After seeing various reviews littered about the web and watching video’s of people using and unboxing a pogoplug, there was not enough detailed write up about how it works on a day to day unit rather than just something to shares your files across the internet. I had spotted this device in a local store for £79, the retail price was £99, so a saving of £20 to be had. Was this a cheap NAS box that could suit my needs or would it turn out to be something slow and unusable.

Un-Boxing and plugging in

The box is pink and so is the unit, while it might attract the girls to the table, I am sure most men might be put off when looking in the store and seeing a Pink box. Why the company choose pink for the colour is beyond me, I am sure they would see more if they had say Black or silver.

Inside is the Pogoplug, the power cable and a white network lead. It is a rather nice packaged box and you do feel you got your money worth. I plugged in the PogoPlug, supplied it with a gigabit network connect and attached 4 USB Drives. I went through the online activation which basically found my pogoplug and I had to confirm the email was correct and we were now online with the device.

Accessing it via Windows

I went to the pogoplug site and downloaded a windows 7 64bit install program, on install it asked for my login and also asked if I wanted Multi Drive mode (each drive attached to the Pogoplug gets its own drive letter). It also went through some wizard to auto copy all my media (Movies, Pictures and Music) to the Pogoplug but I skipped this part, Like to do this by hand.

What happens now is a Drive letter appears (P:) and inside this is each drive which I had already named by the web interface and the total of all drives are reported plus the free space. This Autoruns when windows starts, so the drive is always on-line.

The Web Interface

When you plug in a drive, it presents it in the web interface as the native name and you get the option to rename this to something easier to remember. It then goes off and starts to process the drive contents and this on drives that are full of movies and music etc can take a LONG time. From this same interface you can share folders and files, you just pop in an email address and it sends the person a link though for movies for example, it has to transcode the file first so it can be played via the web browser and your upload will suffer if they start to pull movies from you.

Where it starts to go wrong

Let first go through facts and figures:

• The network interface was supplied a full gigabit network – this is faster then USB 2
• The drives in question are both linked to the pogoplug, so USB -> USB in theory
• The external drives are USB2

The first thing I tried to do was move some files from one drive to another using the windows interface, thats grab the folder and tell it to move the files.  At this point I got a windows error telling me I had no permission to do so. I could create files and folder, I could delete files and folders but I cannot move a file or folder from one drive to another.

What you have to do in this instance is Copy the stuff across then delete the folder, rather sloppy I am sure. This is where the next issue comes into play –  It told me this would take 55Minutes to copy 15.7GIG – HOW LONG???

The easy solution

In the example above, I found it easier and quicker to just plug in my drives to the machine, do the moving of files (which worked) and the time difference was same 15.7GIG took about 14 minutes (roughly). The same solution came when I wanted to format a drive, it was just easier to pop the drive on a windows box, format it and job done instead of having to delete all the files (which took forever it seems) via the pogoplug interface.

Expandability

The reason I went and splashed some cash on this pink box was a few reasons. The first was I already had various External USB Drives at hand with media on and this device meant I could spend a small amount of money (compared to a full blown NAS) and not only have all my external drives shared across the network but also the internet, imagine having access to all of my music on my phone – amazing.

The other reason was there is a growing community of applications and basically you can install a lot of different programs to run in the background and expand your pogoplug – call openpogo – this includes SAMBA for proper file and print sharing, a torrent downloader, webserver, MySQL Server and many more.

Thoughts in the early stages

Remember that I have only had a few hours to play with this device but I wanted to get my initial impressions out there for people who might be thinking about buying one. If I had bought a proper NAS Box and a couple of 1.5TB Drives – I would have spent 3x what this device cost me but ended off with a device that had a single plug and been a LOT faster at accessing files. I could have also plugged in my USB Drives and shared them too but that would have been the limit of that NAS Box solution for example.

I agree that in USB via the network in my own use generally is slow and the PogoPLug is no different. If you think about this though – once all your photos, music, movies and files are stored – then speed over the internal network should not be an issues. I tested the playback with some 1080p content and this worked without a single drop in frames or buffering.

Transcoding takes a LONG time – if you have a lot of video files that you may need to watch on your mobile device or share with others then expect to leave the box ticking away for months on end, I may do a few at a time and see how it goes. So far then – it seems a good buy, it just means I am leaving 4 USB Drives plugged in and powered up along with this device 24/7.