Synology explains why it limited NAS drive compatibility

Synology aims to aggressively push its enterprise storage products to businesses in South Africa, and its recent decision regarding its NAS Plus Series compatibility is to ensure increased product reliability.

This is according to Synology regional sales manager Michael Chang, who met with MyBroadband at Computex 2025 in Taiwan to discuss developments in the company’s consumer and enterprise product segments.

Synology unveiled two of its latest product developments at Computex 2025: the PAS7700 rack server and its new cloud-based C2 Surveillance platform.

Chang noted that while its consumer and prosumer segments have always been its bread and butter, its success and deep expertise in these markets have allowed it to expand its enterprise business.

However, given its solidification in the consumer and prosumer markets, Chang says Synology is not yet viewed as capable of providing enterprise solutions.

“A lot of enterprises have a misconception that Synology is not an enterprise-ready brand,” he said.

“However, the company is indeed offering these solutions, and plans to aggressively grow our enterprise system integrators to address the pain points of enterprise and public clients in South Africa.”

Chang made particular reference to the company’s newly launched PAS7000 series in this case.

Synology’s sales account manager for the Middle East and Africa, Jennifer Lin, told MyBroadband that the company is gaining increasing traction from enterprises in South Africa.

At the same time, she said they were seeing a growing uptake of their products by small and medium-sized businesses in the country.

As for its surveillance products, Chang said that CCTV was in its top three product segments in terms of sales, behind storage and data protection, respectively.

“Before launching our cameras, Synology operated within the NVR segment of the surveillance market, something we’ve been doing for about 10 years now,” he said.

NVR refers to a network video recorder that records footage from IP cameras within network-based surveillance systems.

Chang said that Synology’s customers in this segment were looking for a more complete ecosystem, which led to the launch of its cameras.

Addressing the elephant in the room

Chang said Synology’s announcement of limitations on third-party drives in their newest Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices was to ensure the reliability of their product.

Earlier this year, Synology announced its latest NAS series, which is only compatible with certified storage devices. However, Synology’s own hard drives were the only ones certified.

Given Synology’s status as a major player in the global NAS market, this announcement was not well received by the tech community.

This new Synology-centric ecosystem strategy could also be seen in the company’s product launches, such as its C2 Surveillance platform, which is not camera-agnostic.

However, for a company that prides itself on the reliability of its backup and storage products, Chang said it aims to provide a certain standard of service to customers.

In the case of the NAS drives, he said that because Synology’s product would typically facilitate the usage of third-party hard drives, it would also be the scapegoat for any faults with the entire system.

He added that complaints received by Synology regarding issues relating to its NAS devices were most often caused by faulty hard drives.

This does not mean Synology hard drives can’t fail. However, the company said each certified hard drive undergoes over 7,000 hours of testing and is 40% less likely to fail than third-party products.

It also said that “severe storage anomalies have decreased by up to 88%” for hard drive models that have adopted its hard drive compatibility policy, compared to older models.

Chang added that Synology will soon make third-party hard drives compatible with its new NAS drives. 

However, they must comply with Synology’s compatibility policy and undergo the same rigorous testing.

“We still welcome third parties to join Synology’s ecosystem and have invited vendors to join our validation program,” he said.

“We have a standard that requires more than 7,000 hours of testing and meeting a strict benchmark.”