It is that time of the year when Synology launches their latest line of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. I was lucky enough to receive the Synology DS925+ a few weeks before launch for some road testing.
“The 4-bay Plus Series models inherited over one million installations and have always been among our most widely-adopted products.” said Jeffrey Huang, product manager of Synology. “Not only are they favoured by professionals, but also deployed by enterprises in remote and branch environments as edge servers. For this reason, we’ve designed the DS925+ to deliver business-grade performance and reliability.”
The launch of the DS925+ coincides with the launch of the DX525 expansion unit with five bays for a total of nine drive bays and up to 180TB of raw capacity.
Shots Fired
The war drums have been beating for a few years now, and the 2025 mandatory requirements are going to upset a lot of power users. The news has been leaked from Deutschland well ahead of the official launch, and over in the Synology subreddit they are all in an uproar.
So let’s rip the bandaid off.
Starting with the 2025 Plus series, Synology is enforcing Synology branded hard drives in their chassis. I swear this is where people stop reading and start picking up their pitchforks.
I cannot stress the importance of the wording, starting with the 2025 Plus series. “Plus models released up to and including 2024 (excluding XS Plus series and rack models) will not change. In addition, the migration of hard disks from existing Synology NAS to a new Plus model will continue to be possible without restrictions.”
The uncomfortable truth for the pitchfork brigade of course, is nothing is never so simple. Sorry Synology, even your official material is contradictory. The communication could be clearer and more accurate. On top of that, leaked information certainly does favours to nobody.
Having access to unrelease products and materials is always wonderful, but it also means none of the public links will give me information on the actual model I am writing about. In the key highlights documents that I have been provided under confidentiality agreement, under “Storage Compatibility and Policy” in nice big bold red words are “Synology drives are mandatory“. Then in the datasheet under “Notes”, it says “Compatible drives are mandatory” and to consult the compatibility list.
Also just throwing this in as it will be relevant later on, in the key highlights document it says “third-party drives can only be used if migrating from existing pools.”
So are Redditors wrong? Yes. No.
Is Synology falling to the dark side? No. Yes.
I had coffee with Synology’s media contact when she was in town a few weeks ago and we had a conversation about this. It was a continuation of the same conversation we had some 12 months prior.
There are quite a number of moving parts. Whilst the roots of Synology were humble and pitched at enthusiast and power users, the gears have steadily been turning the ship towards the prosumer and enterprise market for a long time.
I do not have any insider information on the decision making process, but it’s an educated guess on my part. It is the ancient battleground of open system versus close systems. The reality is, with the change in focus, Synology has to lock down the variables to reduce the complexity of support.
Yes, some of the arguments from the users make sense. There is a very limited number of hard drive manufacturers out there, but there are still a lot of options within those ranges. In all honesty, I had one chassis with three different types of drives in two different sizes. Would not in a million years expect to get OEM support for that configuration. I have also been on deck resolving issues when a SAN with full vendor compatibility (not Synology) go completely sideways and I had all their resources thrown at the problem to help resolve it.
At the same time, Synology needs to heed this complaint – the war drums would be a lot quieter if the compatibility list update interval is quicker with more recent capacities from NAS focus ranges.
The Hardware Compatibility List 4.0 says the drive compatibility framework undergoes over 7000 hours of rigorous testing to ensure optimal integration and long-term dependability. I understand testing takes time, but your biggest supporters are crying out for you to come back to the party.
Now that I have covered this topic, moving on.
Specifications
The DS925+ comes with three hardware specification changes from the previous DS923+ model.
It now comes with a AMD Ryzen V1500B quad-core, replacing a dual-core R1600.
The other big ticket item is the inclusion of dual 2.5 GbE ports replacing the dual 1 GbE ports and the addition of a USB-C replacing the old eSATA ports for drive expansion unit.
Other specifications have remained the same such as the two M.2 NVMe slots, 4Gb DDR4 ECC RAM in two slots.
