Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Pogoplug isn’t very attractive, but what you can do with it is pretty enticing. This $79 box has two ports, one for an Ethernet connection to your router, and a USB port for connecting to an external hard drive or memory stick. Make both connections, plug the Pogoplug into an electrical outlet and you (almost) instantly have an Internet-connected Network Attached Storage drive. According to Pogoplug’s creators, the only other step required is to register your device on Pogoplug’s site. Then you get a personal Web site with all your content displayed and downloadable. The drive will also show up like a network drive in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder."

This looks pretty neat. I really like the fact that you can access it locally as a normal network drive while still being able to get at it through the Internet. Plus since it is a bring your own drive solution, you should be able to easily expand it. Available for preorder for $79.

"It's been a hot minute since we've seen any fresh new kit from Plextor, but the firm has just rolled out a new pair of NAS drives for those on the hunt for -- what else? -- networked storage. The StorX PX-NAS500L / PX-NAS1000L drives offer up 500GB and 1TB of capacity, respectively, and each unit includes a gigabit Ethernet port, one-touch USB back-up button and the ability to grow thanks to a pair of USB 2.0 sockets. Beyond that, you won't find much else special about the new duo, and your guess is as good as ours on pricing / availability."



Not many details on this, but I really like that these network drives are starting to include USB for expandability. Now they just need to start making matching USB enclosures for the additional drives and then they might be on to something.

"It might be a compact little NAS appliance, but Synology's new Disk Station DS-207+ certainly knows how to pack the features in, as this dual disk desktop box takes most of the features of its bigger Cube Station stable mates and delivers them at a competitive price. The family comprises two models with the DS-207+ on review equipped with a 500MHz processor partnered by 128MB of memory. The lower-end DS-207 comes with a basic 266MHz FreeScale processor and 64MB of RAM and costs around £25 less. The feature list is very similar as both appliances offer Gigabit Ethernet plus a triplet of USB 2.0 ports for external storage or printer sharing but the DS-207+ also has an eSATA port at the front."



I've never heard of this particular brand, but based on the specs and the review, this is a very nice NAS. I really like the backup options since you can set it to automatically backup from the NAS to external drives you connect to it via USB, making this a nice option for businesses as well as home users.