WD My Passport Wireless 1TB Storage Drive Review
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The WD My Passport appears to be a very solid product that advances what one should expect from a portable storage device. WD has created a wireless mobile storage device that allows you to cut the cords and transfer files between pretty much every popular iOS, Android, Windows or Mac device out there. Being able to quickly transfer files between smartphones, tablets and computers can be frustrating, but WD makes it super simple with this product. We love products that actually solve a problem and the My Passport Wireless will certainly solve the issue of how to centralize all your data on one device and then you are able to control all that data on your own personal cloud. Photographers will also love the My Passport Wireless due to the fact that it supports SD cards and has an integrated FTP. If you happen to have a DSLR camera that has WiFi support you’ll be able to set it up to where the pictures and videos will be saved on the drive.
When it comes to performance we were seeing right around 113MB/s when it came to sequential read/write speeds when using the USB 3.0 cable. When we cut the cord and used the 802.11n solution on the 2.4GHz band we found performance dropped down to 5.8MB/s read and 7.6MB/s write on the same sequential test. It would be nice to see performance numbers higher than this, but it is still competitive with the other drives on the market and you have to remember that this is WD’s first wireless portable drive that they are bringing to market, so they will be able to build off of these speeds. When being used as a Wi-Fi extender we found download speeds of roughly 9Mbps, which is a far cry from the 100Mbps service local network it was connected to, but it you are seeing the limitations of the single stream, single band 802.11n wireless solution that WD went with. It would have been nice to see an 802.11ac antenna being used, but WD looked at battery life versus performance and factored in cost and found that 802.11n was the optimal solution for today. We were able to hook up several devices and stream HD content and we got about six hours of battery life, so it looks like WD came up with a solid device for today that has appropriate battery life. WD actually caches up to 6 minutes of content onto a 16GB flash chip on the storage drive, so other than the initial buffering of the video we were able to get seamless video playback.
WD My Passport Wireless Models and Pricing:
The WD My Passport Wireless 1TB that we looked at today has an MSRP of $179.99 with the expected street price to be slightly lower than that after the initial demand subsides. WD expects the WD My Passport Wireless to become available to purchase on September 21, 2014. The My Passport Wireless faces competition from devices like the Seagate Wireless Plus 1TB ($159.99 shipped) and the Corsair Voyager Air 2 1TB wireless drive at ($195 shipped), but is competitively priced and featured when it simultaneous streams and battery life. Which drive is right for you is ultimately your decision, but WD has entered the wireless storage market with a very solid first product and we would recommend it to our readers.
Legit Bottom Line: The WD My Passport Wireless storage drives allow you to cut the cords and connect all the computing and mobile devices in your home to one device to share and backup your data. It makes life simple and and what household couldn’t benefit from offloading their content to free up space to their very own personal cloud?