Internal drives, you're right, likely wouldn't be bought by a non-techie alone.
But THIS affected type of drive is specifically marketed to a very non-technical user, and I can certainly confirm my non-technical friends and family have bought products in this segment independently, whereas my techie friends steer clear.
It's a NAS that's made to look like a drive. My techie friends would never buy it - they'd get Synology/QNAP, or do their own over-complicated time-consuming solution (slight editorial opinion there ;), or use cloud backup, or some combo. But my dad, mother in law, and other relatives have products like this, and have purchased them on their own. In fact, I think when asked, most techies would in fact go against the notion of buying cheap but internet-exposed storage device for a non-technical friend :O
Your slight editorial opinion reminded me of this HN hot-take from the DropBox announcement:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
But THIS affected type of drive is specifically marketed to a very non-technical user, and I can certainly confirm my non-technical friends and family have bought products in this segment independently, whereas my techie friends steer clear.
It's a NAS that's made to look like a drive. My techie friends would never buy it - they'd get Synology/QNAP, or do their own over-complicated time-consuming solution (slight editorial opinion there ;), or use cloud backup, or some combo. But my dad, mother in law, and other relatives have products like this, and have purchased them on their own. In fact, I think when asked, most techies would in fact go against the notion of buying cheap but internet-exposed storage device for a non-technical friend :O