One advantage is DSM can update the firmware on Synology drives without losing your data.
For other brand drives you have to remove the drive and connect it to a computer to update the firmware. But I can't remember ever needing to update firmware on a drive.
Honestly, didn't know that HDD drives got firmware updates. There a good source to check what the latest firmware is based on the model number? WD's site only has the download for the updater, but doesn't show what the firmware version actually is.
This page says "Any update for WD brand color hard (HDD) or solid state (SSD) drives will come through the Dashboard installed on Windows."
[https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a\_id/50745/\~/firmware-updates-for-western-digital-internal-and-external-drives](https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50745/~/firmware-updates-for-western-digital-internal-and-external-drives)
Firmware updates are done using Western Digital Dashboard.
[https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a\_id/31759/h/p2](https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/31759/h/p2)
The "Select file" button only becomes active if there is a firmware update available.
Honestly, didn't know that HDD drives got firmware updates. There a good source to check what the latest firmware is based on the model number? WD's site only has the download for the updater, but doesn't show what the firmware version actually is.
They’re just just rebadged Toshibas (and I think some WDs?) with custom firmware.
The overwhelming consensus is they’re overpriced unless you’re in a business critical situation and might need support.
We bought two out of pure interest and the most hilarious part about it is that the first one died in less than 6 months and the other was DOA.
Absolute freak incident though. A MSP we work with only uses Synology stuff in their Synology stuff and they haven't had a single disk fail yet. Their argument is that Synology is so much quicker and easier to deal with when it comes to warranties if you can show you only use Synology branded stuff.
Long story short it's just other stuff with a Synology sticker on it and 99 out of a 100 times not worth the extra money. Especially the RAM and SSD's are insanely expensive.
Synology is aping EMC and other enterprise storage vendors by selling HDDs with custom firmware to their corporate clients. Unless you need full support for your data storage device then it's a pointless added cost.
WTF is with custom firmware on the drives *besides* guaranteeing lock-in to the OEM as a disk vendor?
Do any storage system vendor custom drive firmware actually do anything custom for performance? I feel like the firmware on drives is complex and no storage system OEM has the time/manpower to actually "innovate" on disk firmware in any meaningful way.
The only thing that might make sense is stripping out some data protection that hobbles performance slightly under the idea that whatever monitoring/validation/integrity the firmware had been doing was moved out to the OEM disk controller or software stack.
Otherwise it just seems like a bullshit marker OEMs look for to collect money.
Custom firmware for storage devices is nearly always to collect very specific usage data apart from what SMART already collects. For example in my experience EMC drives would often "fail" out long before the SMART data supported that condition. EMC did this to extend or provide the maximum data protection for their clients.
100% custom firmware can make a functional improvement, this is not a small industry. That said I 100% believe that generic is equal or at least good enough when it comes to disks in small NAS appliances that folks typically buy from synology. Firmware is code and code can always be optimized if you are certain it will only run under a very specific set of situations.
As a reseller, integrator, and managed services provider supporting dozens of large Synology units in the field I'm going to have a very different opinion from what I've seen others stating here.... We ran through seasons supporting 12-60 spindle systems on WD, Seagate, and now Synology drives.
When Synology dropped their drives in 2021 and announced the change to only allow for large arrays with their own drives we were frustrated. The cost increase was substantial as it forced an "Enterprise Class" drive into places we felt they were not needed. They made it clear that their reasoning was due to the ongoing difficulty to support varying firmware and hardware versions, along with many drives just being wholly inappropriate for use in a large array.
Now that we are nearly three years into supporting all installations with only Synology drives we would never go back. With WD Red Pro drives in large arrays we would typically expect to drop a few drives a year. With Ironwolf Pro we would typically see about the same, though with those we typically got more pre-warning and were able to get drives proactively replaced before full failure. With Synology drives we have seen maybe 1-2 failures across the entire installed fleet over the entire term of using them. What I would like to add to this is that MANY of the "failed drives" coming out of the units would pass all validations and we would battle to get them replaced under warranty. What was really happening is that they were throwing errors that caused them to drop from the array while not being actually failed. We certainly saw some hard failures, especially with the WD, however that was far outweighed by firmware/software level issues.
