Last week I finally ordered the PogoPlug from CloudEngines. I first saw the product back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.
I knew what it was, but kind of like the first time you played with a Tivo you weren't exactly sure if it fit any specific need you have. Yesterday it arrived so last night I dug in with the idea that if it took too long to get working I was going to bail out. Happily it installed in about 5 minutes.
Just to backup a bit, the PogoPlug looks like a brick power supply. It plugs into the wall, or optionally has a power cord if you don't want it hanging on a powerstrip. Other then the power connector it has only two other connectors, the first a Gigabit Ethernet connector (copper) and a USB2.0 port. Both cables are also supplied which is a nice touch. The instruction manual is three lines of text in the bottom of the box. Plug the network connector into your switch or router, Plug the USB connector into a USB hard disk (I used a thumb drive for testing), and plug the power into the wall.
Done, installed.
Once you apply power the lights go crazy for a minute and then it settles down into two green indicator lights. All that is left is to go to the website pogoplug.com, signup, and enter the serial number of the PogoPlug device you received.
After that, instant global hard disk!
You can get to the files via a web interface, or simply download a filesystem driver and mount the drive on any or all computer you have attached to the internet.
Pretty, cool and seems to work great.
You can mount and unmount the USB drive using the interface so you can have multiple media drives you can change out.
The real beauty of this thing is it just works. No firewall hacking, the filesystem driver for windows seems to know if you are inside your home firewall or out without any fuss. It just works.
The web interface has permissions so you set up access for other people to get to folders, etc.
Not much more to say, it's pretty cool. I am a pretty active emailer of docs to myself between work and home and I just stopped doing that now. I could get the same behavior with our VPN at work but that's kind of a pain and it doesn't work for media like music, video that would be cool to keep at home. I have read good things about the Iphone App to access the drive share but I don't use the Iphone so don't know firsthand.
The price went up a little from CES, its now $99. I have to say however, its worth it. I love stuff like this that doesn't rely on my desktop computer to work. My only wish is that it would work with Network Attached storage as well as USB storage.
Give it a try!
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