Is your smartphone running out of space? Can’t install more apps or games because you have lots of videos from the last trip? How about a storage upgrade? WD My Passport Wireless portable hard drive is one solution for these problems.
WD My Passport Wireless portable hard drive is the cheapest wireless hard drive for your laptop, smartphone or tablets. Let’s see how this drive performs.
What’s in the box
You will get all the necessary accessories in the box. The WD My Passport Wireless drive, a USB 3.0 cable, a USB AC power adapter to charge the device and a quick installation guide to setup your drive for the first time.
Design
WD My Passport portable drive is a wireless drive with a relatively thick casing, which is because of the battery I guess. We got some WD branding on the top with two LED indicators. One power key and WPS key on the side with a USB 3.0 port. It also comes with an SD card slot to expand drive’s storage or read your memory card wirelessly and four rubber feets at the bottom to keep the drive steady.
Features
The best feature of this device is written in the model name – Wireless. This is a wireless portable hard drive which you can access wirelessly on any of your devices whether it is your PC, Mac, Android or Apple smartphone. It works best with all the devices, reading or writing the data from/to WD My Passport Wireless.
Features include an app for Android and iOS to access the contents of the drive. You just need to connect your device to the Wi-Fi hotspot created by the WD My Passport Wireless. Connect your WD wireless drive to your existing Wi-Fi network to get access to the internet.
You can also read your micro SD card using the slot provided. Insert your micro SD card in the adapter and slide it in the micro SD card slot provided at the left side of the WD wireless drive. Now you can access your micro SD card wirelessly with the drive.
The Dashboard (Control Panel)
The dashboard looks more like the WD My Cloud OS with a little information about the drive like the storage space occupied in a pie chart, battery status, and connection status. More features are available in the tabs which you can access using the menu bar appear above the information on the main screen.
You can control the whole drive using this interface; there are so many options to configure your drive as the name of the hotspot drive creates, change the password or change the drive mode (performance or battery saver). You can check for the updates also to upgrade the interface and remove some bugs from the drive; you can’t use your drive while updating and it takes approximately 15 minutes to update the firmware version.
Working
It took me almost 2 minutes to set this drive and get it working. If you can’t figure out then read the instructions below:
- Turn the WD My Passport Wireless on by pressing the power button (or plug it into wall adapter and it turns on automatically).
- Wait till you see the blue LED goes steady blue, now the drive is ready to connect.
- Connect your laptop or desktop to the My Passport Wireless network.
- Open a browser and navigate to the hard drives default IP address: http://192.168.60.1
- Click I Accept when prompted on browser, type in the desired Wi-Fi name and password and click Next.
- The drive will reboot, and you will see a new Wireless network with the name and password you just created, connect to it and follow the instructions.
- After a while, you will land on the control panel where you can see all the settings.
To charge it and use it with your desktop without Wi-Fi, you can use the USB 3.0 cable which comes with the drive in the package.
To access the drive content, you need to open File Explorer in Windows PC and find the drive under Network section.
Performance
WD My Passport Wireless took so much time to turn on the wireless hotspot, one turned on it took me 5 minutes to turn it off. Read write speed wirelessly is not so much good, the maximum write speed is 5 Mbps which is much low than an expensive portable hard drive like this.
Pros:
- Micro SD card slot
- Easy setup
- Dedicated Android and iOS apps
- Low Price (Rs. 10,645)
Cons:
- Takes time to turn on Wi-Fi hotspot
- Battery backup is less
Verdict
If you are buying a portable hard drive to sync content from/to all your devices includes your PC, smartphone or iPad then this device is good. But the battery backup at performance mode is not good; it can only give you about 2 hours of backup with a full charge. The build quality is superb, and the rubber feets keep the device steady on any surface.
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