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.

The first NAS I used was an HP N40L, so I’ve got a soft spot for that little chassis. Then the motherboard died… So I built my own case, stuffed some drives in it and called it a NAS. Installed OMV, set up a garbage storage stack — a RAID 1 made of junk, then a RAID 0 on top of that, then another RAID 0. It ran fine for over a year, but that pathetic 3TB capacity ran out fast, so I started looking at a new NAS. I like small cases like the HP N40L, and I saw that a German site had the HP MicroServer Gen 8 on sale again, so I figured I’d do a German import. After ordering I assumed it’d arrive around the end of November, but it showed up surprisingly fast — 12 days to my door, and no customs fee.

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.