 Tom here from Morning Systems and we're going to talk about Synology and specifically about their drives or the compatibility list. Now whenever I do a review of not one of these low-end systems but one of the higher-end systems such as the FS3410 and I have a link down below for that review, I bring up to make sure people are aware and you can check their compatibility list prior to purchase. So this is not anything that's a surprise if you're doing your research on these. Aware that it does require specific drives and I say specific meaning they have Synology drives that they prefer you to use in their flash station. I say prefer perhaps that's not strong enough word. They will give you an error message if you don't have those drives in there. We're going to show that error message and how that looks later in the video so you can understand and talk about some of the, well why I don't think it's a great idea they did it that way but we'll get to that in a moment and yes you can use the drives but well that's later in the video. When it comes to these and these smaller units that's not the case. They allow well a variety of different drives to be slid into these particular units and I you know have a currently a Seagate iron wolf four terabyte and this one actually I got two of them in here I got a pair of drives in here and these smaller units I don't ever see Synology switching around and going nope we only are going to use these very narrow list of specific drives sold by Synology. Now I bring it up as someone who talks to Synology talks to their engineers have good conversations because we're a reseller of them we do a lot of Synology solutions and all the smaller ones the more home user or even small business targeted ones like these little Synologies I don't really see that as a thing that's not just going to change I get the fear that people have because when you have a product you like and companies tend to figure out ways to make more money by figuring out ways to exclude you from other options and force you to buy from them but when it comes to some of their high-end market and where Synology's going with that is they want a very predictable performance profile they're looking for the ability to update firmware to provide a very reliable platform for the enterprise therefore higher end models like the flash station have a requirement of their drives on their approved list which yes I wish it was bigger but this is one of the reasons I bring it up early on in the video when I was doing the review because I like people to be aware of this as one of the requirements it's just something you factor in whether or not you're going to buy it because that's the way that particular model works that is the requirement for that model but nonetheless I don't share that same fear that Synology is going to do that to the lower end models so I'll leave that part at that but now let's jump into the demo to show you what happens when you use an incompatible drive because that is the real question now we're going to first start here on the Synology product compatibility list and look up the flash station 3410 and as you scroll down here you'll see well a more limiting list of drives of only the Synology enterprise ones and that's it that's the whole list so there's not a lot of different options for this model but like I said you can look up and you type in the model number you put in HD SSD and you find devices no list them out but if you do the same thing for a model that's even a little bit kind of high end like the DS 1621 access plus you'll see quite a few drives on the list different C gates Toshiba's Western digital drives that are on their list now these drives are going to be the more common ones and like I said these are their desktop models where they don't have that same you know stick to it we need these high end performance profiles but it's easy enough to check before you buy any Synology's just go to their Synology product compatibility list do a search look up the drives see if you're narrowed down to that compatibility list now you can still use drives sometimes outside that list but you know sticking with that list that list got a good variety in there is going to be ones that Synology's taking the time to test with so I think that's a pretty good place to start with them well let's start over here and talk about what happens when you put a non-compatible drive in here and we have this warning the system is in warning status all right what's in warning status it says go to the storage manager all right so let's open that up and we see the overview we see a drive must have failed actually what we did was swap the drive we can click on the drive here and it says unverified but allocation status normal because we actually took in resilver the drive put it in a pool made it active and yes that will work but this drive is not on their list this is just a crucial one terabyte SSD that we put in here and it works but doesn't have the verified status so we have that error message to contend with when we look here it tells me the storage pools at risk the storage pool contains one or more unverified drives using unverified drives may affect system reliability and stability you can check the drive info to identify the unverified drives and replace them with compatible drives now here's the good news right now it's fine except the fact that Synology is unhappy about it I wish there was a way I could just check a box and say I understand the risk I don't care like I'm fine I'm going to use a non-Synology drive in this so please don't give me these errors but here we are no checkbox that I can see to do this now maybe in the future Synology will say hey let's go ahead and create a checkbox to solve this problem and you know I think that would be a fair middle ground for people who go I understand that I'm not using a Synology supported drive I am fine with that I'm an adult just let me check the box and not have these errors the problem is they don't have that box and therefore you have these storage errors so it never looks right so if I were to fill this with drives that well we're all unverified that would just be even more annoying and it just kind of looks like I get a broken system I'm hoping Synology at least adds that feature but in the short term and this is where I want to be very clear if you plan to buy these also plan on buying the Synology drives one thing I will admit though that I'd like is that it works at all because some platforms may not allow to do this it does at least let me use that drive as a spare if I were waiting on another replacement so I will give them that as a checkbox they didn't force me not to use it they just forced me to kind of look at an error message on the system but leave your thoughts and comments down below head over my forums for more in that discussion on this topic and let me know what you think thanks and thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video if you've enjoyed the content please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon if you'd like to hire a short project head over to LawrenceSystems.com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our 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