I just want to share my recent experience with Pogoplug and reformatting drives.

I have a 2TB Fantom Green drive. It worked out of the box with my PogoPlug Pro, though it did drop a few times in the first couple weeks. During that time I investigated several different backup programs, so I got to exercise it a lot.

(As an aside, my primary reason for not going with the ActiveCopy feature of PP is that I want old versions to be retained. I looked at lots of products but will probably settle on GoodSync.)

Initially my throughput was in the 4-20KB/s range. Slow, but workable. I figured this was because I was going over the network. But finally, after too many drops, I decided to reformat the drive and start over.

The key is to do a low-level format, not just the "quick format" in windows. I saw another thread here somewhere (can't find it again) where another person did the same; as a last-ditch effort before returning the PP, he reformatted his drive and got better reliability and throughput. But I've also seen a number of posts where people say, "I didn't reformat because it was formatted NTFS when I bought it."

I don't understand the technical details, but there *IS* a difference. From now on I'll always low-level format *ANY* new drive I purchase.

I am now seeing consistent 700KB/s throughput to my PP with no drops from GoodSync. Also, the 'Analyze' stage in GoodSync dropped from 2+ minutes to < 8 seconds. This is on 8+GB of data in 8,800+ files.

So if you are having reliability issues or if the Support people suggest you reformat your drive, DO IT if at all possible. And not a quick format, a real, multi-hour format. It makes a BIG difference.