Synology is making a change to its high-end Plus models, requiring them to use the company’s own storage media beginning in 2025.

Synology is a German company that makes a popular line of NAS devices. The company says it wants to rely “on its own ecosystem for upcoming Plus models,” beginning with the 2025 lineup. The company touts improved performance, security, and support for the decision.

“With our proprietary hard disk solution, we have already seen significant benefits for our customers in various deployment scenarios,” says Chad Chiang, Managing Director of Synology GmbH and Synology UK. “By extending 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, performance, and significantly more efficient support.”

Synology does hold out the option for hard drives that are certified to the company’s specifications to also be used.

For users, this means that starting with Plus Series models released in 2025, only Synology’s own hard drives and third-party hard drives certified to Synology’s specifications will be compatible and offer the full range of features and support.

The company says using an unlisted hard drive will have some restrictions, in terms of what features are available.

The use of compatible and unlisted hard disks will be subject to certain restrictions in the future, such as the creation of pools and support in the event of problems and malfunctions caused by the use of incompatible storage media. Volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates of hard disks will only be available for Synology hard disks in the future.

Synology is one of the leading NAS providers, and has built its reputation on security and reliability. As a result, while the company’s decision to restrict some features when using non-branded hardware may disappoint some users, it’s not a surprising decision given the company’s focus.