The Black Tech Report

Data, no matter how much you have now days, your needs keep growing year over year, and for some people it’s month over month.  Recently I’ve been reading more and more about storage devices, and backup solutions, stay tuned for more coverage of these topics.  I recently blogged about Dropbox where I talked a little bit about how you can use this service to share, and backup data.  Sometime ago I also talked about Google Docs which gives you online space for documents and other files. I recently ran across a press release about the new Seagate FreeAgent DockStar $99.99, the name reminds me of DeathStar but maybe that’s because I’m a StarWars Fan.

Anyways the FreeAgent DockStar by itself does nothing, it’s just a docking station, with a power adapter and a ethernet port, but when you couple this device with FreeAgent Go portable storage solution you get a large amount of data that you can now store and access from across the internet which means anywhere in the world.  The device as stated has a dock port for the FreeAgent Go device, 3 USB ports to plug in other storage devices including USB thumb drives, and NON Seagate storage devices, a power adapter and ethernet cable.

So you ask the question what is this product just supposed to do for me?

You get a device that can enable your storage to be placed on the internet (encrypted) so you can access your iTunes music, your pictures, your video, your documents etc.  It can even create a RSS feed for each of those directories, which now enables you to give that to anyone who can plug the feed info into a feed reader so as changes are made to your directories they get updates showing the changes without the traditional notification of calling someone, or having to email them to say take a look at the new data I uploaded. Here are some of the highlights:

• File sharing at its simplest with a clean, web-based interface.
• Access files from any networked PC or Mac® computer in your home.
• After service activation, access and share files with friends, over the internet — no special software required.
• Enables friends to upload content as well, creating a comprehensive share space.
• Appears as a local drive whether in the home or accessed through the internet, for simple drag-and-drop access.
• Dock a FreeAgent Go™ drive and connect up to three USB storage devices.
• Send pictures straight from your iPhone® to the FreeAgent DockStar network adapter.
• Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

Think about this…

Imagine your out of town, visiting a friend or loved one, and you want to show them that video from this summer. Without a device like this or some kind of web service you would just have to wait till you got home, figured out a way to upload all the videos you want to show them, then pray that they know how to access the files.  This solutions eliminates that issue, all you have to do is connect to the internet using any computer and supply your username and password, then start streaming the video directly to this computer.  That is awesome, an just down right cool when you think about all the other things you would have to do otherwise.

In my case it now eliminates the fact that I had to keep my server running at home while traveling hoping and praying that something didn’t happen to my hard drive on the computer or it didn’t over heat and start a fire.  Those days are long gone in my book with the FreeAgent DockStar.

Conclusion

I think that Seagate is obviously on the right track to supply us with a solution that makes things easy, but the one draw back I have is the fact that the device uses the underlining technology of pogoplug.com which is not a bad thing it’s just that DockStar only comes with a 1 year pogoplug subscription for internet sharing after that first year you have to pay $29.99 to continue usage that is where the device fails in my eyes.  Why should we have to pay after 1 year, when if we just purchase a pogoplug for $99.99 the Internet Sharing is FREE for ever.  Most people who purchase this device would not know this if they didn’t know the underlining technology is pogoplug.  Shame on you Seagate for trying to pad the bottom line when you really don’t have to this way.

TBTR