Seagate FreeAgent DockStar Network Adapter [Works With FreeAgent Go Portable HDDs, Share Your HDD On Your Home Network or With Others Anywhere Using PogoPlug]

It’s all about sharing. People want to share their lives with anyone that’ll listen and sites like YouTube and FaceBook are a testament to this personal media exodus. On top of this, we all want to be able to access our data and information no matter where we are on the planet and if we have friends we want them to have access to it as well. Could we be any more high maintenance? Seagate has just announced a new network adapter called the FreeAgent DockStar and it too is all about sharing.

As the name suggests, the Seagate FreeAgent Dockstar was made to work with the Seagate FreeAgent series of portable HDDs. But don’t worry; it’s compatible with most other USB storage devices, too. The basic premise of the Gigabit Ethernet connected DockStar is that you connect your portable USB hard disk and it instantly becomes available to share with your entire home network as well as anyone with an Internet connection. The main connection cradle is made to work directly with the FreeAgent Go portable USB hard drives but the unit also has two rear-mounted and one side-mounted USB port so you can connect your other devices.

Now for the rub. In order to take advantage of the Seagate FreeAgent DockStar’s sharing capabilities you’ll need to use Cloud Engines’ PogoPlug service, which comes along with the dock as part of the installation package. PogoPlug is basically the web-enabled front-end used to access and manage the connected USB storage devices. Both you and anyone else that wants to access the files will see the same interface, so it appears to offer fairly seamless integration. As for installation, you basically plug in two cables (power and Ethernet) and then surf on over to the web activation page to activate and automatically configure the network adapter.

Once you’re up and running you just add your friends’ email addresses to the DockStar’s profile and it will automatically send them an email notification with a link to your shared drive on PogoPlug. There’s also a free iPhone app (of course there is) that gives you remote access to your files and lets you send pictures straight from your iPhone to a folder on the FreeAgent DockStar. As if all that weren’t enough, users can also place linked pictures and video into their MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter profiles directly from the DockStar interface.

The Seagate FreeAgent DockStar network adapter is available for sale now through www.Seagate.com for $99.99. The first year of the Pogoplug service is included in your initial purchase, but after that it’ll cost you $29.99 a year for unlimited storage and access privileges.