These ports can't be used to share a USB printer on your local network, which is a surprising limitation. The Dockstar has three USB ports as well as a dock for Seagate's own FreeAgent range of portable hard disks. If it doesn't, then you'll have to do this manually, but the setup wizard provides the necessary port numbers to do this. The Dockstar will attempt to open the ports necessary for its remote access features to work if your router supports UPnP port forwarding. The online setup wizard takes less than five minutes to complete, if only because there are very few options aside from your user name and password. Although it can share files among all your networked computers like any other NAS, the Dockstar's design emphasises its extensive remote access features rather its basic local file sharing capabilities.Ĭonfiguring the Dockstar is extremely easy. Unlike every other network storage enclosure we've seen, it doesn't take internal SATA hard disks but external USB disks instead. The user experience for both is the same.Seagate's Dockstar is very different from other network storage devices. A basic Pogoplug adapter is also $99 and demands no subscription fee the DockStar throws extra USB connections into the mixture, but that's nothing you couldn't add to the Pogoplug by virtue of a USB hub. The $99.99 sticker price of the DockStar includes a year's worth of Pogoplug service (though no FreeAgent Go drive, which start at $89.99 for 250GB) after that period you're looking at a further yearly subscription of $29.99, and that's where we can't quite follow Seagate's thinking. There's also an iPhone application, and various levels of integration with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can share directories, too, either by automatically emailing out links – with read or read/write permissions – or via an RSS feed. A single green LED lights up to show that the dock is online.įrom that point on, when you remember you want a copy of the presentation you were working on at home, would like to show your parents a slideshow of holiday snaps, or fancy listening to the new album you've downloaded, it's a simple case of visiting the site and logging in to remotely access your content. Setup is incredibly simple – at least for the basic functionality – requiring only that power and ethernet connections be made, a FreeAgent Go drive docked, and then stopping by the online registration site to create a user account. To that basic system Seagate add a far more streamlined dock design, which takes a standard Seagate FreeAgent Go drive slotted in almost perpendicularly, together with an extra three USB 2.0 ports (two on the rear, by the ethernet port, and a third on the side) to add extra external storage. Register the adapter at their site and, by tapping in your account details from any internet-connected computer, you can access the files on the drive and even stream audio/video content. The basic Pogoplug adapter looks like an overgrown wall-wart, with a single USB port (for the hard-drive) and an ethernet port. Pogoplug, first announced back at CES in January, is a combination hardware/software system that makes sharing USB drives over the internet straightforward through an online interface. Seagate get round this by using Pogoplug's technology, or more accurately by squeezing a Pogoplug adapter into the dock itself. That, together with NAT firewall confusion and concern over just who has access to your shared files, is often enough to scupper any half-hearted intention to open up a NAS. Home broadband connections often charge extra for static IP addresses, meaning the string of digits you have to remember in order to access your home network can change without you necessarily realising it. What dissuades most users from setting up remote access is the hassle of network settings.
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