Based on my experience dealing with SFPs I highly suspect they looked at their bug tracker and concluded that 13% of the sketch-ass mystery drives were causing 50% of their labor expenditure.
And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...
Maybe I'm wrong but doesn't SFP evolve pretty heavily here?
The newest version is from --2022-- 2016. There are also quite high data-rates involved.
SATA and Smart are stable for a long time.
Smart has some special commands depending on manufacturer but the core set of functions always work.
I think we would all be OK with a "please don't buy list" of HDDs that are well known to cause problems.
"Model X of Manufacturer Y doesn't work well. Please buy something else."
They did not opt for this. They opted for "you have to buy our own overpriced drives".
TBH this is quite sad.
I recommended Synology to some people before...
Feels like I have to walk back on my word.
This is 21st century American business. Synology wasn't going to choose their drives for maximum reliability after a long, hard, and most importantly expensive benchmarking period, they were going to stuff the cheapest drives they could buy from suppliers in there and charge more than any other drive. There's a very reasonable chance this would have produced lower quality outcomes and more support calls in the long run than random drives purchased on the open market.
Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.
Your experience with SFPs does not translate to hard drives. Hard drives are very, very, very standardized. SFPs are not. Yes, all SFPs have a standard hardware interface, but the optics coding varies wildly.
Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.
HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.
Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".
And by "issues" I mean highlighting all the little cases where they had a) coded to spec with no ability to handle out of spec but foreseeable if you're cynical (which the fresh out of school junior engineers who typically wind up handling these things aren't yet) conditions b) failed to code to spec in some arcane way that shouldn't matter if the thing on the other end of the cable isn't questionable.
Of course, the money side of things almost certainly motivated them to see it one way...