The Western Digital My Passport Wireless ($179.99) looks just like a traditional portable hard drive, but it's actually a portable wireless media drive that stores 1TB of music, photos, videos, and any other document you'd like to carry around with you. It's a good travel companion for your family, and has a handy SD card slot for uploading photos and videos from cameras and other devices, but there are some features you get in other wireless drives that you may miss here.
Design and Features
The My Passport Wireless ($169.99 at Amazon) measures about 0.96 by 3.5 by 5 inches (HWD), and weighs just north of 8 ounces. The chassis has a metal ring shell bisecting the black top and bottom panels. True to its name, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi is the primary way to connect to the drive. There's also a single USB 3.0 Micro-B port for transferring files to and from your Mac or PC, or for recharging the drive's internal battery. It fits the same design ID as drives like the Western Digital My Passport Studio (1TB), but adds a Power button and a Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) button instead of the FireWire ports found on the Studio drive. You can use the drive's bundled USB charger and USB cable with other smart devices.
WPS can be used to quickly connect devices like some laptops and external Wi-Fi adapters to the drive, provided they support the standard. Otherwise, you can use a password to protect the My Passport Wireless' 802.11b/g/n network. Most portable media drive competitors like the Corsair Voyager Air( at Amazon), the LaCie Fuel($189.00 at Amazon), and the Seagate Wireless Plus($199.83 at Amazon) lack WPS.
Similar Products
LaCie Fuel
Corsair Voyager Air
Seagate Wireless Plus
The network that the My Passport Wireless creates is initially designed to be a one-to-one direct connection with a smartphone or tablet, but once you've gone through the setup process, you can connect up to eight devices at a time, including laptops, phones, and tablets. Once on the network, all your devices can search and play media stored on the drive.
Android and iOS tablet and phone users can download the WD My Cloud app from Google Play or iTunes, respectively. The app lets you rename the drive and its network, set a password for the network, and otherwise monitors the storage space and battery capacity of the drive. Firmware updates are also handled through the app. Because there's no My Cloud app for Windows or Macs, you can connect laptops and access the media through the drive's built-in Web server as well. One notable omission is that the Kindle version of the WD My Cloud app hasn't been updated to connect to the My Passport Wireless. The Seagate Media app compatible with the LaCie Fuel and Seagate Wireless Plus has a Kindle version.
Once you've set up the network, you can attach the drive to a public or portable Wi-Fi hotspot, or to your home network. Note that the hotspot setup only uses the external hotspot for access to the Internet. The home network mode opens the drive up to your home Wi-Fi network so you can watch the videos from the drive on a DLNA-compatible HDTV on your home's Wi-Fi network, for example. Both home network and hotspot modes allow devices connected to the My Passport Wireless to access the Internet. Then again, the Corsair Voyager Air, the LaCie Fuel, and the Seagate Wireless Plus also have Internet pass-through.
The SD card reader lets you download and back up any card you pop in the slot. You can either download files on demand via the app, which is the default, or set the drive to automatically download anything from an inserted card. The latter is very handy if you have several cards to process at once. You can also set the drive to automatically erase the card after each download, which speeds things even more. You will, of course, have to be careful if you have both settings on automatic, since it will end the process by erasing the card every time. The transfer and erasing process worked quickly and reliably in our testing.
The My Passport Wireless comes with a standard 2-year warranty. A slightly thicker 2TB model is available for $219.99.
On The Road
I connected the drive to the both our lab test network and a portable hotspot, and it passed Internet signals through to an iPhone 5s( at Amazon) and an iPad Air($389.99 at eBay). Playing back photos in the WD My Cloud app is fine, and it is an easy way to view your snapshots while still on vacation. Music and videos play back easily as well, but the app has no resume function, so you'll have to either watch each video again from the start, or scrub along the timeline manually to get to where you left off. Viewing DRM-coded videos like "The Hunger Games," bought from iTunes, was problematic. On the LaCie Fuel, I could view the video in Safari after launching it from the Seagate Media app, with iTunes taking care of the DRM. The same file streamed from the My Passport Wireless refused to play in Safari when opened from the My Cloud app.
I witnessed an odd effect whenever I moved the drive. When I picked up the drive it felt like picking up a gyroscope, where it resisted movement perpendicular to the axis of rotation. It felt like it didn't want to be moved, which could hamper portability. The drive continued to serve data, but it felt like it could become an added source of wear and tear. The drive is rated for 20 hours of standby time and 6 hours of continuous video streaming. We left the drive on during an 8-hour workday, and it had plenty of juice left after it passed Internet through, as well as streaming several movies and TV shows during those 8 hours.
Copying files to the My Passport Wirelesss by dragging and dropping is quick and easy, and the drive is formatted exFAT for compatibility with both Macs and Windows PCs. Once files are loaded, the drive will read the file names, then catalog and categorize the files. You can set the catalog cache size from 1GB to 64GB, which helps speed access to the files. You can also set up passcodes for access to the files (so you can give people access to the Internet pass through, but not the files on your drive), and you can have it remind you that you're on a data plan so you can avoid streaming video from the Internet if at all possible. The LaCie Fuel and Seagate Wireless Plus also catalog their files and present them categorized as well in the Seagate Media app. The one thing we'd wish for is a media sync utility for your Mac or PC, which automatically searches for files that can play on your devices and copies them over. Seagate supports such a sync utility for the LaCie Fuel and the Seagate Wireless Plus.
If you have your media files organized on your host PCs or home server, then the Western Digital My Passport Wireless is a great way to bring them with you on a business trip or vacation. If you're like most folks and have files and folders all over your PC, though, then the LaCie Fuel is a better choice. Its media sync utility and the fact that the Fuel handles DRM content better keeps it on as our Editors' Choice portable wireless media drive. That said, if you take a lot of pictures on vacation, the presence of an SD card slot could tip the scales in this drive's favor.
The 1TB Western Digital My Passport Wireless portable media drive lets you carry lots of movies, music, and photos with you, and it adds a few notable extras including an SD card slot.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
