Bottom Line Up Front: Synology gets a Superior Rating for Exceptional Support and standing behind comprehensive warranty coverage for its products.
It all started innocent enough - a routine hard drive replacement that was showing increased bad sectors. I had requested overnight delivery of a replacement drive from Seagate, the Iron Wolf Pro hard drives carry a 5-year warranty. Seagate shipped me the replacement and I was in the process of doing a drive swap in my 12 bay Synology NAS Diskstation - simple right?
Even though both the Synology NAS Diskstation and the Seagate Iron Wolf Pro supports hot-swapping I always prefer to shut down the system and do the hard drive swap wth the NAS off-line. Only this time when power was applied the NAS started flashing the Blue Power Light and Orange Alert light. This behavior I had never seen before and after about one minute the 12 bay light indicators all came on - solid orange LEDs, then after another 3 minutes the Synology NAS Diskstation powered itself down. Like any good IT guy - you try it again maybe it was a fluke but to my best efforts, the NAS continued to behave poorly and would not boot.
Contacting Synology Support: Using the Synology Support Website I logged in with my Synology Account and opened a support ticket. This particular Synology NAS carried a 3-year warranty with as luck would have it was expired by one month. However, Synology had extended the warranty of this model and a few others by one additional year - YEAH!! The support entry form was simple and straight forward - you simply select the issue that best describes your situation and enter a one-sentence summary.
Within two hours of my submission, I received a notice from Synology Support that the ticket was updated - I opened the ticket and found a troubleshooting guide that outlined 5 steps to determine the next steps. Unfortunately, my Synology NAS Diskstation could not pass the critical step 2 the bare bone power up - my Diskstation had a hardware failure. I updated the support ticket with the results and within two hours I was informed the unit would be covered under warranty and an RMA would be issued by Synology's RMA team.
The RMA team provided me several options (1) I could ship my unit to their warehouse and a replacement would be sent out or (2) I could have a replacement shipped immediately using several free shipping options. I elected to have the replacement shipped next day air which did have a cost of $78.00 but to get the NAS back up and running it was worth the cost. In order for Synology to send a replacement unit before receiving the bad unit requires a refundable deposit. Keep in mind I opened the Support Ticket late Wed and by Friday I had a replacement sitting on my doorstep.
By midday Friday My Synology NAS Diskstation was fully up and running as if nothing happened. This is a testament to a Professional Synology Support Team and a Company that stands behind their product's warranty. My total cost was $78.00 which was an option for next day delivery, otherwise, the entire replacement process would have been completely free had I elected to use the 2nd-day delivery method - but I was in a rush.