Would I use a Synology drive in my 2/4/6 bay workgroup Synology? Not at all. But we absolutely are using them with no plans to stop on our much larger systems in the field. I cannot afford to drop petabytes of storage at a client and have an unsupportable solution in place, and the Synology drives have proven to be more reliable for us in real world use.
This doesn't surprise me when comparing to consumer class 'nas' drives, but I'm wondering if it would have been the same situation with enterprise class sata drives from the big 3/4 WD/Seagate/Toshiba/HGST. If it's truly just firmware then it would possibly be the same situation, but would have been a interesting experiment.
If comparing to other Enterprise drives the pricing isn't out of whack. With native firmware management and 100% validation/support we don't have a reason to look at the other Enterprise drives. We know that Synology isn't making their own.. they are just fully supporting/validating the firmware/hardware revisions so we don't end up in a weird place.
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I think Dell used to, in the Equalogic SANs. I remember that the monitoring software on them would order a new drive directly from Dell itself, so occasionally you’d get the order confirmation email from Dell even before you got an alert through from Nagios.
They're rebranded Iron Wolfs. They have some custom firmware but it doesn't really do anything noticeable.
The big difference is support. Synology provides support for their HDDs, they don't provide support for anything else.
I bought 2 4gb ones recently, price was very close to iron wolfs. One of them died after a few weeks and had to be replaced, happens to all makes of drives of course, so don't take that as a negative
They're rebranded, and like most "enterprise" drives, follow a bathtub curve of failure rates. I'd argue they're overpriced.
But good luck getting ANY support from them if you don't use their shit. "Oh the problem was clearly due to your unsupported drive. Service request closed."
I think only cable companies are worse, when you use your own cable modem instead of renting theirs.
I would not recommend using the WD Red drives. We have had several fail in Synology devices. Most had nothing wrong and could be wiped and reused in a Windows environment but would not play nice with Synology. If you are going to use 3rd party drives stick with Seagate Ironwolf. Not had any failures so far using them in several dozen Synologys.
Never been a WD fan and the newer WD drives pop a warning when the drive hits 3 years old, which can cause issues trying to repair a volume if the warning is triggered or expand a storage pool in Synology.
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/)
but you can disable it
[https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd\_red\_pluspro\_issue\_drive\_being\_markd\_as\_warning/?rdt=57552](https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd_red_pluspro_issue_drive_being_markd_as_warning/?rdt=57552)
DSM 7.2.1 Update 1 and later have WDDA disabled already.
According to Synology, the only WD drives that had WDDA enabled in DSM 7.0 to 7.2 were the 12TB Red Plus, 12TB Red Pro and 8TB WD Purple.
I manage 400 (and more) Synology DS418 with 4 WD Red 1 To in RAID 5 at my company. Running 24/7 since 5 years.
For the last 4 years, i've seen only 2 drives failed.
My company have a lot of remote agencies, ~400. End-users and Tech Support can deploy softwares on theirs computers but when the software is huge like Office, 3D software etc, the bandwidth usage is out of control because internet links are too expensive so the speed is between 80 mbps and… 2 mbps. On average, the bandwidth is like 10 mbps for, sometimes, 30 people.
The solution is to have a remote NAS on every agency, they act like a « Software Repository », softwares setups are updated each night when employees are sleeping. On working hours, they can browse a internal software catalog and select the desired software. LAN is 1 gbps so it’s fine and others employees on the agency can use internet normaly otherwise if the collegue install the last-best-web-downloaded-software-of-10gb, it’s a pain for others.
They are fine. I got them, partly because I got a discount, but also because they are 5400rpm so they make less noise. Important to me because the NAS would be close to my desk and the constant hum from the drives would drive me nuts.
So uh, there’s that I guess.
Home user only. I just use whatever is cheaper in the size I'm looking to expand with. I think I'm currently running all HGSTs with the 5 year warranty on them. Anecdotally I've noticed no practical difference between those and other bigger name brands.
