As with several hobbies, my father got me interested in running a Personal Weather Station (or PWS).  At first, I used second-hand hardware for this, but ran into issues.  Most of the issues I had were communications between the base station and the sensors.  So I swapped out with another second-hand system.  This one was relatively stable with the communications, but developed an issue with the humidity sensor.  After a couple months, it too developed communication issues.  Fresh batteries in the sensors and base station did not resolve the issue, so I began looking for a new weather station.  This time, I decided to purchase a brand new weather station.

I received daily emails from various online tech stores about various sales or daily deals that they are having.  On December 4^th, the Shell Shocker email from Newegg.com had a device that interested me.  It was an external hard drive enclosure that could host 4 drives, up to 8TB each. This device had a mail in rebate that brought the final price to $49.99.  Having several Western Digital MyBook external drives, this interested me.  With the thought of if it worked, I could (void the warranty) move the MyBook drives into the single enclosure, and go from 4 external power supplies down to just 1.  That would make it a lot easier on my UPS.