Synology's new Plus Series NAS systems, designed for small and medium enterprises and advanced home users, can no longer use non-Synology or non-certified hard drives and get the full feature set of their device. Instead, Synology customers will have to use the company's self-branded hard drives. While you can still use non-supported drives for storage, Hardwareluxx [machine translated] reports that you’ll lose several critical functions, including estimated hard drive health reports, volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analyses, and automatic firmware updates. The company also restricts storage pools and provides limited or zero support for third-party drives.
For reference, precious few companies make hard drives, and Synology is not one of them. As such, a self-branded hard drive is merely a drive from a major vendor, like Seagate, Toshiba, or Western Digital, that gets a new sticker slapped on it alongside a potential custom firmware that serves as a sort of DRM, unlocking the correct functionality from the host device (in this case, a NAS).
