By Patrick Avenell

Japanese storage specialist Buffalo, which is distributed in Australia by Uniden, has today unveiled a new hard drive/cloud storage solution called CloudStation.

Once a consumer has set up one of the new CloudStation devices, which connect directly into a router through a supplied Ethernet cable, they are able to access their content remotely; through a PC, a smartphone or a tablet.

Buffalo is promoting CloudStation as a cost effective consumer cloud solution, as it does not require ongoing access fees or charge for the app gaining access to Pogoplug cloud service. Importantly, the Pogoplug app is available on all the major platforms, including Apple, Android, BlackBerry and WebOS.

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Once you have stored all the content you want to share on the CloudStation, such as music, videos, images, important documents and alike, you can grant access to third parties — for example, friends — to particular files of your choosing. A real world example would be letting your friends access and playback your music collection, but restricting their access to your Word documents.

“Bringing CloudStation to the Australian market delivers on Buffalo’s promise of simplifying data mobility, allowing users to access and share their content freely, with anyone, anywhere,” said Buffalo ANZ business manager Boris Shen.

“While consumer and small business interest in cloud storage has been gaining momentum, CloudStation can promise one thing that other online cloud service providers can’t: complete control over your digital files, with no fees ever.”

This is, of course, a cost of purchase. There are two lines of Buffalo CloudStation products available. The consumer focused CS-X is a single drive unit available in 1TB (RRP $209) and 2TB (RRP $259) varieties, while the double drive, CloudStation Pro Duo CS-WV/R1, which is more for the serious user or a small business, is RRP $389 for 2TB and RRP $639 for 4TB.

The CloudStation is set to go on sale on 28 November 2011.