they are also locking their newer 12bay and rack units to only work with their own overpriced (re)branded Toshiba drives.

before this they were great units that were very easy to setup and manage provided you were not concerned about cost.

Can you provide a source for this claim?

they have made no official announcement but all new rack stations as of feb lock in. the new 12bay disk station units also now do confirmed by support & user reports (thou it is possible to hack around it it seems) - lots of chatter on r/synology

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/r53ow5/synology_c...

Better yet, run your ownCloud/nextCloud.

It’s not uncommon to install Nextcloud on Synology, so that’s not an either/or.