Accessing Your Data Wherever You Want

First up is the FreeAgent GoFlex Net Media Sharing Device. This device allows you to connect up to two FreeAgent Ultraportable drives and a standard USB external hard drive to your network, and also gives you access to them from the Internet as well. Network Attached Storage devices have been gaining steadily in popularity over the past few years. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that wireless networking has been helping more and more people easily setup home networks. NAS devices range from external hard drives all the way to full blown servers such as Windows Home Server and tend to be great for backing up data or streaming media. The Net Media device allows you to easily make your FreeAgent drive into a full blown NAS device.

Figure 3: The GoFlex Net Media Sharing device. The bars on the front light up to show how much space is being used on the hard drives.

Setting up the Net Media device was simple and painless. I just plugged in the power cord, connected it to my wireless router with a network cable, and plugged the drive into one of the two available slots on the device. Next I logged into www.pogplug.com, signed up for a free account, and it found and configured everything for me. Once Pogoplug has found and configured your drive, you can then access it via an internet browser, a small client installed to your PC or Mac, or using an app on your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Palm device.

Figure 4: Pogoplug, a simple yet nice looking interface for managing your network attached GoFlex drive.

The browser based version of Pogoplug is pretty nice. The interface is simple, uncluttered, and attractive. The Pogoplug website allows you to upload and download files to and from your drive, it can encode video for playback on your mobile device, and it can interface with Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. The desktop client for the PC and Mac allows for a more traditional way of working with the networked drive by keeping you securely logged in and setting the FreeAgent up to look and behave like a normal network drive accessed by your PC. The free downloadable app for the smart phones mimics the browser experience, but is tailored for the smaller screens. I will admit that I was initially put off by having to rely on an external website to manage my locally connected device, but after playing around with Pogoplug for a while, I found that I don’t mind it as much as I thought I would. Because the Net Media device does rely on Pogoplug, it would not work for someone running a network without internet access.

By the time I was done putting it through its paces, I found that the Net Media device really impressed me. It painlessly allowed me to add the GoFlex drive to my network and from there I was able to access it from all of my computers, and I was even able to stream video to my Android phone. For the $99 price tag, it is a solid and capable product well worth the money.