WD My Passport Wireless review – portable hard drive with built-in wi-fi

By Stephen Fenech On Oct 22, 2014

Our demands for memory and storage are steadily on the rise and the new WD My Passport Wireless makes it easier stream and view content on our devices anywhere.

WD’s My Passport Wireless offers all of the benefits of a regular portable hard drive but adds wireless connectivity to stream the content on board to computers, smartphones and tablets.

The product is easily portable and small enough to fit in one hand and is slightly wider and thicker than a smartphone.

The wi-fi enabled storage solution broadcasts its own wireless network so you can easily connect from a computer or mobile device to access the photos, videos and music on board.

Up to eight devices can link to the My Passport Wireless at the same time and wirelessly access the content.

It’s a great solution for travellers especially for young children in the backseat on a long drive who can now access their favourite content on their devices from the drive without any arguments.

The device has 802.11n wireless standard onboard and can smoothly stream up to four high definition movies at the same time.

WD My Passport Wireless is also attractive to users who want to carry around all of their favourite content but don’t have the space on their devices to store it.

Even the highest capacity iPhones with 128GB storage don’t come close to the space available on these drives

The device can also be connected with a USB 3.0 cable to your Mac or PC for high-speed transfer of data like a regular external hard drive.

Users can download the WD My Cloud app for iOS and Android devices which creates a location and menu system on your mobile device to access the content onboard the My Passport Wireless.

The app also makes it possible to access content from cloud storage services like Dropbox OneDrive and Google Drive.

Available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, the WD My Passport Wireless also has an SD card slot, located on the left side of the WD My Passport Wireless, to make accessing and uploading content on the move even easier.

Users can insert their SD card and copy the content to the onboard hard drive.

The content on that SD card can also be shared wirelessly to other devices through the My Passport Wireless.

But this is also an excellent solution for travellers and photographers who want to transfer the content from their memory cards to the WD drive to make room for even more photos and videos.

Also included is FTP (file transfer protocol) which means the drive has the ability to link with compatible wireless camera and automatically transfer photos from the camera to the drive as they are capturing them.

The WD My Passport Wireless is powered by a rechargeable battery that can run continuously for up to six hours with up to 20 hours of standby power.

The power indicator light is colour coded so users can tell at a glance how much charge is left on board – blue = 100 per cent, green = 75 per cent, orange = 50 per cent and red = 15 per cent.

The WD My Passport Wireless is priced at $249.99 (1TB) and $299.99 (2TB) and is available in stores now.

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