After messing with this device for a week now, I felt it was only right that I add my thoughts on how it has been going. I wanted to show the good, the bad and the downright ugly sides of this device. What you can also see is that so far I have not returned this to the store, it is either because I am lazy or I feel it *might* turn out good in the end – let us see.
The initial goal for this device
If you recall I had a collection of external hard drives, this been as follows:
1TB iomega USB2 Drive
500GIG iomega drive
320GIG Seagate Drive
And finally – 60GIG Freecom laptop drive.
The first issue – one of speed
When I started out – I shoved all the MP3′s and the Background (I like to change my wallpaper ever 15 minutes) to the 500GIG Drive, the HD Movies to the 1TB Drive and the rest was spread out across the other drives. When my wallpaper changer come to try and get some new wallpaper – it struggled and the 500gig drive was rattling away for ages. The same can be said for me adding the tunes to iTunes – it took forever. I wondered at this point if the issue was the 500gig drive, was it just too slow?
I connected all the drives to my computer and over the next couple of days, I moved the files about in an effort to speed up the file access. I guessed the 1TB drive was both quieter and faster then the rest (It was newer) – so I moved all the MP3 and Backdrops to that drive. As you can imagine, moving files over USB was not fast and I either had too many files or my drives are not big enough for the media that I have.
Indexing
The next annoying issue was the pogoplug seemed to always be indexing the information and if I hovered over any movies on “my Pogoplug” page – it added it to the queue to be re-coded. After some messing about, it was worked out that you can switch off this feature per drive and as I don’t plan to stream my entire movie collection just yet – this works fine for me.
Sharing out the files
I tested out this function, how it works is you simply add an email address and a folder or a file. You can select “read/download” or “Full Control“. The said person gets an email, they click the link and it tells them that it will last two weeks or they can make an account (on Pgogplug.com). If they do make an account, they can also download the desktop application and access your drive as P: drive – much easier then the web interface.
The speed of accessing the files is as fast as your upload allows, opening for example a PDF takes a few minutes for a 24MB file and will consume all your upload speed in the process. There is no controls over time or speed – this means you cannot stop how often a person starts using your bandwidth. The entire point I guess of this feature is more of you sharing your photo’s quickly with your friends and family or you accessing your files while you are away.
Plugging in a full drive
If you have drives that are near full of media, you will find that the pogoplug will soon crash as it tries to index the media. the reason this happens is simple, unlike a normal NAS which just shares out your drives, this box will try and index your media as I mentioned and to store this info requires drive space of course. I got the RPC 600 Error many times when I tried to stop it transcoding all my movies and I had to plug the drive into my desktop to fix the drive after it managed to screw the drive up more than once.
Another issue is time – I left it Generating Thumbnails last night, 9 hours later and it is still going. If this is how slow it takes to do pictures, imagine how long it would take to do movies as well – I still have (17424 items pending processing), maybe the rest of today then? Are we saying then that the ‘normal’ person only has a handful of pictures, movies and songs and they add the files as they go along?
Sitting on the fence
On one side of me, I am telling myself that I should box this thing up and get it back to the store, get my money back and start buying some proper NAS equipment, even if that NAS box I buy is only limited to 3TB internally. On the other side of me, I am ‘sure’ that this thing can be useful – I have already added Samba, Torrent client a few other bits. The cheap side of me says that it is not much of an outlay and as it came from a store, was easy to buy (and take back) plus the fact I can always add more space via USB as required. The problem with External USB though is the number of drives I need to have plugged in and on 24/7 – so honestly I am not sure at all.
UPDATE – 2nd August 2010
I had written to Pogoplug with my thoughts and Jeff Fochtman replied back, I want to get across some points he made if I may:
We focus on three things;
1. easy install so even novice users can set-up our product
-To do this we provide an ongoing hosted service for free for the user. This negates the need of port-forwarding, router configuration and the other things that most networked products need for remote access
2. Easy sharing
-you can share a folder with a simple email link. Again this uses the web service that we host for the user for free. Imagine a Mom trying to share 1000′s of photo’s with family members…we do this very well
3. Mobile device and remote access-once again having the service allows us to easily connect a user to his/her home content
Jeff is 100% Correct, if you are of a tech nature and trying to make the PogoPlug run as fast as a dedicated NAS then you, like me will be disappointed. I will still state that the grouping of the music collection if the album is “Various Artists” will make it list each song as one album (when in fact iTunes groups his as one album). The Android Application needs a lot of work in my own personal view (which is shared by the people on the forum). I had to delete in order of 3GIGS worth of data which the device had generated for the files on the drive and the default options need changing in my view. I thank Jeff for the email and his thoughts and as an easy to use and share device – this is good for some people, just don’t expect too much out of it.
