Docks are great for those who feel comfortable handling sensitive electronics but I would counter that they're not particularly well-suited to the average consumer.Once you have one of these docking bases, you can insert/use/remove any 3.5 or 2.5 inch SATA drive at will. Many people have a bunch of these drives laying around of all sorts of various capacities, and/or they can be bought for a good price if you look around.
Finding small and cheap bare drives is getting increasingly difficult and I'm not convinced that it is going to get easier. It is annoying at best that you can buy a 6TB drive for the cost of two 1TB drives and the complication of maintaining this collection of bare drives as you rack up recordings. Then there's the issue of transcoding and archiving if you don't want to swap drives in and out of docks. This may be a cheap solution, but it is far from elegant and there are some non-negligible risks involved.