It’s time to review the WD My Passport Wireless drive.
This is how WD describe the My Passport Wireless:
“This is the one wireless drive for all your devices. Free up space on your tablet and smartphone. Back up or transfer your photos and videos from your SD card to keep on shooting. It’s wireless. Portable. It’s one drive with no boundaries.”
What’s in the Box?
The box contains the My Passport Wireless, a power adaptor, a cable and some paperwork.
A Closer Look
Using the My Passport Wireless
Once you have charged the My Passport Wireless, it’s time to connect it to either your computer, or your mobile device. The following screenshots show the web interface via my MacBook.
Once you have signed into the My Passport Wireless you can easily see how much capacity you have remaining, what you have used, how much battery charge is left, how the My Passport Wireless is connected and more.
You can also make changes, for example how your My Passport Wireless connects to your network or the Internet, various admin type tasks, hardware details, media streaming and even checking for and updating the firmware.
You can then start using the My Passport Wireless for whatever you need it for – for example, if you want to transfer images from an SD Card, just pop the SD Card into the side and then press the WPS button to start the transfer.
Final Thoughts
The WD My Passport Wireless is available in either 500GB, 1TB or 2TB (2TB is the one we have here for review.
The My Passport Wireless is a little bigger and heavier than a standard external drive, but then it is doing a lot more. It also looks good with its silver edges and black top.
Configuring the My Passport Wireless is fairly simple and straightforward – my advice would be to fully charge it first though, especially if you want to do the firmware update. You can leave it plugged in to the power thought if you don’t want to wait.
Battery life is pretty good – I got somewhere between 4 and a half and 5 and a half hours from it, and that was a mixture of file transfers and media streaming.
The media streaming work well – just connect whatever you want to use to play the files to the My Passport Wireless and away you go.
One thing that I didn’t like was the amount of time it took to transfer my files via SD Card, it seemed to take forever, so make sure you do regular transfers if you are taking lots of photographs otherwise you will find yourself waiting around, a lot! Transferring files was easy though – just put the SD card in and press a button. Then wait…..
However, what was fast was connecting via the USB 3.0 port – transferring files this way was very quick!
Another useful feature is the Internet Sharing option. What this does is allow you to connect and use the My Passport Wireless as a Wi-Fi hub so that multiple devices could connect to the My Passport Wireless to share a single connection. This is very useful if you are somewhere like a hotel room that might charge you to use Wi-Fi on a per device basis!
The interface is very simple to use and gives a lot of information – it’s very easy to make changes and to get an up to date picture of the drives usage.
The My Passport Wireless also comes with a 2 year warranty.
The WD My Passport Wireless costs around £199 for the 2TB model so it’s not cheap, but you do get those added features, it’s not just another external hard drive.
