Plug Touts Expandable Storage Via USB Drives Plugged In At Home 87
DeviceGuru writes with an excerpt that may be of interest especially for mobile users with cheap, always available wireless data: "An OpenWRT Linux-based hardware adapter called Plug designed for unifying USB-connected storage met its $69,000 Kickstarter pledge goal in 12 hours. The tiny Plug device eschews cloud storage for a localized approach whereby an app or driver installed on each participating computer or mobile device intercepts filesystem accesses, and redirects data reads and writes to storage drives attached to the user's Plug device. The Plug enjoyed one of the fastest fulfillments in Kickstarter history, meeting its goal in 12 hours, and has already soared to over $223,000 in funding."
Re:ummm? (Score:5, Insightful)
We can all see the obvious, that's it's a Bifferboard under the cover. What you should do is read the funding drive. The real magic is in the software, where it intercepts all local storage requests and makes access to your remote disks entirely transparent, and doesn't consume local storage unless you configure it to cache specific items.
Plugging in the Plug at work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest flaw in this device is that it's expected that you can plug in a plug at work for offsite backup. Do these people actually work at corporate america? It's a non-company sanctioned device connected to the corporate network consuming a non-trivial amount of bandwidth. The odds of this flying at the work place are nearly 0, and most likely the network admin would look at you like you're crazy for even suggesting it.
30 Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
"The device includes a USB 2.0 port and a 10/100 Ethernet port with an average transfer speed of 30Mbps"
In what alternate reality is 30 megabit-per-second an acceptable speed for accessing terabytes of data? That's not even 4 MB/s of average transfer speed. That's not even fast enough to play a 1080p content, and a goodly amount of 720p content.
You want me to even consider a device like this? It needs to have USB 3.0 support, a gigabit link and be able to reliably push at least 500mbit in both directions (device dependant). If that raises the price, then the price needs to be raised - because under 4 MB/s is simply not an acceptable transfer speed. For crying out loud, hard drives have been faster than that for over 20 years.