I've seen these before when they originally came out. Read the review at CNET and decided, "Eh." The deal at Buy.com was a little to good, for me, to pass. The price for the Pogoplug was $49.99 plus tax but free shipping. When the original price was like $129 and now at least $99 or above, I thought it would be good time to test this little product out on my home network.
I have a couple of SimplePro 500GB USB external hard drives, a couple of Western Digital 120GB portable USB drives and a few notebook hard drives I have pulled from old laptops and put in portable cases. I've dwindled down my computer count from 5-7 desktops to 2: 1 is about a year old with 1TB main drive and an added Hitachi 640GB; the older machine has 4 hard drives that range from 120GB to 200GB and is mainly used as a network backup where I backup all my files to from various notebook/netbook machines in the house.
I have a Belkin 8-port USB hub but sometimes it would intermittently "disappear" when connected to my "backup" machine running WinXP. It's frustrating to set up back up software to run daily/bi-daily and not have the drives available for some freaking reason. The Belkin hub has currently been just a charging station for my various USB-chargeable devices.
Also, the backup machine randomly shuts down which makes me lose those four backup drives. I think it's an overheating issue but I solved that part by using a floor fan to blow constantly into the case. It works but now occasionally the computer will lose video feed. I'm not sure if it's the video card because the machine will turn on although I can't audibly hear the POST. Basically, it powers on and that's it; no video image, no hard drive action. Sometimes I can let it sit, jingle a few things here and there, when it will suddenly work properly...until the next time.
So, longer story shorter, I could use some sort of networked, Internet-accessed, "clouded" access to my files. This may not be the solution but it's a good place to start at a decent price.
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