New 2025 Synology disk compatibility policy
"Synology’s storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model. Starting with the 25-series, DSM will implement a new HDD compatibility policy in accordance with the published Product Compatibility List. Only listed HDDs are supported for new system installations. This policy is not retroactive and will not affect existing systems and new installations of already released models. Drive migrations from older systems are supported with certain limitations.
As of April 2025, the list will consist of Synology drives. Synology intends to constantly update the Product Compatibility List and will introduce a revamped 3rd-party drive validation program.”
Reason for the new Synology HCL Policy:
Each component in a Synology storage solution is carefully engineered and tested to maintain data security and reliability. Based on customer support statistics over the past few years, the use of validated drives results in nearly 40% fewer storage-related issues and faster issue diagnostics and resolution.
Each validated hard drive on the compatibility list undergoes over 7,000 hours of comprehensive compatibility testing across platforms to ensure operational reliability.
Technical support data shows that validated drives result in a 40% lower chance of encountering critical disk issues.
For models that have adopted the new hard drive compatibility policy, severe storage anomalies have decreased by up to 88% compared to previous models.
By adhering to the Product Compatibility List, we can significantly reduce the variances introduced by unannounced manufacturing changes, firmware modifications, and other variations that are difficult for end-users and Synology to identify, much less track. Over the past few years, Synology has steadily expanded its storage drive ecosystem, collaborating with manufacturing partners to ensure a stable and consistent lineup of drives with varying capacities and competitive price points. Synology intends to expand its offerings and is committed to maintaining long-term availability, which is not available with off-the-shelf options. We understand that this may be a significant change for some of our customers and are working on ways to ease the transition. Synology is already collaborating with our partners to develop a more seamless purchasing experience, while maintaining the initial sizing and post-install upgrade flexibility that DSM platforms are renowned for.” – Senior Synology Representative on the record.
Today, Synology published an official statement on the matter of disk support in their upcoming 2025 models that are about to hit the market in Q2 of this year.
Luka Manestar
Luka Manestar
Most of the X25 models are already known, at least on paper, as there are not many changes compared to the previous generations.
What has changed was something that was already in a way announced back in 2021 with the first revision of the disk compatibility policy, as well as the introduction of Synology's official HDD/SSD/NVMe drives.
Luka Manestar
Now we have a new update on that same policy, as Synology has decided to prioritize their drives above 3rd-party ones, starting with the X25 upcoming devices.
Düsseldorf – April 16, 2025 – Following the success of the High-Performance series, the company is now increasingly relying on Synology’s own storage media for the Plus series models, which will be released starting in 2025. Users will thus benefit from higher performance, increased reliability, and more efficient support. “With our proprietary hard drive solution, we have already seen significant benefits for our customers in a variety of deployment scenarios,” said Chad Chiang, Managing Director of Synology GmbH and Synology UK. “By expanding our integrated ecosystem to the Plus series, we aim to provide all users—from home users to small businesses—with the highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support.” For users, this means that starting with the Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology’s own hard drives and third-party hard drives certified according to Synology’s specifications will be compatible and offer the full range of functions and support. There will be no changes for Plus models released up to and including 2024 (excluding the XS Plus series and rack models). Furthermore, migrating hard drives from existing Synology NAS to a new Plus model will continue to be possible without restrictions. The use of compatible and unlisted hard drives will be subject to certain restrictions in the future, such as pool creation and support for issues and failures caused by the use of incompatible storage media. Volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic hard drive firmware updates will only be available for Synology hard drives in the future. Tight integration of Synology NAS systems and hard drives reduces compatibility issues and increases system reliability and performance. At the same time, firmware updates and security patches can be deployed more efficiently, ensuring a high level of data security and more efficient support for Synology customers.
So what does this mean?
This means that on day one of the release, no official 3rd-party drive will be supported unless they are on the official compatibility list. How the certification of 3rd-party drives will go remains to be seen, but we can see that Synology drives will not be, in fact, exclusive.
Will Synology or the disk vendor go through the certification process, will probably dictate how fast the whole process will last, and in the end, what drives and NAS models will be supported?
2024 models are excluded from this new policy, but it is also important to know how this control and validation will be implemented. All of this will be known once the actual new devices arrive on the market.
More news on this will be added as confirmed information will be disclosed.
