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Plug Touts Expandable Storage Via USB Drives Plugged In At Home
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."
...for reasons old or new, this isn't exactly a surprise.
It's unfortunate that there's no practical solution to avoid the use of third-party systems with cell-phones while still enjoying the data redundancy benefits that are the entire point of those devices...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Kickstarter page is chock full of marketing bullshit but has very little details.
Average transfer rate 30MB/s over a 100mb LAN?? I dont think so.
It offers better security than my computer?? How? I want details, specifics & proof.
Nice idea though
http://www.amazon.com/Addonics-NASU2-NAS-Adapter/dp/B001OC5J9U/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1373815402&sr=8-3&keywords=usb+nas
Yeah, it would be great if there was an entire website, with a video, explaining why you would want this and what it does, perhaps even linked in the article posted above?
I have been following this and I think the best selling point comes from the kickstarter page ...
With Plug, all your devices are connected with each other thanks to a zero-configuration, private and encrypted VPN (asymmetric encryption based on RSA-2048/SHA-1 keys). We had excellent speed benchmarks on this network. It goes through any main NAT & firewall we tested, it's decentralized when possible, and it doesn't require any user configuration. It's safe and does the job.
Because you don't want to configure iSCSI to a cheap, small device with GigE which runs Linux (like a PogoPlug) yourself, or because the OS you hope to use as a client doesn't come with iSCSI drivers.
I've never actually tried it myself, so I won't use words like "lazy" since it might be a lot harder than I imagine.
Supposedly (according to Wikipedia) there has been an iSCSI initiator in Windows since Win2k. It's certainly in Linux these days, and in Linux since 2.6.12 or 3.1 depending on how you're counting, I don't know which came first but would guess 3.1.
A second-generation pogoplug (not first-and-a-half, which is what the rev.2 really is) has GigE and USB3 and can run Debian. If I were looking for a cut-rate way to attach a remote storage device to my PC as if it were local, that's what I'd use.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
It was funded well beyond it's goal of $69,000 ($295,998) by 3,279 people. So obviously somebody wanted/needed it. You're just looking for people to agree with you so you can feel better about yourself for not contributing to the goal; admit it. =p
It seems like this is reinventing the wheel when we already have consumer NAS devices supporting Samba and NFS.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Let me know when they produce a tangible product.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"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.
/dev/random
Why pay for a device? I've had my "MyDocuments" folder redirected to another (bigger) physical drive for 7 or 8 years.
Unless the "plug" has a lot more RAM than your average plug-in device, Plug can't support ZFS either. ZFSoL has a minimum RAM recommendation of 2GB. ZFS also has the overhead of checksumming, which on modern non-embedded CPUs isn't a problem, but on an embedded system, present a significant overhead.
ZFS is an enterprise filesystem; it's not designed for low-end hardware.
Please help metamoderate.
The capacity of 8 drives goes up over time. 8 of my first hard drive would be 80MB total. Now it's 32TB. It's only going up.
I have Asus RT-AC66U router and it has 2 USB ports. It allows to connect disks and make NAS too.
Why buy this specialized device Plug with bad reviews when Asus has stellar reviews and does about the same.
There are also much cheaper USB-equipped routers too.
Yup, that's the main point. And that you can send links that allow access to a single file.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's VPN, a NAS file server and desktop software integration.
I'm especially curious about their APIs and whether it'll be hackable.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
PogoPlug v4 supports GigE and two USB3. It's up to you to install your own Linux on it with ZFS support. However, since the CPU is a bit slow, if you want any performance at all, you will want something like an in-kernel NFS for file sharing. I have mine configured with OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and NFSv4. But I mostly use it to stream videos using Nginx over HTTP to my iPad.
For something a bit faster than PogoPlug v4, try MiraBox from GlobalScale technologies.
I once had a signature.
There will also be some infrastructure needed for VPN support - at least for routing, key exchange and NAT traversal.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It runs on DD-WRT so you can assume it's standard disk handling under the hood and that limitation can be raised by swapping out or configuring the OS.
I'm much more interested in dm-RAID and encryption.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's hardware that costs about $20-$30 to make. USB3 and GbE would add $10 or so - very significant. I'd access it mostly via wireless and for that the speed is very adequate.
However since their software runs on DD-WRT it should be possible to run it on more powerful HW too.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If you're thinking of doing this DIY with a router USD port or Raspberry Pi bear in mind that some USB IDE/Sata adapters don't support spindown (hdparm -y or -Y). As a result you have a 2.5" disk running constantly leading to failure and also a risk of overheating.
Unfrtunately I can't tell you which adapters support the poweroff or standby signals.
A blog I run for the wealth
You seem to confuse price and cost. I've been lurking on the ARM-netbook mailing list for a while; this stuff is dirt cheap to make in China. There's a reason why high volume low end Linux based systems have come down to $30-$40.
USB2 and 100baseT is probably built into the SoC while USB3 or GbE needs an additional IC.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I've been a fan of http://www.backupthat.com/ for a while now and they do something similar. You get unlimited (ever expanding) storage through your email. Essentially, when you run out of space, you just connect another email account. I've got about 500GB stored with them for free.