by jchw | 2025-10-08 09:29:56+00:00
At this point I'm not suggesting a boycott at all, I'm placing a vote of no confidence in Synology. There is no reason to believe they've had a "change of heart" on their mentality, they're not stopping due to backlash, they're stopping because their greedy scheme failed. If they can figure out one that works, is there any reason to believe they won't take it?

Go to the Synology website and browse to a NAS. Here's Synology's closest product to the new UniFi UNAS offering, the DS1825+.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1825+

> See why Synology drives are ideal

And it just links to a marketing video announcing Synology drives... Does it explain why you should use Synology drives? ... No. It is literally 100% marketing puffery. They do not mention or acknowledge any of the dumb software lock-in tricks they were playing. Coupled with no formal announcement, they are apparently willing to do the absolute bare minimum to win back customers who left over this. Apparently for some people, this is good enough, even though unlike many markets there are actually plenty of competent NAS products. And we wonder why enshittication is so prevalent? We're paying for it. Its a positive signal that they can't get away with anything, only almost anything. Feel free to experiment with user trust! There's no consequences anyways!

And honestly, while Synology DSM is a pretty decent experience, though to be clear I have personal misgivings with it all over the place, I really struggle to see how it can justify the price tag. The UniFi UNAS Pro is a new and weird product, but by any account it does have solid fundamentals for the job of network attached storage. Comparing the specs... The DS1825+ comes with 2x2.5GbE... versus the UNAS Pro's 10GbE. It comes with 8 bays over the UNAS Pro's 7. It comes with a Ryzen V1500B over the UNAS Pro's Cortex-A57, both with 8 GiB of RAM. One thing the Synology NAS has is the ability to expand to 18 bays with additional enclosures, which is certainly worth something, but what I'm trying to say is, the specs are not actually leagues different especially considering that this is what you get without paying extra. For Synology you will pay $1,149 over the $499 of the UNAS.

Don't get me wrong. UniFi UNAS is brand new. I don't think it has support for running third party applications or Docker workloads, and there are definitely less storage pool options than with Synology DSM. But, it really seems like for the core NAS functionality, the UniFi option is just going to be better. Given that neither of these devices are actually all that powerful, I reckon you'd probably be best off actually just treating them like pure storage devices anyhow, and taking advantage of fast networking to run applications on another device. Especially with 10 GbE!

You could literally buy two UniFi UNAS Pro units and a Raspberry Pi 5 and still come up a little short on the price of the DS1825+. Not that you should do that, but it says a lot that you could.

So sure, buy whatever you want, but Synology already played their hand, so don't be surprised when they do what they've already shown they are more than happy to do. I'm not buying it.

And P.S.: Yes, there are plenty of mediocre or crap products on the NAS market, but you literally don't just have to buy on brand names alone. There are plenty of reputable reviewers that will go into as much detail as you want about many aspects of the devices, and then you can use brand reputation to fill in any gaps if you want. It feels silly to hinge entirely on brand reputation when you have this much information available...