As best as I could understand, the hardware wasn't dead. It was "soft bricked" due to no fault of my own. And they wouldn't stand behind their product and instead insisted I upgrade to a newer and less capable product.
No, I wasn't expecting replacement hardware. I was expecting support for a product that they were still releasing software for.
Six years ago my box shit the fan. Synology could have recovered it for me, but they insisted I "upgraded" to their newest box. That was when I realized that I would never buy from them again. Thank goodness their hybrid raid is at least MDRAID.
Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at idle with no power save mode).
They did not come (directly) out of Intel Labs. They left because they were working on a moonshot project that lost corporate support. Just like Ampere computing, just a few years later.
No, I wasn't expecting replacement hardware. I was expecting support for a product that they were still releasing software for.