Credit: Synology A Synology DS1525+ NAS, which up until today would scream at you unless you filled it with special Synology-branded disks. A Synology DS1525+ NAS, which up until today would scream at you unless you filled it with special Synology-branded disks. Credit: Synology If you put non-verified drives in a Synology NAS that required verified drives, certain functionality would be reduced or potentially removed, depending on the specific model disks you were introducing. Additionally, the Synology DSM interface would spam you with large "DANGER" warnings that your data might not be safe. Synology also at first refused to display S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic information from unverified drives, though this particular restriction was eventually lifted. Savvy sysadmins could disable the verified drive requirements altogether by using one of several different workarounds, though that kind of thing opens one up to a different kind of danger—the danger of depending on an unsupported configuration tweak to keep a production system fully online and functional. It's not a big deal for home users, but for business users relying on a Synology system at work with people's livelihoods involved, the should-I-or-shouldn't-I calculus of using such a workaround gets murkier. Synology is likely banking on the fact that if your business is of a certain size and you're spending someone else's money, a few hundred bucks more on each disk drive for peace of mind and a smoothly functioning NAS might seem like less of a speed bump than it would to a homelab admin spending money out of their own pocket. While Synology's claims about its validated drives having undergone extensive testing and yielding some performance benefit do hold water (at least under the specific benchmark circumstances called out on Synology drive page), it's very difficult for me to see Synology's actions here as anything other than an attempt to squeeze additional revenue out of what the company thought to be an exploitable market segment. Enterprise storage companies like Dell-EMC enjoy vast margins on high-end storage gear—margins that don't exist down in the consumer and SMB space where Synology is usually found. So the company decided to be the change it wanted to see in the world and created a way to extract those margins by making expensive custom hard disk drives mandatory (at least in a "nice data you got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to it—better use our disks" kind of way) for more and more products.