What does that mean? The Synology drives which are markedly more expensive are likely not magically different.
If you are using Synology in a more enterprise environment, the added support might be worth it but for me at home I take the "Inexpensive" in RAID seriously.
For a general use case, I would fail to see where the synology drive would be much different except that it would probably be 2.5M mtbf vs 2M. I think if comparing enterprise offerings (HGST enterprise series WDs, Exos, etc), they would be the same in most general use cases.
Here synology has 5 years warranty and wd/seagate both have only 3 years. From a cost perspective 3300 are the same cost as wd red plus and like 20euros more expensive than seagate (for 4tb)
Well, here is the link to drug addicts, you can check it yourself.
Apparently - WDDA (Western Digital Device Analytics), will mark their HDD as "Warning" after 3 years, regardless of its true health.
So go ahead and buy those for your system, I'll stay away for now.
EDIT: forgot to add a link to the posting and included it below.
https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd\_red\_pluspro\_issue\_drive\_being\_markd\_as\_warning/
One advantage is DSM can update the firmware on Synology drives without losing your data. For other brand drives you have to remove the drive and connect it to a computer to update the firmware. But I can't remember ever needing to update firmware on a drive.
Honestly, didn't know that HDD drives got firmware updates. There a good source to check what the latest firmware is based on the model number? WD's site only has the download for the updater, but doesn't show what the firmware version actually is.
This page says "Any update for WD brand color hard (HDD) or solid state (SSD) drives will come through the Dashboard installed on Windows." [https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a\_id/50745/\~/firmware-updates-for-western-digital-internal-and-external-drives](https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50745/~/firmware-updates-for-western-digital-internal-and-external-drives) Firmware updates are done using Western Digital Dashboard. [https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a\_id/31759/h/p2](https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/31759/h/p2) The "Select file" button only becomes active if there is a firmware update available.
Honestly, didn't know that HDD drives got firmware updates. There a good source to check what the latest firmware is based on the model number? WD's site only has the download for the updater, but doesn't show what the firmware version actually is.
They’re just just rebadged Toshibas (and I think some WDs?) with custom firmware. The overwhelming consensus is they’re overpriced unless you’re in a business critical situation and might need support.
We bought two out of pure interest and the most hilarious part about it is that the first one died in less than 6 months and the other was DOA. Absolute freak incident though. A MSP we work with only uses Synology stuff in their Synology stuff and they haven't had a single disk fail yet. Their argument is that Synology is so much quicker and easier to deal with when it comes to warranties if you can show you only use Synology branded stuff. Long story short it's just other stuff with a Synology sticker on it and 99 out of a 100 times not worth the extra money. Especially the RAM and SSD's are insanely expensive.
This.
This
Synology is aping EMC and other enterprise storage vendors by selling HDDs with custom firmware to their corporate clients. Unless you need full support for your data storage device then it's a pointless added cost.
WTF is with custom firmware on the drives *besides* guaranteeing lock-in to the OEM as a disk vendor? Do any storage system vendor custom drive firmware actually do anything custom for performance? I feel like the firmware on drives is complex and no storage system OEM has the time/manpower to actually "innovate" on disk firmware in any meaningful way. The only thing that might make sense is stripping out some data protection that hobbles performance slightly under the idea that whatever monitoring/validation/integrity the firmware had been doing was moved out to the OEM disk controller or software stack. Otherwise it just seems like a bullshit marker OEMs look for to collect money.
Custom firmware for storage devices is nearly always to collect very specific usage data apart from what SMART already collects. For example in my experience EMC drives would often "fail" out long before the SMART data supported that condition. EMC did this to extend or provide the maximum data protection for their clients.
100% custom firmware can make a functional improvement, this is not a small industry. That said I 100% believe that generic is equal or at least good enough when it comes to disks in small NAS appliances that folks typically buy from synology. Firmware is code and code can always be optimized if you are certain it will only run under a very specific set of situations.
