Doing something like this over a box like this gives you a lot more room to grow, since you can use multiple drives at once, plus you get the benefit of being able to grab SMART data from the drive, which I doubt this box provides.

So if I understand this correctly, could I add a Cloud Pod to my local network and then mount it via NFS on machine on the network?

Could solve a very challenging workflow, where we want to access external drives (plugged in the office) from an AWS EC2 instance

The other piece of Black Magic kit that has gotten my attention is a 10 Gbit primary with 100 Gbit uplink network switch designed for AV production work. Decent price compared to the bigger players (Cisco, Netgear, Extreme, etc.) and it has some VERY unique features: an HDMI port to watch video traffic that passes through it. Yeah, there is some security aspects about that worth bringing up but in a production environment where the network is (mostly) private, it is a pretty big deal to preview stuff flowing over the network. The other big feature is the ability directly through the front panel of the switch to do video routing between devices without the need to install an application on a computer that’s on that network. I know a few audio guys dealing with Dante and AVB who’d love that convenient feature if it worked on those protocols. Much will come down to its software as well as the robustness of the hardware. I do like Black Magic gear but they’ve had some lemons in the past: I’ve had 19 of 20 Web Presenters fail on me due to faulty internal power supplies.

If you’re looking at one of these, the STH review is right. It’s a really simple device and that’s good and that’s bad depending on your expectations. If you’re conceptually thinking it’s a way to turn a USB drive into a simple network share that’s easy enough for my grandmother to use, then you’re about right with the concept.