Technology

Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?

Well, Citrix's CEO was Broadcom' software boss

And also hasa place at the US treasury, he's DOGE-affiliated as well: https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2025/citrix-parent-ceo-krause-on-doge-role-we-re-applying-public-company-standards-to-the-federal-government

Well,

Broadcom released a free VMware again

should be taken as a bait to lure in unsuspecting users before later stage enshit tactics happen. Synology seems to be at some other point in their enshit process, but enshit nevertheless.

QNAP, Asustor, UGreen, Unifi, and many others already offer lower cost NASes from 2 to 8 bays (some might offer even more)

If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They'd sell a ton of them.

There's no shortage of alternatives to Synology hardware. People buy Synology because of the software.

Hey, that's not entirely true! Our place brought them in because it was also a cheap solution! Honestly, it has done fine for our storage solution, which is mostly backups related. Then again, we came from Baracuda, which was super expensive, super locked down, and did break a lot.

It doesn't become useless, it just misses out on a bunch of useful features for the drives.

Still ridiculous, of course

Well shit… I don’t even think about that.

You picked an excellent time (in terms of consumer choice on NAS's). I've been using a DS920+ for the past few years, and the software is solid (e.g. the core apps like Drive, Photos, etc). Synology is (was?) also always number one in terms of security. But honestly, there's little to no reason to expose your NAS to the internet these days since tools like Tailscale make life a lot easier (and safer).

That being said, I also was a beta tester for Ugreen's NAS(es) last year. Their software sucked at the time, but it's gotten way better. The hardware itself is gorgeous, and they don't skimp on parts. The one I have is one they never intended to sell in the US: DX4700 (they sell the DXP4800). This one has an Intel N5105 (predecessor to the N100), 8GB RAM, and dual NVME slots (for cache or for storage). Plus they listened to us testers when we told them to allow third party OS installs without voiding the warranty (e.g. OpenMediaVault, etc).

Point is, no matter who you go with or if you build your own, it's a good time (minus tarrifs).

Fixed

Worked-around, you mean. And that hack seems temporary.

One point: if it matters to you, you might want to confirm your enclosure's behavior under power-loss conditions. I had one that did not come back to a powered on state or have an option to do so when power was restored. Not something I'd thought of, since I'd assumed this behavior. Eventually, after some looking, found an enclosure with a mechanical-toggle power switch that did restore prior state.

Their website looks pretty sketchy, ngl

This is what I’ll replace my DS415+ with, too, once it dies. The TerraMasters are basically bog-standard Intel NUCs with a storage adapter. And there’s HDMI output and an internal USB drive which you can just replace (or overwrite) and install OMV or TrueNAS or whatever.

That's all a NAS has ever been, just a PC that specializes in storage. "NAS" isn't a specific product, either - it's whatever hardware you set up to function as such. My own NAS is a 2014 Mac mini running OMV (Debian 12 based) with a 4-bay locking drive dock attached to it. Works great.

I took images of my gaming PC drives (500GB, 2TB) onto a 4TB spinner, then shoved that spinner into my NAS's dock. With 2 minutes of point and click configuration, I can access those images from my gaming PC's new Linux install over the network to copy whatever data I might need. Easy peasy. No Synology needed for that.