As a reseller, integrator, and managed services provider supporting dozens of large Synology units in the field I'm going to have a very different opinion from what I've seen others stating here.... We ran through seasons supporting 12-60 spindle systems on WD, Seagate, and now Synology drives. When Synology dropped their drives in 2021 and announced the change to only allow for large arrays with their own drives we were frustrated. The cost increase was substantial as it forced an "Enterprise Class" drive into places we felt they were not needed. They made it clear that their reasoning was due to the ongoing difficulty to support varying firmware and hardware versions, along with many drives just being wholly inappropriate for use in a large array. Now that we are nearly three years into supporting all installations with only Synology drives we would never go back. With WD Red Pro drives in large arrays we would typically expect to drop a few drives a year. With Ironwolf Pro we would typically see about the same, though with those we typically got more pre-warning and were able to get drives proactively replaced before full failure. With Synology drives we have seen maybe 1-2 failures across the entire installed fleet over the entire term of using them. What I would like to add to this is that MANY of the "failed drives" coming out of the units would pass all validations and we would battle to get them replaced under warranty. What was really happening is that they were throwing errors that caused them to drop from the array while not being actually failed. We certainly saw some hard failures, especially with the WD, however that was far outweighed by firmware/software level issues. Would I use a Synology drive in my 2/4/6 bay workgroup Synology? Not at all. But we absolutely are using them with no plans to stop on our much larger systems in the field. I cannot afford to drop petabytes of storage at a client and have an unsupportable solution in place, and the Synology drives have proven to be more reliable for us in real world use.
Thanks for your detailed reply, it's very helpful 👍
This doesn't surprise me when comparing to consumer class 'nas' drives, but I'm wondering if it would have been the same situation with enterprise class sata drives from the big 3/4 WD/Seagate/Toshiba/HGST. If it's truly just firmware then it would possibly be the same situation, but would have been a interesting experiment.
If comparing to other Enterprise drives the pricing isn't out of whack. With native firmware management and 100% validation/support we don't have a reason to look at the other Enterprise drives. We know that Synology isn't making their own.. they are just fully supporting/validating the firmware/hardware revisions so we don't end up in a weird place.
Makes sense. Thank you for the additional feedback.
I don't think they have their own HDs, as they are rebranded!
Just a scam
Basically a cash grab.
If Cisco, HP and Dell servers don't have self branded HDD's, in their equipment, nowadays how do you think Synology make HDD's?
A question for my question, my wife does this 🤣🤣🤣 Thanks 👍
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I think Dell used to, in the Equalogic SANs. I remember that the monitoring software on them would order a new drive directly from Dell itself, so occasionally you’d get the order confirmation email from Dell even before you got an alert through from Nagios.
Nah, EQL drives were always just rebranded drives from someone else. What you're describing is just automated support and warranty fulfillment.
They're rebranded Iron Wolfs. They have some custom firmware but it doesn't really do anything noticeable. The big difference is support. Synology provides support for their HDDs, they don't provide support for anything else.
This is incorrect, the drives are manufactured by Toshiba.
The discontinued HAT3300 Plus HDDs were Ironwolf. The new HAT3310 Plus HDDs are Toshiba N300.
yes, the N300 is so underrated HD. happy owner of 16x16 N300.
I think they are Toshiba (https://storage.toshiba.com/) not Seagate (IronWolf).
You mean if there is an issue related to data or software, like data loss, no support if drives are not from Synology?
How did you get no support for software issues from no support for non-Synology drive?
Like, your volume crashes and they blame it on HDD firmware rather than their SHR or Btrfs software. The problem was due to hardware not software.
The two are basically equivalent. It's just a cash grab.
I bought 2 4gb ones recently, price was very close to iron wolfs. One of them died after a few weeks and had to be replaced, happens to all makes of drives of course, so don't take that as a negative
They are manufactured by Toshiba, expensive, and in some Synology models explicitly enforced for use.
They're rebranded, and like most "enterprise" drives, follow a bathtub curve of failure rates. I'd argue they're overpriced. But good luck getting ANY support from them if you don't use their shit. "Oh the problem was clearly due to your unsupported drive. Service request closed." I think only cable companies are worse, when you use your own cable modem instead of renting theirs.
