," says Chad Chiang, Managing Director of Synology GmbH and Synology UK. "By extending our integrated ecosystem to the Plus Series, we aim to provide all users - from home users to small businesses - with the highest levels of security, performance, and significantly more efficient support."

For users, this means that starting with Plus Series models released in 2025, only Synology's own hard drives and third-party hard drives certified to Synology's specifications will be compatible and offer the full range of features and support.

Plus models released up to and including 2024 (excluding XS Plus series and rack models) will not change. In addition, the migration of hard disks from existing Synology NAS to a new Plus model will continue to be possible without restrictions.
The use of compatible and unlisted hard disks will be subject to certain restrictions in the future, such as the creation of pools and support in the event of problems and malfunctions caused by the use of incompatible storage media. Volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates of hard disks will only be available for Synology hard disks in the future.

The tight integration of Synology NAS systems and hard disks will reduce compatibility issues and increase system reliability and performance. At the same time, firmware updates and security patches can be provided more efficiently to ensure a high level of data security and more efficient support for Synology customers.