The choice of CPU, of course, will be endlessly debated in online forums and dissed. It is a hell of a bone of contention when the V1500B is a Q2 2021 product, and the R1600 is a Q4 2022 product. My knowledge says that the R1600 is actually a better performer – if you are single threading your operations, or dedicating a core to a virtual machines. The V1500B will give you double the cores to handle more virtual machines better. That said, power consumption on the V1500B is lower.
Given Synology has long been pushing their virtualisation hypervisor for a while now, this makes a lot of sense. Right now, any landing spot away from Broadcom controlled VMware is a good landing spot. Except for Oracle Virtualbox (or Oracle anything, don’t get me started). Make that almost any landing spot.
Getting Started
I have commissioned so many Synology NAS that I can just about do that in my sleep. Synology provided me with four Synology branded 4TB drives for this review.
The hard drive trays are toolless, just pop out the plastic rails, pop the drive in, label up, interface pointing out the back, plastic rails back on and it’s ready for loading into the chassis. Do that three more times and the four bay machine is ready to rock and roll.
DSM Migration
Of all the years I have been using Synology, the one thing I have never tried to do? A NAS to NAS migration. I have configured many DiskStations from scratch, I have moved disk arrays between chassis to get them up and running fast. This time around I thought I would try something new – a NAS migration.
All my Synology NASes are loaded with various packages, containers and other dependencies. It is not impossible to manually move things but why if I can make my life easier? The methodology is simple enough. Load up Migration Assistant on the target DiskStation, connect to the source system and let it do it’s thing.
What’s that saying? No plan survives first contact with the enemy. I came to a crashing halt because … my source array is in an error state.
My source array has a failing drive and I was not intending to decommission the entire unit. The plan was to migrate away from my problems in the commissioning of the DS925+. Even with deactivating the drive, the array remains in error as far as DSM is concerned.
The easy way of doing things just got a little complicated. Plan B was to use Hyper Backup Vault. This means I have to backup my source DSM somewhere .. somewhere with enough space to host terabytes of data. Lucky for me one of my other systems can handle that load for the time being.
The Hyper Backup route is, shall we say, the scenic way? You back the data up to a different system, then from the new DSM you trigger a restore onto it. I did the whole shebang, apps, configuration and all backup because I could. Also because I am backing up to a separate host then restoring it, it essentially doubles the time to migrate. The things I do in the name of testing.
The good news is, Hyper Backup works really well. I got some 5TB of data moved into a vault without a hitch. Unfortunately as I gave Sime the 2.5GbE switch last year, I was stuck on bonded 1GB ports on my network. Ah regrets.
The restore process is a full wipe and restore on the target DiskStation s. For this reason I barely configured the DS925+, did not bother with 2FA and any app installation. The warts and all restore job was wiping everything off the array and plonking on the image from Hyper Backup.
After letting the software do it’s magic over a pretty long period of time, the DS925+ came up happily, on the original IP and device name I had. All the configuration from the source system has survived the process and I have commissioned the DS925+ with all my data intact. Even my Tailscale configuration has come back up on the same exact configuration as before. It was a magical moment except happiness did not last long.
Everything was looking good until I look at the errors in the notification. Two packages were in error and were removed. One of was absolutely critical – Storage Manager. I have no Storage Manager on the DSM925+ post a Hyper Backup restore. It was not good.
Storage Manager is a built in app to DSM. It is not available in the Package Center for installation and you need it to work out what your array is doing. I mean, the system will tell you if a drive has failed – I know because I popped a drive out to test. But without the app, I can pop the drive back in but I can’t tell DSM how to fix the problem.
I thought I would try manually update DSM with the same PAT file I used for the installation. Unfortunately that was a no dice because DSM will only update to a newer version. The same version does not count. I know there is a github script available to bypass this, but I am sticking to what Synology will officially support here.
