Is there a reason to think all the other companies couldn't start doing it to?

Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?

Well, Citrix's CEO was Broadcom' software boss

And also hasa place at the US treasury, he's DOGE-affiliated as well: https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2025/citrix-parent-ceo-krause-on-doge-role-we-re-applying-public-company-standards-to-the-federal-government

Well,

Broadcom released a free VMware again

should be taken as a bait to lure in unsuspecting users before later stage enshit tactics happen. Synology seems to be at some other point in their enshit process, but enshit nevertheless.

QNAP, Asustor, UGreen, Unifi, and many others already offer lower cost NASes from 2 to 8 bays (some might offer even more)

If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They'd sell a ton of them.

There's no shortage of alternatives to Synology hardware. People buy Synology because of the software.

Hey, that's not entirely true! Our place brought them in because it was also a cheap solution! Honestly, it has done fine for our storage solution, which is mostly backups related. Then again, we came from Baracuda, which was super expensive, super locked down, and did break a lot.

It doesn't become useless, it just misses out on a bunch of useful features for the drives.

Still ridiculous, of course

Well shit… I don’t even think about that.

My switch to Unraid is feeling better every day 😀

Yup, been using that from the start, since none of the 20TB drives were "verified" when I bought them.

It's a bit annoying that you have to do that, but ultimately a non-issue.

One point: if it matters to you, you might want to confirm your enclosure's behavior under power-loss conditions. I had one that did not come back to a powered on state or have an option to do so when power was restored. Not something I'd thought of, since I'd assumed this behavior. Eventually, after some looking, found an enclosure with a mechanical-toggle power switch that did restore prior state.

This is what I’ll replace my DS415+ with, too, once it dies. The TerraMasters are basically bog-standard Intel NUCs with a storage adapter. And there’s HDMI output and an internal USB drive which you can just replace (or overwrite) and install OMV or TrueNAS or whatever.

Their website looks pretty sketchy, ngl

I have one, but I feel pretty burned by them since the model I bought was immediately outdated because the next hardware version after mine was a new cpu arcitechure, and the new software updates don't support the old architecture. I think they moved from arm to x86 or something like that. So I'm stuck with old software that's no longer supported, only a year or two after I bought the up to date model.

And, yeah, as the other commenter noted, it does feel quite like you're using knock-off software. Remoting into it doesn't really fill me with confidence. Maybe it's fine but it just looks/feels like the cheap and shitty version of something more reputable. And it's not even running a proper version of linux that I could customise - it's a stripped down version of arch that I can't install anything on unless it's on their official app store, which doens't even work half the time, and when I do install the official version of plex/etc the cpu is so wimpy that it can't even direct stream untranscoded video directly off the disk. My raspberrypi 5 is literally 10x (!!) faster than it in cpu benchmarks. You're probably right that I could probably overwrite the os with something better, but then what's the point in buying an expensive NAS when you could just buy a pi with much more power, community support, packages, etc, plus a dumb external usb enclosure for half the cost? Maybe the more recent ones with the updated cpu architecture are more powerful and have better apps, idk, but now I just use it as a dumb hard drive enclosure and do any smarts, such as plex or scripts I need to run, on my pi anyway.

So, I'm considering just moving all my NAS/plex data to an external drive attached to my pi.

That's all a NAS has ever been, just a PC that specializes in storage. "NAS" isn't a specific product, either - it's whatever hardware you set up to function as such. My own NAS is a 2014 Mac mini running OMV (Debian 12 based) with a 4-bay locking drive dock attached to it. Works great.

I took images of my gaming PC drives (500GB, 2TB) onto a 4TB spinner, then shoved that spinner into my NAS's dock. With 2 minutes of point and click configuration, I can access those images from my gaming PC's new Linux install over the network to copy whatever data I might need. Easy peasy. No Synology needed for that.

That's fine for us techy people, but my parents would not be able to do that.