Customer Reviews

Pogoplug Multimedia Sharing Device

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(32)

 

 

Update (November 2011):

If you need reliable access to your data (mission critical or not), do NOT use Pogoplug. This weekend (which, coincidentally, is the Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S. when many people are hundreds or thousands of miles from home), the Pogoplug "geniuses" decided to update their service to give customers 5 GB of storage in the company's own "cloud." Looks like they're trying to pretend to be a Dropbox or iCloud service now. Well, in the process of doing their upgrade, they knocked the existing Pogoplug service offline. Now that it's back up, I can see my Pogoplug, but my attached storage is nowhere to be seen. Keep in mind that there was NO notice given of any planned downtime. This company is absolutely terrible about notifying their existing customer base about anything when it comes to downtime or planned outages. There are many people with Pogoplugs that are currently having the same problem I'm having; and as of now, there has been no response from the company.

The only solution I've seen mentioned by other users is to power cycle the Pogoplug device. Unfortunately, I'm currently hundreds of miles from home, and even though they've made multiple revisions to their web interface in the last 18 months (most of them not positive revisions), they have yet to add the ability to remotely reboot the Pogoplug. So, I guess I'm SOL until I get back home. It's a shame that I actually thought I could depend on this device and this company and they go and pull a stunt like this over the long weekend with no notice. This company clearly has no idea who it is or what it wants to be; and it's just trying to haphazardly copy everything that others are doing while breaking existing features in the process. I am not a satisfied customer!

Original review from May 2010:

The idea of having the ability to plug multiple USB 2.0 external hard drives into this and see and share the contents without much fuss appealed to me. I've heard Leo Laporte raving about this device so I figured I'd give it a shot because I trust his opinion on tech recommendations, for the most part. I've had this device for just over two months now. I primarily use the Pogoplug to share photos with family, keep a backup of some files, and share files with colleagues. I must say that the web interface is pretty nice, and it has allowed people that I've shared files with to be able to navigate to them without any assistance from me. So, that's pretty straightforward. It's also easy to control permissions for directories on an individual by individual basis (read only/read and write.) That's a plus.

Onto the negatives. . .

I wouldn't rely on this in any "mission critical" environments. I certainly haven't used this for anything that qualifies as "mission critical", but given the issues I've had, I wouldn't rely on this if I did need it for that purpose. When I tried to transfer about 4 GB worth of photos to my mother's PC (she was running the Pogoplug software for Windows--she is using Windows 7), the connection repeatedly timed out during the file transfer. That was annoying because since it's just using Windows Cut/Copy/Paste, there's no option to resume the transfer where it left off. I literally had to browse the folder on her machine that the pictures were going into and compare the file names of what she had vs. what I had on my Pogoplugged hard drive. It turned what would've already been a fairly long process into an even longer process since I had to "babysit" it for several hours. As far as internet connection specs, I have 3 Mbps upstream and my mother has 40 Mbps downstream, so we weren't trying to accomplish this feat on slow connections.

The second issue I've had that has necessitated my continued reliance on Dropbox is that when a colleague tried to transfer several hundred files to me, all of the files appeared to be there in Windows Explorer and on the Pogoplug web interface, but when I tried to work with them, the software I was using wouldn't be able to see anywhere between 2 to 10 of the files. The files were not zipped before transfer -- the folder containing them was simply copied and pasted onto my Pogoplugged drive. The colleague transferring the files to me didn't receive any file transfer errors on their side, but clearly something didn't transfer properly with some of the files even though they all appeared to be the proper size in Windows Explorer (header issue, perhaps?) With this colleague, I've gone back to using Dropbox exclusively to receive files from them and have never had a problem. My colleague has a fiber connection of >30 Mbps upstream and I have 30 Mbps downstream, so he shouldn't have had any bandwidth issues uploading files to my Pogoplug.

