Synology Is Ditching Its NAS Drive Compatibility Restrictions
Synology's latest network-attached storage (NAS) devices can only use hard drives and SSDs approved by the company, which did not go over well with the company's long-time customers. The company is finally walking back that requirement, but it might be too little, too late.
Most NAS products can create drive pools with any 2.5 or 3.5-inch internal drives, and that was true for all consumer Synology products released before 2025. However, the 2025 models of Synology's DiskStation Plus, Value, and J-Series NAS units were restricted to drives on the official compatibility list , unless they were in a drive pool migrated from an older system. The list is supposed to contain drives tested for reliability, which the company says helps with "a stable and consistent experience."
The official list is still missing many popular third-party drives, but it does contain many Synology-branded drives that are generally more expensive than the competition. The compatibility requirements also meant the end of drive 'shucking'—buying cheap or discounted external drives and ripping out the storage for use in another device. The compatibility requirements prompted many people to move away from Synology, like buying UGREEN or Terramaster systems, or building a custom system with Unraid or another similar operating system. To quote Douglas Adams, "This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Several months later, Synology is backtracking on the drive requirements. Starting with the DSM 7.3 update, 2025 model-year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J Series units can create storage pools with any third-party drives, just like older Synology units. However, creating an M.2-based storage pool and cache still requires drives on the compatibility list.
The blog post explained, "Synology is collaborating with drive manufacturers to expand the range of certified storage media, delivering more reliable options. In the meantime, 2025 model-year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J Series running DSM 7.3 will support installation and storage pool creation with third-party drives¹. Together with the existing support for third-party drive migration, DSM will provide users with greater flexibility in managing their storage deployments."
This is great news, but it might be too little, too late. There's nothing stopping Synology from restricting drive compatibility again in the future—perhaps when the official list has more affordable options to address those complaints. This is a change that probably needed a "we messed up and we're sorry" statement to start building back customer trust, more like what Sonos did after its disastrous software updates, but Synology isn't doing that yet.
The DSM 7.3 update is rolling out now to supported Synology models. It's a staged rollout, so it might take a while to show up on your unit, if you don't manually download the package and install it.
Source: Synology
