Synology’s rollback will give us back the possibility to use third-party hard drives in its latest NAS lineup on DSM 7.3.
It’s a welcome change of pace after months of criticism over the restrictive drive whitelists. But the market Synology comes back to is less forgiving and more competitive than the one it left, and winning power users back may be a tougher task than flipping a software switch.
What Is New in DSM 7.3 for Third‑Party Drive Support
For those in the I’ve-already-installed-this category, take note that today’s update unlocks Synology’s 2025 systems to popular 3.5-inch HDDs along with industry-leading brands of 2.5-inch SSDs—and once again you have the freedom to create and add storage pools at your leisure without the old “Sorry Dave, best I can do…” delays.
Some of the Itep members had meetings with the team but there was no feedback from it, complains Hélios Ribeiro. Local product requirements provided more flexibility. Synology claims that they collaborated with some of the main drive vendors on extending its compatibility list—it wants to strike a balance between ensuring compatibility and engaging in adequate validation.
There are still reasons to prefer the Synology-branded disks, which come with deeper integrations like smoother firmware updates, diagnostic improvements, and better health telemetry. That distinction is understandable from a support point of view, but it also draws a line in the sand between “best experience” and “fully allowed,” a contrast on which some users will undoubtedly fixate.
Why the restrictive drive policy backfired on Synology
Synology’s earlier restrictions were out of step with the culture that had made it a default recommendation. At the home lab level and for small businesses, a lot of us had been making do by mixing in cheap Seagate, WD, and Toshiba drives together (usually bought on sale or shucked from external enclosures) to get to capacity points that were reasonable. Once-halted configurations felt like forced lock-in, and it inflated total cost of ownership on many deployments.
Community sentiment turned quickly. Third-party reviewers, storage forums, and the Synology subreddit were inundated with reports of once-reliable configs no longer being supported in new models. The practical wasn’t the only philosophical objection: a NAS is an appliance that users think of as something they own, not some kind of walled garden where supported components change in mid-stream.
How rivals pounced on openness to win NAS customers
Whereas Synology clamped down, competitors doubled down on openness and performance. QNAP, Asustor, and TerraMaster all extended ranges with added firepower in the form of faster processors, large RAM ceilings, the ability to add PCIe cards, and almost-ubiquitous 2.5GbE if not all-out 10GbE networking. A lot of these systems take literally any SATA or NVMe drive and pass the burden of decision and trust to the customer.
Other younger contenders also upped the ante. Ugreen’s surprisingly capable streamers and Ubiquiti’s tightly integrated UniFi storage: two products that brought new ideas and ambitious value. Meanwhile, the boom in self-hosting accelerated. Open platforms, such as TrueNAS and Unraid (from iXsystems and a community project with a strong following, respectively), enable builders to create ZFS or Btrfs storage on commodity hardware, add containers and VMs, and avoid the lock-in that comes from needing proprietary anything.
Net-net, DSM’s historical edge in usability, though still large, is no longer insurmountable. Rival platforms have improved their interfaces, backup tooling, and app ecosystems. For many of these workflows the gap has diminished to a matter of taste rather than need.
How hardware expectations have shifted for modern NAS
Performance needs have exceeded safe, incremental refreshes. Media-heavy homes and photo/video teams are going to appreciate multi-gig networking, but NVMe becomes a greater need in the realm of caching (and primary pools) along with memory headroom that doesn’t involve circumventing spec sheets. Prosumer purchasers also want clear upgrade paths—things like native 10GbE options and validated ECC RAM—because for many users, a NAS is an investment in the five-to-seven-year range, not just something to use until it breaks.
Synology still nails the day-to-day experience.
DSM is still the most refined NAS OS available for anyone who prizes stability and tidy administration, but neat features such as Active Backup and Synology Hybrid RAID take much of the sweat out of tricky jobs. But with AI-assisted workflows, 4K and 8K media libraries, multi-user editing, and more coming into play, polish just isn’t enough any longer as AI/ML-driven, multi-channel I/O and CPU loads add pressure.
Rebuilding trust requires more than a settings toggle
Rolling back the drive policy is a must, but just the first step in trying to rebuild credibility, with many enthusiasts and SMBs who once raved about Synology now busy warning others not to go near them. Swift and transparent communication will be as important as firmware itself. Like, publishing exactly how often Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba certificates are going to be rechecked so you can pipeline launches around it; defining what the heck “supported” and “fully compatible” means; making an enduring commitment to interoperability over a product’s life.
Transparency allows users to make evidence-based decisions as well. (Disclosure: I’m hardly a neutral observer myself.) Independent datasets like the Backblaze Drive Stats, which focus on data center use cases, have educated buyers to look at models and batches rather than brand logos. Industry analysts like IDC persist in seeing strong demand for networked storage in such SMB and edge situations, but capturing those deployments does demand openness, modernized hardware, and predictable ownership costs.
Over two decades Synology has built up goodwill creating powerful storage that users could actually use. Returning the freedom of third-party drives helps get it back on the right side of that story. Whether it is too late will depend on what happens next: more ambitious hardware releases, a clearer roadmap, and a long-term commitment to stronger adoption of user choice. The customers who walked out are not coming back to see any one feature. It could be for a revived philosophy.
