Back in April this year, Synology announced that it was restricting the use of third-party hard drives in some of its new NAS devices. The affected models include the new 2025 Plus series lineup, such as the then-anticipated DS925+ and DS1825+, while older models (2024 and earlier) or the J series were exempt.
If you installed a drive that was not on the company"s approved list, you were greeted by an "unverified drive" warning and lost the ability to create storage pools or see drive health reports.
The Taiwanese company claimed that it was doing this because the business was "transitioning to a more appliance-like business model" and that if you used its validated drives instead of ones from third parties, you would experience almost 40% fewer storage problems.
Now, Nas Compares reports that Synology has backtracked on its deeply unpopular hard drive policy. While the exact reason for the reversal isn"t confirmed, NAS Compares claims to have spoken with "numerous sources" in Europe and the US who said that "Synology DiskStation sales were at a fraction of the previous year." So, it"s not hard to guess that sales were tanking after that April decision.
The lifted restriction was noticed in DiskStation Manager (DSM) 7.3. This new version will restore full support for third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. There are some caveats with M.2 / NVMe drives, as they have to be validated by Synology if you want to use them for things like creating new storage pools, setting up cache, or migrating data from another Synology system.
In a recent statement by the company, it claims that it is "collaborating with drive manufacturers to expand the range of certified storage media" and confirmed that 2025 Plus, Value, and J series models running DSM 7.3 will support installation and storage pool creation with non-validated third-party drives.
Synology is committed to delivering reliable, high-performance storage systems. Rigorous validation of both hardware and software components has long been a core development priority. Synology storage drives, together with the third-party validation program, are engineered to provide the highest levels of reliability with DSM.
Synology is collaborating with drive manufacturers to expand the range of certified storage media, delivering more reliable options. In the meantime, 2025 model-year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J Series running DSM 7.3 will support installation and storage pool creation with third-party drives¹. Together with the existing support for third-party drive migration, DSM will provide users with greater flexibility in managing their storage deployments.
The DSM 7.3 is now available for download. Check out the release notes here.