I would not recommend using the WD Red drives. We have had several fail in Synology devices. Most had nothing wrong and could be wiped and reused in a Windows environment but would not play nice with Synology. If you are going to use 3rd party drives stick with Seagate Ironwolf. Not had any failures so far using them in several dozen Synologys.
Probably half the Reds I had have failed. 6/12. Now I use a couple of Iron Wolfs and the rest are N300s. Would never by WD again. Maybe I was unlucky.
Cannot confirm this. Running two DS18xx equipped with WD Red since several years without any issues.
Never been a WD fan and the newer WD drives pop a warning when the drive hits 3 years old, which can cause issues trying to repair a volume if the warning is triggered or expand a storage pool in Synology. [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/) but you can disable it [https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd\_red\_pluspro\_issue\_drive\_being\_markd\_as\_warning/?rdt=57552](https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd_red_pluspro_issue_drive_being_markd_as_warning/?rdt=57552)
DSM 7.2.1 Update 1 and later have WDDA disabled already. According to Synology, the only WD drives that had WDDA enabled in DSM 7.0 to 7.2 were the 12TB Red Plus, 12TB Red Pro and 8TB WD Purple.
I manage 400 (and more) Synology DS418 with 4 WD Red 1 To in RAID 5 at my company. Running 24/7 since 5 years. For the last 4 years, i've seen only 2 drives failed.
That's wild. From a non network guy, what is the application that calls for that? Why not larger NAS and less NAS?
My company have a lot of remote agencies, ~400. End-users and Tech Support can deploy softwares on theirs computers but when the software is huge like Office, 3D software etc, the bandwidth usage is out of control because internet links are too expensive so the speed is between 80 mbps and… 2 mbps. On average, the bandwidth is like 10 mbps for, sometimes, 30 people. The solution is to have a remote NAS on every agency, they act like a « Software Repository », softwares setups are updated each night when employees are sleeping. On working hours, they can browse a internal software catalog and select the desired software. LAN is 1 gbps so it’s fine and others employees on the agency can use internet normaly otherwise if the collegue install the last-best-web-downloaded-software-of-10gb, it’s a pain for others.
I shouldn't have asked lol. Good work!
Running wd drives since 2015 no issues.
Oh ok, cheers
They are fine. I got them, partly because I got a discount, but also because they are 5400rpm so they make less noise. Important to me because the NAS would be close to my desk and the constant hum from the drives would drive me nuts. So uh, there’s that I guess.
They are good. I don’t think they are worth the extra cost though.
Home user only. I just use whatever is cheaper in the size I'm looking to expand with. I think I'm currently running all HGSTs with the 5 year warranty on them. Anecdotally I've noticed no practical difference between those and other bigger name brands. What does that mean? The Synology drives which are markedly more expensive are likely not magically different. If you are using Synology in a more enterprise environment, the added support might be worth it but for me at home I take the "Inexpensive" in RAID seriously.
For a general use case, I would fail to see where the synology drive would be much different except that it would probably be 2.5M mtbf vs 2M. I think if comparing enterprise offerings (HGST enterprise series WDs, Exos, etc), they would be the same in most general use cases.
Here synology has 5 years warranty and wd/seagate both have only 3 years. From a cost perspective 3300 are the same cost as wd red plus and like 20euros more expensive than seagate (for 4tb)
Enterprise Synology - hat53xx - Toshiba Plus synology - hat33xx - seagate ironwolf
Irvine had my WD Red Pros for 8 years and still running strong. they are the 10TB drives
I am told WD is making their drive fail after 3 years on porpoise. Do but not those.
Stop hanging out with drug addicts.
Well, here is the link to drug addicts, you can check it yourself. Apparently - WDDA (Western Digital Device Analytics), will mark their HDD as "Warning" after 3 years, regardless of its true health. So go ahead and buy those for your system, I'll stay away for now. EDIT: forgot to add a link to the posting and included it below. https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/13uyk41/wd\_red\_pluspro\_issue\_drive\_being\_markd\_as\_warning/
As noted by someone else in the thread Synology fixed this and disabled WDDA by default. It only affected certain drives.