[freeAgent]

As far as lists of drives to avoid, Synology could certainly do that, but we also already have Backblaze’s reports on their own failure rates. Synology also uses multiple vendors to produce “Synology” branded drives, so as the article states this may also lead to confusion about which Synology branded drives are “good” vs. “bad” in the future, even with seemingly identical specs.

[op00to]

The idea is not so much about which drives fail or whatever. It’s more that certain consumer drives have firmwares that don’t work well with NAS workloads. Long timeouts could be treated as a failed drive rather than a transient error by a desktop drive, for example.

[freeAgent]

I’d argue that anyone who is buying a NAS for personal use probably does enough research to figure out that NAS-focused/appropriate drives are a thing-though. And if they contact Synology support, it should be very easy for them to identify bad drive types. On top of that, they can (and have) warn about problematic drives.