I see Seagate is offering a NAS based on the pogoplug & software.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=7508

 It offers 3 USB plugs (4 if you count the stand plug for a Seagate portable drive).

 It does differ from the pogoplug in that the web service will cost $30 a year, but in exchange Seagate is guaranteeing SMB support soon.

 Anybody have an opinion about buying that instead of a plain pogoplug?

I have no idea what kind of security & privacy they will offer.  We already know that the PogoPlug people refuse to discuss anything releated to privacy or user security, which makes a lot of people nervous, as well as guaranteeing nobody will use it for any sort of business.

Seagate is using the same service & software, so it might not be any better, but on the other hand, they are a large company with a reputation and they probably don't want to open themselves to major lawsuits.  (One lawsuit against Seagate would probably result in Seagate suing & crushing CloudServices, which would probably shut down all PogoPlug users....)

Seagates plug requires an external power plug, but it does offer up to 4 drives plugged in at once, which is a good thing.  Unless they are doing it just as a usb hub and all 4 drives have to share the same usb bandwidth, which would be pretty bad if you needed to copy stuff from one drive to another.

Seagates WAN access will cost $30 a year after the first year, which is not a good thing.  But I don't really plan on needing that anyway.  (To be honest, I'd much prefer using a domain redirector service kind of thing anyway, if I ever really needed WAN access.)

 Seagate is going to be offering built in SMB service, which is a REAL GOOD thing!!  It means we wouldn't be dependant on the pogoplug software & service and be risking my.pogoplug.com outages.  Other the other hand, SMB can be hacked into the PogoPlug, but not everybody (including me) is comfortable with that kind of stuff.

 And I don't know if the Seagate NAS can be limited to just LAN (for privacy & security) or if it would require net access to authorize & activate.

One other thought is that since this is (presumably) just a redesigned plug (since its still using the Pogoplug software & service), there might be a good chance of a redesigned plug comming out soon.  But maybe not...  Maybe Seagate designed their own and are just using the PogoPlug software & service under license.

I dunno....  Still definetly some questions about the Seagate version of PogoPlug, but personally, the Seagate one sounds pretty good.  SMB comming soon and since they are a big lawsuit target of a company, they'll probably have better (or at least better documented) privacy & security policies.

Any other thoughs?