Being a Drobo owner, one of our newsletters mentioned a promo where DataRobotics collaborated with PogoPlug, a cloud-storage service. While I’m perfectly happy with Dropbox, Pogoplug offers something that I find really useful. So I decided to give it a whirl.

As I said earlier, it’s a cloud-based storage app – and we’ve seen a lot of those. Dropbox by far is the most effective service IMHO – so I’m not going to abandon that anytime soon. Pogoplug’s online cloud space is 5GB for free, but since there was a promo, I got 10GB. But like I said, I’m perfectly happy with Dropbox so far, so I’m not going to use Pogoplug for that.

The one feature of Pogoplug that I find attractive is it allows remote-access capabilities on any of your drives/volumes – which, basically turns your computer into a personal file server… allowing you to access any of the folders you’ve made available anywhere, anytime.

In my case, I made my Drobo available – particularly my iTunes library. So I’m essentially doing a ZumoCast-esque implementation:

That’s Pogoplug on my 16GB iPhone – in the process of indexing my entire music collection – which is easily half a terabyte in size. The difference with ZumoCast is that I’m not limited to just my iTunes library – I can pretty much make available anything I want.

It costs nothing to get Pogoplug account,¹ and the mobile application that lets you access your files is free as well.

The software that allows what I’ve just demonstrated however, is not. You can use it for free, but it will be lacking features – one of them is the exact feature I’m talking about right now: media streaming.

Purchasing a license will cost you roughly $30 (exclusive of taxes, etc.) so it can set you back as much as $35. But you only have to pay once, and the license is good for all your machines (should you want to share stuff from other machines).

iTunes match has useful features as far as purchasing, integration with mobile iTunes, etc. goes. But ultimately, streaming will be the most used feature of iTunes match – and you’ll get all that for a recurring fee of $24/year. You can already get streaming for free with ZumoCast – and you can get that and much more functionality with a single $30 Pogoplug purchase.

If you’re just a regular user/music listener – I guess ZumoCast would do the job. But if you’re a professional that needs access to your personal/work files at a moments notice, then Pogoplug’s offering can’t be beat.