Cool..specs aside I wonder how Synology support is. I was turned off from getting another Netgear due to the lack of support after 90 days.
Idk about the routers, but there NAS appliance support
for me has been Top Shelf!
It dropped rather a lot with the release of DSM 7 as the initial round of that upgrade unfortunately fell into COVID restrictions everywhere, so phone, online, everything just went south. Even so, compared to other vendors we were dealing with in that time period, they were still far better. That said, we do not pay any subscriptions for 'added value' support, we do not employ outside services for support, all of the manufacturer support comes from the manufacturer, it's all of the "Basic Warranty free and included for x-time" sort of support, and perhaps importantly as well, we've only been using Synology for the past couple of years (2020, 2021, 2022). Basic Warranty on the goods we purchased was 3-years from the date of sale and the buyer could add 2-years on top of that within 90-days of purchase, for a total of 5-years. (They had some sort of special promo recently and we added the extra 2-years for each of our devices so they would remain in-warranty during their entire anticipated 5-yr service life.)
From everything I have read, once you are out-of-warranty factory support is non-existent and neither love nor money will change it.
The NAS OS is a Linux shell and super-easy to use even if, like me, you are altogether ignorant of Linux. The baseline for their support people and programmers assumes users, at least of the consumer, and Pro-consumer or SMB variety are all generally Linux-illiterate. As such if a Linux function becomes important and you don't want to let them take a quick look-see via the internet into your device (which I don't), they've been very good about sending along step-by-step instructions for running Linux commands to feed them back info they need to help. And if you happen to know Linux, a little or a lot, they are very quick to adapt to your expertise to render assistance.
They also have special services like business on-boarding for those with more substantial needs like large corporations and multi-nationals.
RESPONSIVENESS
Pre-COVID: My experience before COVID was phone time to reach a TS tech were usually < 5-10 min, long enough to warrant a bit of extra looking for answers on my end but short enough to make their TS feel very available. Online TS was also very good, very quick (< 1-day) and could be viewed as a direct line to Tier 1.5/2 support as the phone techs will submit a ticket for online support if they can't get you fixed up.
During COVID: They also released their new OS, DSM 7, which had been in the works for a couple of years. The timing was unfortunate and TS took a very bad turn. Phone holds seemed to average > 1-hr before reaching a tech, sometimes they'd be so long the system would announce it was timing me out and disconnect. Rarely I was able to reach someone in < 5-min but it was really obvious a lot of their staff was out and those left were all working from home. Online tickets stretched out to 3- to 4-days, sometimes more. Phone holds became rather nasty as noted above.
Today: Tech Support seems to be improving and headed back to it's previous status. Online queries are taking 1- to 2-days, phone queries while still long rarely if ever get timed-out and the wait times are generally < 15-min.
QUALITY OF SUPPORT
Again, for me the support quality never dropped. It was and continues to be first rate. Since getting onboard with my first Synology NAS I have found their information to generally be very good to excellent. Their willingness to help, to go the extra mile, to loop-in programmers if need be, for the actual programmers to work with me, and for everyone on staff to make, and not rarely to implement suggested enhancements has also been top quality.
I'm not saying they're prefect because they aren't, and there are hiccups sometimes, but from where I sit Synology sets the bar for support and everybody else is playing catch-up.
CAVEAT: My experiences are limited to their NAS's. Routers may or may not be a whole different can of worms.
Sky
