I bought this purely to save a buck… Think about it — 199 yuan. Even just a hard drive enclosure costs about that much, so it’s a win.

I’ve got a few too many laptop hard drives lying around. Up to now I’ve been using all sorts of different enclosures, so I got to wondering—do dual-bay external enclosures exist? Turns out they do. One is the much pricier kind with Thunderbolt and USB Type-C, clearly aimed at Mac people. The other is the one I bought: cheap, plain USB 3.0. The Taobao reviews looked decent enough, so I figured I’d grab one and see.

We already had a NAS at home, but it was useless to the older folks in the family. Fine for me, too much hassle for my parents. For them a NAS is actually necessary — they need somewhere to keep the photos they take, whether on phones or cameras. Importing photos from a phone to a PC is way too much trouble for them, and I didn’t want to install some domestic Chinese management app and get burned. Dumping everything onto one computer also seemed unsafe — one dead hard drive and it’s all gone. So we decided to go with a Synology. Given data safety concerns, I picked the two-bay DS216se.