After being vocal about Synology's new (hopefully temporary) drive compatibility restrictions for their 2025 NAS models, I've gone and bought one anyway. I got the Synology DS925+, which has replaced our trusty DS418play that's been faithfully serving our home since 2018.

Yes, I'm aware of the hypocrisy. No, I'm not proud of it, but after looking at alternatives and weighing up the options, I decided that at the current stage of my life, pragmatism won over principles in this instance.

Goodbye to another workhorse

Our DS418play has been an absolute workhorse for the past 7 years. It's handled everything we've thrown at it: file serving, Plex, Docker containers, Hyper Backup, Home Assistant, etc.

But like all good things, it was starting to show its age. I've been wanting to get Home Assistant onto a supported platform, and the easiest one is in a VM, which the DS418play didn't support.

The DS925+ is a solid upgrade that adds some (now pretty standard) NAS features: 2.5Gb networking and NVME drives (I use one for Docker and the VMs). It's not the most exciting or powerful choice, but I think it's the right one for our situation at the moment.

The Synology drives were actually cheaper*

I, like many others, was (and still am!) pretty critical of Synology's new policy requiring their own more expensive drives for the newer NAS models. It felt like a cash grab by forcing users into buying more of their products, for something that should be a commodity purchase.

But when I was actually shopping around for an upgrade, I noticed something weird. The 6TB Synology-branded drives were actually cheaper than the equivalent Western Digital Reds and Seagate Ironwolf drives at the time I was buying. Historically, they have been more expensive.

And not just a little cheaper, but well over 10%, and Amazon had an extra 10% off on top of that when buying 2 at a time. In the end, I paid only AUD$221 for each drive. They're manufactured by Seagate and are pretty much Ironwolf drives with custom firmware, so I'm comfortable with their quality.

_{*It's possible (maybe even likely) that Synology were temporarily lowering prices to encourage take-up.}

Why not jump ship?

You might be wondering why I didn't use this as an opportunity to try something like TrueNAS or Unraid. These are genuinely compelling alternatives that have matured a lot in the past 7 years, and I was tempted to buy better hardware and custom-install one of those.

The honest answer? Time. Or more accurately, the lack of it.

My spare time is increasingly scarce now, and the idea of spending weekends migrating data, finding non-Synology app alternatives, reconfiguring services, and learning a new NAS platform just didn't appeal to me. For example, I learned that TrueNAS doesn't even have a file browser built-in.

Synology's DSM usually just works, and is still the best NAS operating system by far. One other big reason for sticking with Synology is that the Hyper Backup system is still a great solution for versioned and encrypted cloud backups, and I didn't really want to go back to something like Duplicati on the NAS.

Migration and setup

One thing I'll say for Synology is that they make hardware transitions relatively painless. I was able to migrate my SHR volume from the old NAS to the new one using their great Migration Assistant. All my settings, data, shares, users, permissions, and Docker containers came across without any issues.

The whole process took almost an entire day, with most of that time spent waiting for the data to transfer over the network (it transfers the whole volume at a block level, not just used space).

Final thoughts

Maybe by the time this NAS needs replacing in another (hopefully, at least) 7 years, I'll have more time to explore those TrueNAS/Unraid options. I was also very tempted by the new UGREEN NASs, but considering they're a very new product and made by a Chinese company, I think I'll keep an eye on the longer term security and privacy record of the devices and their software.

Or, maybe Synology will have sorted out their drive compatibility nonsense by then.