>What I can’t live with is the new policy, implemented this year, where you must buy your drives from Synology.

Used to do the same thing at EMC back in the 90s-early 2000s with Symmetrix. The cover story was that the EMc-branded drives, which were marked up like 1000x had “special firmware”.

The reality was that it was to prevent procurement guys from putting a BOM spreadsheet in front of the sales rep and saying “why are you charging me $2M for $100k of parts I can buy at Fry’s?