I will say that the iPhone app for the Pogoplug is a potential selling point, but Dropbox has an iPhone app as well. The iPhone app for the Pogoplug has not been without its faults, either. I've tried to watch some video clips via the iPhone Pogoplug app and it's hit and miss. Sometimes I can watch the full clip and sometimes my iPhone thinks that the clip is only a few seconds long and stops a few seconds in. I haven't been able to pinpoint the cause of that problem, and refreshing the file list or removing and reinstalling the app hasn't fixed the problem.

All-in-all, I think the Pogoplug is a great idea that's targeting an audience that wants a NAS-type device but doesn't want to drop some bigger bucks for a Drobo. I don't regret purchasing it because I expected there to be certain kinks and quirks with such a relative newcomer to the market. I hope that some of the issues I've had will be addressed in the coming months where possible through software updates to the Pogoplug desktop software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Being able to "auto-resume" a file transfer where it left off when the connection dropped would be a huge plus, but it would require some work on the developer's part. Perhaps a file transfer queue could sit inside the Pogoplug software and monitor the progress of a file transfer and allow it to be resumed if it failed? I certainly hope the developers will continue to actively improve the desktop software.

I work out of town a lot and want to be able to transfer large files back and forth to a remote site. Also I collaborate with other professionals and need to share large files with them. Pogoplug is my solution. It works great. I have 2TB drives connected to it and, rather than trying to e-mail large files, I just upload to my pogoplug and share them with whoever I want. Also, whenever I have questions, the Pogoplug customer service is quick to respond and very helpful. I have been very pleased.

Eric

I've been using pogoplug connected to a 250GB external hard drive for about a month now, and can say they werent kidding how simple this is. It took longer for me to find room around my desk to connect everything than logging into their site download a simple application and off i go. The application creates a virtual drive on your computer that allows you to use it as a normal drive connect straight to the pc. Although they do provide a software to monitor for folder changes to sync to your files i opted for a more robust software. I decided to use SyncBackPro to monitor any changes on folders and sync then from my pc to pogoplug and pogoplug to pc (along w/ many other features). This seems to do the trick nicely. If you have multiple drives connected to your pogoplug you can do active sync which will transfer the files to another hard drive for redundant backups.

The website [...] looks and works wonderfully. Its able to transcode your videos into HTML5 allowing you to view your videos anywhere and pretty much anything. The sharing option is fantastic when working on projects. Only downside is if you share a folder that other party (and given full access) can use up as much storage on your hard drive as they want. There currently is no way to limit how many gigs they can use. It would be best to have a extra hard drive for sharing only in case your sharing.

As a android user they do have a app on the marketplace which recently had a update that really improved upon it. Again since videos are HTML 5 you can view them easily. It does get little choppy on 3G but on wifi works perfectly. Only downside is that you can upload documents/images from your phone to your pogoplug.

So, I usually research items like this to death because internet hype can spoil a good purchase. After trying to obtain as much info as possible on the Pogoplug, I finally pulled the trigger and bought one. My main motivation was that I hate Itunes and wasting more time "synching" than listening to my huge music library. Problem solved with Pogoplug! I bought from Amazon but the seller was [...] for $99.00 with free shipping. I use a Motorola Droid for work and my personal cell is an Iphone and both markets have an app that works great. I also work on multiple computers at various times of the day. Thanks to Pogoplug, I can access my music library and anything else on the drives connected to Pogoplug without having to pack all of that stuff around on computers or portable hard drives. This thing works like it should and have to say that I rarely encounter electronic items that I would say truly changed my life but Pogoplug is one of those items. Buy one NOW! You won't be disappointed. Streaming over a cell network solely depends on the available connection that you have over your cell network but most of the time even that method works fine. I use this method when I am at the gym working out and I don't have to always change the music on my device. I just stream from Pogoplug. Nice and easy! Great product, great price. You can't go wrong!

