I don’t support this decision in any way, but I can at least think of some legitimate motivation for it (assuming the Synology branded ones aren’t marked up from the equivalent Seagate/Toshiba ones). I imagine Synology has to deal with a lot of service calls and returns for issues that are caused by shoddy drives (like those Seagate drives with the fudged lifespan numbers), not by anything that they can directly control.

In reality, the above was probably what sparked the idea, but I’m betting that they’re going to jack up the price of those drives just to squeeze out a little more profit for this quarter.