When it comes to the storage devices found inside enthusiast PCs, solid-state drives reign supreme at this point. Their performance is crazy fast, and they have no moving parts. But there’s still a lot of demand for the old mechanical drives. They may be pokey, but the cost per gigabyte is much lower. And if they're in an external enclosure, you can have a pretty handy mobile backup device. But lately, mech drive makers haven't been willing to go quietly into that good night. Western Digital's answer is a unit with a built-in wireless hub, mobile apps, a rechargeable battery, and SD card slot, in an enclosure that's about an inch tall.
The wireless aspect is arguably the biggest draw. This drive can take up to eight connections at once, and since it's a Wi-Fi hub, you can use it as a pass-through to the Internet. In this role, the drive is basically a range extender, which sounds quite handy for situations where you encounter dead spots that need a signal boost. With its internal battery, you could bring Wi-Fi to locations that don't even have electrical outlets nearby. Of course, with all that going on, the battery won’t last very long.
The company claims up to six hours of video streaming before the battery dies, but adding Internet access to the mix will push that number down further. It’s not easy to test definitively, because battery drain will depend a lot on the signal strength achievable by your PC or mobile device, the hub, and your Internet router. Also, if you plug the drive into your PC with a USB cable, Wi-Fi shuts off. For some reason, this is by design, and mentioned near the end of the manual, in the troubleshooting section. If you want to both power the device and connect to it over Wi-Fi, you'll have to plug the USB cable directly into the bundled AC adapter. Even then, the battery will not charge unless the unit is idle. You’ll unearth this nugget in WD’s online support pages. It looks like being a Wi-Fi hub and an external drive is too much for a USB 3.0 cable to handle.
Making matters even worse, the drive transferred data over Wi-Fi at just a few MB/s, regardless of whether the battery was set to "Battery Life” or "Performance” mode. We couldn’t dig up any information on what wireless speeds it’s rated for, but it definitely wasn’t in the 802.11 g or802.11n range. When we connected the drive to a PC over USB 3.0 and just created a network share on it, file transfer performance degraded further. The Android and iOS apps didn’t report transfer speed or estimated time of completion.
When transferring files directly to and from a PC over USB 3.0, we got around ЮОМВ/s, so at least there were no surprises there. However, this cuts off access to the drive’s web interface. With that gone, you can’t reset the drive to factory settings, view its battery level, or update the firmware. WD’s desktop software does not expose those functions, and updating the firmware made the device forget out network router’s password. Speaking of password security, you can remove the one on the device itself just by holding down the power and WPS buttons for "around" 10 seconds. That's convenient in case you forget the password, but it’s poor security against unauthorized access.
The My Passport Wireless isn’t a bad storage device, really. It’s just one with some disappointing limitations that aren’t articulated until you’ve already brought the drive home and plugged it in. It tries to go Swiss Army on you but ends up more like a butter knife, doing the basics of external storage correctly but being poorly adapted to functions outside of that role, for which you are paying a premium price. - TOM MCNAMARA