I was reading while you can get other drives working, you’ll regularly have warnings about incompatible drives. I have a stack of WD easystore 14TB external hard drives waiting to be shucked. The drive inside the first shucked is a WD140EDGZ-11B1PA0. I think they will work with the DS1823xs+but I have enough projects going on and just want something that works.
What has your experience been like? I see you used the Synology_HDD_db script. How painless was it? Did you run into any issues? Is there ongoing maintenance using non synology drives?