Eh, part of the product is being able to predict drive failure and show users information.

There are plenty of drives on the secondhand market now that have had their information partially or fully wiped or otherwise modified so in order to preserve that ability to show synology users something approaching a decent prediction they said you can only use approved devices.

This isn’t the first time a company has done this exact thing. It used to be really common with the big name infrastructure providers. You couldn’t use an ibm/dell/hp/whoever storage doohicky without using their (re)branded drives.

It used to get lambasted as a cheap attempt to get more cash by upcharging a captive customer, but nowadays I tend to attribute it to unique market conditions around manufacturing, availability and cost versus cost per unit storage.

The first time i have seen it happen was back when everyone realized that aside from physical mechanical failure where the no no parts get touched, age wasn’t nothing but a number to these drives. Suddenly you’d get people reflashing chips that had reached eol just so their 80 megabyte drive could keep on truckin. Obviously it was fine, but that meant there would be reduced demand for the next generation and overall negative revenue growth so everyone started cracking down on unsupported disks. That’s not the whole story, because the 90s and early 0s are the time when fast hard drives allowed programmers to take advantage of swap space like never before to make up for a lack of memory in the face of ballooning datasets, but it’s a real thing that happened alongside big time storage availability becoming everyday.

There was another time back during the switch to sata and again as the 6gbps sata standard was allegedly sunset.