I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual contact with the support people in your organization to understand this. If the people answering phones and chats didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in advance to test with.
We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3 (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface.
No product is perfect but these interfaces are very well tested and billions of machines run as expected with them.
The move from them was purely for money reasons.
Based on my experience dealing with SFPs I highly suspect they looked at their bug tracker and concluded that 13% of the sketch-ass mystery drives were causing 50% of their labor expenditure.
And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...
Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't SFP evolve pretty heavily here?
The newest version is from --2022-- 2016. There are also quite high data-rates involved.
SATA and Smart are stable for a long time.
Smart has some special commands depending on manufacturer but the core set of functions always work.
I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems.
"Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."
They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives".
TBH this is quite sad.
I recommended Synology to some people before...
Feels like I have to walk back on my word.
This is 21st century American business. Synology wasn't going to choose their drives for maximum reliability after a long, hard, and most importantly expensive benchmarking period, they were going to stuff the cheapest drives they could buy from suppliers in there and charge more than any other drive. There's a very reasonable chance this would have produced lower quality outcomes and more support calls in the long run than random drives purchased on the open market.
Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.
Your experience with SFPs does not translate to hard drives. Hard drives are very, very, very standardized. SFPs are not. Yes, all SFPs have a standard hardware interface, but the optics coding varies wildly.
Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.
HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.
Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".
I've been using them for 4 years across enterprise level HDDs, personal HDDs, portable HDDs, never seen any issues or differences in experience other than speed.
From every success story like yours, how many people have tried it but given up and returned to a commercial solution because of a bug in OMV and absence of support except for a community forum filled with rabid (and usually clueless) fanboys?
So can Synology. "I'm sorry, sir, but your XYZ drive doesn't appear on our list of recommended/supported drives. I'll need to refer you to XYZ Corp for this issue. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
That's all they ever needed to say. Instead, they said, "Fuck you, pay me."
Are you saying Synology’s move to support first party drives was a good thing? Plenty of companies deal with unpredictable hardware and, in fact, Synology has for years, in part thanks to standards.