That left me with the almost nuclear option, which was the mode 2 reset of a Synology NAS and re-installing DSM. This was the four seconds press of the reset button with a toothpick until you hear a beep, then let go and press and hold again within ten seconds until you hear another (three maybe sometimes) beep.
After the boot up cycle, the DS925+ then prompted me to provide the PAT file for reinstallation of DSM, which then restored the Storage Manager package for me. Whilst this process did not hose my drive array of data, it did remove all the packages that I had transferred from backup.
I thought I was in for the long haul of installing apps and restoring app configuration for a few hours. So colour me surprise when Glacier, Container Manager, Plex for example all picked up their existing configuration as soon as the app was reinstalled.
Other Scary Things
Remember earlier I said in the key highlights document Synology says “third-party drives can only be used if migrating from existing pools“?
Well I tried that out. One of my other Synology NAS has four WDC 8TB drives running the same level of DSM software.
After I finished with the DSM migration, I did what any curious reviewer would do. I popped my WDC array into the DSM925+ to bring it online and nothing happened. The DS925+ refused to boot. At some point I had steady green lights on all the drive LEDs, but a blinking green status light and no response on network. At other times I had the blinking blue power light and absolutely nada. I tried all the tricks I know of, but the DS925+ was not going to play ball with the WDC array.
Eventually after a lot of fiddling around, get the WDC array come back to life in the original chassis that I had it in. It doesn’t matter how much or good your backup strategy is, when your production data set isn’t booting up, you will be a wee bit concerned. What I had planned to be a relatively simple test ended up being about three hours of sweating bullets.
Then after a few days, like a mad scientist I tried it again and zero joy. I am convinced that at this point, the DS925+ does not going to honour the migrating from existing pools with third-party drives. At this not at this point in time.
I suppose this is where I close the circle on the discussion of the hard drive mandate. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of being able to tinker, have some control over my things.
But life gets in the way. I want my production data available, on tap and supported. I don’t want to be sweating bullets when something goes wrong and I have to figure out just which part went wrong in a FrankeNAS.
If I want to tinker, I have something completely separate for it. Just like my phone, I have my daily driver, and one that is rooted (Android) and I don’t care if I have to wipe it to start again.
Other Features
There is plenty more to the DSM ecosystem, and I have covered many components over the years on DRN.
None of the packages are flawless, but by and large Synology has built a lot of value add into the system to remove dependencies on many other providers. There is Photos, Synology Office, NoteStation, Drive just to name a few.
The core DSM software is still a super polished product. However if you are looking to go open-source route, you can always spin up an image in Container Manager and run whatever that tickles your fancy.
At the heart of it, you want a reliable set of hardware and a rock solid backup strategy. Whilst it was not without some hiccups, I had no data loss in all the shenanigans that I did this time around.
The USB-C port is a replacement eSATA port. You don’t get to plug in a USB-C storage device and access it through that port. I tried so you don’t have to.,
Conclusions
The Synology DS925+ is an incremental upgrade from the previous release, with changes that has been causing controversy on the internet.
Personally I understand why Synology is choosing to go down this path, and you simply cannot please everybody and everyone are entitled to their opinion.
The product remains a solid performer and the inclusion of 2.5 GbE ports is definitely the biggest win out of the lot. The change in CPU will help those who are running the virtualisation hypervisor, and you will be well advised to max out the RAM on the DS925+ if you do go down that route. I moved away from running my virtual machines on DSM because of eggs and baskets.
Do I still recommend Synology in the face of the mandatory changes? For the average user and SOHO, yes. Why? Because a cursory look at the pricing of the Synology consumer drives are on par with the alternatives. Yes they are reducing some of your choices, but unless you are a power user or wanting to be on the bleeding edge of storage capacity, would you even know or care about the change?
The DS925+ along with the DX525 expansion unit will be available for purchase starting now through Synology’s network of partners and resellers worldwide. Also noting that Synology intends to continuously update the Product Compatibility List, drive manufacturers can apply to be on the Synology third-party validation program.
DRN would like to thank Synology for providing the review unit.
