Cloud Engines Pogoplug 2 Pogoplug - now in its second incarnation - is the kind of gadgets 'real' geeks hate. It's brightly coloured - an awful white and pink combo; not a plus point - it's consumer friendly and, when all is said and done, it's just a network adaptor for hard drives. Why work a weeny, girly gadget when you can maintain an enormous, …
I have the version 1 of this bought via the US. (I was so impressed by the marketting I had it shipped to the hotel whislt on holiday there before they sold to the UK.) Version one is regular computer beige, but only has 1 USB port, thats not a problem as it will support USB hubs, the V2 just makes it neater. The Pink is a problem if you have it on show, mines slung under a desk anyway so the colours irrlevent.
The "coming soon" features really do seem to come soon. That active copy was announced late last year and followed very shortly. They have promised uPNP and the ability to mirror the data to another pogoplug, a personal p2p service almost, has been muttered in the forums. No idea when they'll arrive, but I'm pretty confident they will. Pogoplug seem to be really responsive to the users needs. I had a minor issue with it and Cloud Engines were more than happy to help. Absolutly excelent device, can't fault it or the service I got from Could Engines.
It's also the engine behind Seagate's Dockstar, but the key difference is this is £99 for life ($129 in the US) , Dockstar is $99 (no uk price yet) plus $30 service fee after the end of the first year.
At the end of the day my home server does all this does and more, but this is a nice toy, I can let people see my photo's and not worry about what else they can get to.
Says Cloud Engines: "The link to the shared folder will expire 2 weeks from the time it was generated and sent. If the user it is being shared with has not created an account and password they will no longer be able to access the share. If the owner of the share removes them from the share list and re-adds them, a new link will be generated and sent with a 2 week expiration."
It's advantage is the software means you can get to it anywhere, and you can network any USB drive, most people have a few spare small USB drives (the old 120/250GB ) size things that are pretty much redundant now.
I can give you a like to the page you can access anywhere in the world through a standard browser, thats not built into many entry level NAS boxes.
If you in the market for a new NAS, this is not the best price. It your going to be using old USB drives it is.
...for external modular eSATA or other faster interface HDD's you can RAID together. Kind a a stack em and RAID em type of drive. Infinite extensibility (Assuming you have enough power points. Hell make the power extensible too for up to a certain number of drives then you have to add another power point).
I should patent it before it's done by someone else!
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