I use Pogoplug in conjunction with my iMac (OSX 10.5.8) for off site backups. It works well with ChronoSync, although Intego Backup Manager Pro cannot backup to it for some reason. I also use it for Quicken backups (running Quicken under Windows XP on a VMware Fusion virtual machine on my iMac). If I need to retrieve a file, I can just open the Pogoplug drive on my desktop with Finder and copy it back. I did not give it five stars because it is not yet fully compatible with every OSX program. I think it is a great solution because I feel more comfortable having my files on my own drive, rather than a cloud server some where. If Pogoplug were to go out of business, I would still have access to the hard drive and could plug it into any computer.

I've had the Pogoplug for about 6 months now and I know it has its limitations, but I still highly recommend it for those who want to create a home network with a few neat extra features. Of course there are several products out there that will allow you to connect an external hard drive to your network for storage, and if thats all you want to do then by all means do not buy a Pogoplug. However, if you want a central location for all of your files and you want internet access to these files or an easy way to share these files over the internet then consider the Pogoplug. Drop box is OK, but I like having the ability to access all of my music files freely over the internet (especially on my iPhone). I've also used it to transfer huge numbers of photos from friends for slideshow projects. Its nice not having to drive to the next town with my flash drive just to collect 500 MB of photos. Also, I've been making home videos and slide shows for six years now. I really like having the ability to show them all to my parents in Florida as soon as I make them. Mostly, I like that I have free access to my files no matter where I am: work, home, on the road.

this unit worked great. Fast install and nothing really to setup. I first transfered my picture file,3gb, during the setup. Also added individual files by drag and drop or copy/paste. I then went out of state and installled the connecting software on another computer, very simple. I was able to access all the files and add more. I was concerned about the negitive reviews on this product and went for it anyway, and very happy with it.

It's a great device for creating a eco-friendly NAS server and Cloud device out the box, but the amount of supported file formats pretty much render this useless if you plan on using this to stream movies or music.. For example MKV and OGG are not supported and may mean something to those looking for that functionality.. It also has 4 USB ports (1 front, 3 rear) and you can use USB hubs for more expansion.. It also supports Gigabit ethernet connections but your going to limited to at least USB 2.0 speeds.. If your attached drives are NTFS formatted your going to see much less in transfer speeds because the Linux OS uses a poor NTFS driver which eats up the Pogoplugs' processor resources causing it to lag..

I took this device and rooted it, installed a modified uBoot loader on it and then Archlinux on a portable USB drive so that it boots up into Linux on power up (USB sticks work too but some won't).. Then I setup a Samba server sharing 2 external hard drives that are attached to it.. I made sure to format those hard drives to EXT3 file system because NTFS formatted drives have really poor transfer speeds over the network.. Basically, I get about 15 to 25MB/s transfer speeds on EXT3 versus 3 to 5MB/s on NTFS.. And the best is that I can stream ALL TYPES of files over my network.. I did lose the Cloud functionality as this setup is independent from Pogoplugs' servers, but you can get free cloud storage everywhere these days.. My main objective was getting a cheap NAS server running in my house and I achieved that with this setup.. The added bonus of running it economically with low power requirements is just icing on the cake.. I have movies, music and pictures streaming to 2 WDTV Live Plus's in my home simultaneously without stutter or compatibility errors.. I uploaded a picture of my crude but effective setup..

If your willing to hack this device and go through some step by step linux programming (google pogoplug archlinux), you will enjoy the benefits of a very low cost and eco-friendly NAS server in your home.. But if you decide to go stock, you may end up being disappointed by the lack of supported file formats it can handle..

I love the Pogoplug and it's easy setup. The interface could use a little work as far as ease of upload or download when you share folders with others.

I'm using this in a small office. We have a wired and wireless network. We use the Pogo to allow access to shared files. It's not perfect, but it's a lot cheaper than a file server, and it works great locally. The remote access works, but it has been slow in my experience. I would not recommend having to rely on this for full time remote access. In the early days, we did experience some problems with loss of connection, but it seemed to be related to our internet connection. The device verifies account info over the internet, but once it has done that, it moves files locally over our network. We are using two WD My Passport drives. We could not get it to work with the IOSafe Drive.