Pogoplug - what a piece of kit! Network Hard Drive Sharing
Discussion
Being a bit of a closet techie, rarely has a piece of hardware impressed me as much as the Pogoplug I bought yesterday.
Over the years I've collected a number of external hard drives, adding more as I needed extra storage. My machine has 6 drives in it (mostly fairly small - 200-300Gb) and my external drives are what hold most of my media (now 2 x 2Tb, 1 x 1.5Tb). I'd been looking for a way to share this media across my network without having to have the PC on and sharing the drives. The only solution seemed to be to junk the old hard drives and buy networked hard drives. An elegant solution, but somewhat costly and I have an aversion to throwing away working drives (hence the motley collection in the PC!).
I came across the 'Pogoplug' which seemed to offer what I needed - the ability to put a bog-standard external USB hard drive onto the network. PC World came out cheapest for these, they have a £30 discount to £49.99 at the moment:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/pogoplug-personal-cl...
Forgive it the extreme luminous pink colour; it really is a fantastic piece of kit. It has connections for 4 USB drives and puts them into the 'My Computer' window as if the drives were still physically plugged into the machine. However, it does this for ANY machine connected to your network and with the attendant Pogoplug software installed and signed in. This allows you a lot of flexibility with how you share the data. It can also make your 'My Documents', 'My Pictures', 'My Videos' and 'Desktop' available to all other machines as well if you like (in both directions - docs on attached machines such as laptops can be shared back to the PC), as well as being able to add custom shared folders. It's fast too, with a gigabit connection (I have a gigabit switch, and was pleased to find the Pogoplug is gigabit-enabled).
The really clever part is where the 'personal cloud' comes in; it even works if you're connected to the internet when away from your home network. Drives on the home network appeared on my laptop (as if the drive were plugged into the laptop) when I connected to the internet at my mate's house last night. Naturally the data transfer speeds were limited by my rubbish upload speed at home, but the ability to get to my documents anywhere I take my laptop is fantastic. There are also apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android as well. There's also a web interface allowing you to log in and get to your documents and files from any browser. There's a 'Pro' subscription too, which opens up real-time streaming of music and films. Given my meagre upload speeds, it's not something I'll be paying for just yet. However, it is a very reasonable 'one-off' $29 fee, so hardly a bank-breaker.
Suffice to say I'm VERY impressed by the Pogoplug and I reckon that I can't be the only person on PH wondering how to share my media more easily. With more and more devices in the home, the easy sharing of things like films and music are starting to become of greater interest. There is also a wireless version as well for another £20 or so.
Initial setup can be a little fiddly, but once you've grasped the concept and how it works, it's brilliantly simple. If anyone else gets one and has issues, feel free to post here and I'll help if I can.
A brilliant little device, and a bargain at £50. I'm now in the process of re-jigging all my data to where I want it which is taking some time(!). Rarely am I so impressed with something that I'll wax lyrical about it on the internet, but this is so good I hope others can benefit from it too.
I'm going to try it with a USB hub later to see whether more drives can be 'daisy-chained'...
Oh, and I may have to do something about the pink colour as well.. 
Over the years I've collected a number of external hard drives, adding more as I needed extra storage. My machine has 6 drives in it (mostly fairly small - 200-300Gb) and my external drives are what hold most of my media (now 2 x 2Tb, 1 x 1.5Tb). I'd been looking for a way to share this media across my network without having to have the PC on and sharing the drives. The only solution seemed to be to junk the old hard drives and buy networked hard drives. An elegant solution, but somewhat costly and I have an aversion to throwing away working drives (hence the motley collection in the PC!).
I came across the 'Pogoplug' which seemed to offer what I needed - the ability to put a bog-standard external USB hard drive onto the network. PC World came out cheapest for these, they have a £30 discount to £49.99 at the moment:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/pogoplug-personal-cl...
