All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.
> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.
That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".
Not if they follow yason's guidance of:
> All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
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Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.
But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.
Typically you'd want to tier it out
1. Fully supported drives: Synology branded
2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features
3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
4. Does not work: list of drives.
There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.