Looking to create your own personal cloud that you can share with others? Then the Pogoplug may be for you, all you need are some external hard drives and an outlet! Let's take a look at what it has to offer.
Setup is stupidly easy, I plugged my fresh out of the box Pogoplug Pro into my router and clicked activate on my.pogoplug.com. From their I went under the settings and changed it to connect wirelessly and I was done in under 5 minutes. I moved the Pogoplug Pro back in my room and hooked up my drives. After a painfully long 8 days it finally finished indexing, and all of my content had readily available previews. These previews allowed me to view all of my content via the Pogoplug app on my android phone with very little lag, even on 3g. This is probably my favorite feature of the device.
The appearance of the device is very unique, running about the size of a 3.5’ hard drive it rests on a springy stand that flexes like crazy. Although the design is very appealing, I think they could have made the device a bit smaller, considering it does not contain storage. A smaller footprint or a stackable design would have been nice to see. The cable management on the back of the device is perfect and kept all the usb cables neat and tidy. Included with the device are an ethernet cable and power cable, both which are white. I found the cable color a bit off, considering the entire device is black but it wasn’t an issue. A quick thing to note is that the power cord falls out very easily in the Pogoplug Pro, a slight bump of the device could cause it to power off.
The Pogoplug works just as advertised, with one minor exception, unlimited storage. Pogoplug advertises “unlimited cloud storage” all over their website but the statement is very misleading. The Pogoplug only puts the storage you own online, it does not supply any for you to use. Using my own storage I can access all of my files online and I am able to mount them in OSX via the Pogoplug app. Attaching a usb hub to expand on the only 4 ports included worked fine, so those with more than 4 hard drives would not have an issue. Accessing drives with the Mac application was a hit or miss, they didn’t always mount for me. The online interface is very basic as seen below and you can do everything possible with your Pogoplug from it.
Sharing files with others is a very simple process and works very similarly to Dropbox, you designate a folder that you want to share, upload files to it and share the link anywhere! This was by far my favorite feature of the device, sharing large video files was super easy and my friends could send stuff over in emails without a problem. All I had to do was add their email address to the Pogoplug and they could send anything. Another very cool option is the ActiveCopy, you can select folders on your Mac or PC that you want to backup and they will upload to a designated folder. While the concept was cool, the upload speeds were painfully slow for me.
Printing with the Pogoplug was a complicated process for me and I really didn’t find it useful or practical. If you are looking for remote printing I would look elsewhere or buy a wireless printer.
The Pogoplug is for someone who wants store stuff online and still have complete control over where their data is. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars setting up a home server the Pogoplug does it for just under $100 ($99 MSRP). 
Lastly and most important to me is the customer service. Pogoplug.com offers many easy to follow tutorials and demos of how to properly setup and use your device. They also offer a community forum where you can post questions and will usually get an answer in a few hours. While I do not like that they do not have phone support (I like talking to people), the forums seemed do the trick with such a simple device.
Still not sure if the Pogoplug is for you? Let me break it down.
If you have a lot of external hard drives and want to get them online this is the easiest and cheapest and easiest way i’ve seen to do it. If you are looking for a large amount of fast, reliable cloud storage and don’t care where it’s stored, I would suggest an online service such as Dropbox, Box.net or even MobileMe.
If you have any questions please leave them below and as always you can find me on YouTube. Thanks for reading!
After thoughts:
-The cables included are of very high quality.
-The device does get warm when lacking proper air circulation.
James Agee