Pogoplug makes any usb device a NAS
Pogoplug is a product with the simplest of goals: to make it possible to access the information on your external USB hard drive from anywhere. It’s a easy enough concept, but in the past doing this wasn’t as simple as it could be.
You could use software tools like LogMeIn to share the information on a PC but if you wanted to forget the PC and share information on a storage device things got a bit trickier. A NAS device was always an option, but that would require either FTP or remote access software like MioNet. A USB external hard drive could then be attached to the NAS to access it remotely (using the NAS as a middleman), but at that point things are confusing enough that you’d probably just go without the files.
Pogoplus aims to make this as painless as possible and to make access to a standard USB hard drive or flash drive a simple task whether you are on your network or in a meeting across the country.
This is accomplished using a small wall-wart which is basically a tiny computer and then the online tools available at https://my.pogoplug.com. As far as the average user is concerned you just need to connect the Pogoplug to both your router and your USB drive and then just login to pogoplug.com from anywhere in the world and you data is right there after a setup that takes about two minutes.
One bonus of Pogoplug is the desktop drive feature. Normally you don’t have to install any files to work with Pogoplug, but it you want to install something you can work a Pogoplugged drive like a local drive on your computer. The best part about this is that there is logic in the software that will recognize your computer as being on the same network and you won’t have to upload the data assuming in on the same network as the Pogoplug.
You can also your the online tools to create RSS feeds so that you can share new items that go into a folder (photos for example) with friends and family. Or you can just use the site to email them and tell them that you opened up a folder for sharing. It is this sort of ease-of-use where Pogoplug excels. Another cool trick is that it works with USB hubs, so you can actually connect multiple drives to a single Pogoplug to maximize your storage capacity.