Forgive it the extreme luminous pink colour; it really is a fantastic piece of kit. It has connections for 4 USB drives and puts them into the 'My Computer' window as if the drives were still physically plugged into the machine. However, it does this for ANY machine connected to your network and with the attendant Pogoplug software installed and signed in. This allows you a lot of flexibility with how you share the data. It can also make your 'My Documents', 'My Pictures', 'My Videos' and 'Desktop' available to all other machines as well if you like (in both directions - docs on attached machines such as laptops can be shared back to the PC), as well as being able to add custom shared folders. It's fast too, with a gigabit connection (I have a gigabit switch, and was pleased to find the Pogoplug is gigabit-enabled).
The really clever part is where the 'personal cloud' comes in; it even works if you're connected to the internet when away from your home network. Drives on the home network appeared on my laptop (as if the drive were plugged into the laptop) when I connected to the internet at my mate's house last night. Naturally the data transfer speeds were limited by my rubbish upload speed at home, but the ability to get to my documents anywhere I take my laptop is fantastic. There are also apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android as well. There's also a web interface allowing you to log in and get to your documents and files from any browser. There's a 'Pro' subscription too, which opens up real-time streaming of music and films. Given my meagre upload speeds, it's not something I'll be paying for just yet. However, it is a very reasonable 'one-off' $29 fee, so hardly a bank-breaker.
Suffice to say I'm VERY impressed by the Pogoplug and I reckon that I can't be the only person on PH wondering how to share my media more easily. With more and more devices in the home, the easy sharing of things like films and music are starting to become of greater interest. There is also a wireless version as well for another £20 or so.
Initial setup can be a little fiddly, but once you've grasped the concept and how it works, it's brilliantly simple. If anyone else gets one and has issues, feel free to post here and I'll help if I can.
A brilliant little device, and a bargain at £50. I'm now in the process of re-jigging all my data to where I want it which is taking some time(!). Rarely am I so impressed with something that I'll wax lyrical about it on the internet, but this is so good I hope others can benefit from it too.
I'm going to try it with a USB hub later to see whether more drives can be 'daisy-chained'...
Oh, and I may have to do something about the pink colour as well.. Edited by Funk on Thursday 4th August 15:53
Viper_Larry said:
So is it converting your existing external USB HD's basically into a NAS device? If you want to share docs that are on your PC, do you have to copy them to one of the external drives, or does it replicate the data for access?
Yep, it effectively turns existing USB HDDs into a NAS.If you have docs on your PC you can share them without having to move them - provided the PC is on. If you want access to them with the PC off, you'd need to copy them across to one of the external drives connected to the Pogoplus.
Crafty_ said:
What security does it have when you host stuff over the net ?
As I understand it, the Pogoplug uses SSL to connect to their site. To access your Pogoplug from your laptop, you must be running the Pogoplug client and logged in which then communicates with your account through the Pogoplug site.The Pogoplug client has a unique 26-key identifier. If you're concerned about sharing documents over the internet, you can stop it sharing those files.
Edited by Funk on Wednesday 10th August 10:38
If your router supports dyndns and external access and has a usb port you can achieve the same result for the cost of a usb HD. Or you can also use a "usb to ethernet connector". You can then set up your own external access through your router without paying extra for this function.
Edited by paul.deitch on Wednesday 10th August 22:01
paul.deitch said:
If your router supports dyndns and external access and has a usb port you can achieve the same result for the cost of a usb HD. Or you can also use a "usb to ethernet connector". You can then set up your own external access through your router without paying extra for this function.
Can you recomend any hubs that do this?Edited by paul.deitch on Wednesday 10th August 22:01
ceebmoj said:
Can you recomend any hubs that do this?
here is one example http://www.macconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Deta...
What i personally use is a Philips SPD 8020 NAS (which has a usb port) with a firmware update from "fvdw" at http://forum.nas-portal.org/showthread.php?7909-up...
Edited by paul.deitch on Thursday 11th August 08:54
I have had a Pogoplug for 18 months or so now. It's good but not robust enough yet. Transfer speeds for big files are fine but for smaller files are hideously slow. This makes it fine for dumping big media files to but try and use it as a target for mirrored backups and it's dead in the water. I also found that copying very big files (2GB+ HD video) caused the windows application to memory leak, nick all my RAM and crash. Iphone app crashes regularly when browsing folder structure.
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