My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage 1 TB – Review

Western Digital is a very popular name when it comes to external hard drives and recently we reviewed Western Digital My Passport Pro 2 TB RAID Storage and today we have picked up My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage.

My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage has the Wi-Fi connectivity and battery backup of 6 hour (while video streaming) and an in-built SD-card reader with FTP support. WD has launched WD Cloud App which allows mobiles/tablets to wirelessly transfer data from hard drive to the device.

[ REVIEW ] My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage

We are reviewing model number WDBK8Z0010BBK, 1 TB variant for Mac OS.

Specifications

Inside Package

• My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage
• USB cable (3.0)
• USB power adapter [AC USB charger (output of 5V / 2A)]
• Quick Install Guide

Charging

Either use USB Power adapter or connect the usb cable to your laptop. Red light blinks stating that My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage is charging.

There are 4 levels of charging indications:

• Blue color – 100% charged
• Green color – 75% charged
• Yellow color – 50% charged
• Red color – 15% charge

Design

My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage is compact in size and easily fits in your hand though it has got some weight and thickness as compared to WD My Passport Ultra 1 TB portable hard drive.

On the front top side you will find two LED indicators, one is for battery charging/charged i.e. Power and other one for Wi-Fi connectivity. It has two manual buttons, one is power button and other one has two functions (press it while hard drive is power off, it displays battery indicator and while on, it allows you to connect to Wi-Fi networks).

How to set up?

Press the power button (left to the USB port), battery indication will come at that instant.

As soon as the hard drive gets connected to the laptop via USB cable, you will see white light blinking. You can either use it as traditional hard drive or use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot (in that case it acts like a media server/NAS).

Transfer Speed – Performance

To check the transfer speed of the My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage we used Blackmagic Disk Speed app. 

5GB stress test – 5 Times done in continuity (Hard drive connected via USB cable)
Write 34.9 MB/s
Read 39.9 MB/s

Read/Write transfer speed remained till 30 MB/s which is kind of very disappointing.

It also has support for FTP (though it is turned off initially for security reasons).

My Cloud App

To transfer the data from hard drive to your mobile/tablet, download the WD My Cloud App from Play Store. Connect to Wi-Fi “MyPassport” network on your mobile and access the files from the app.

Use http://mypassport.local to access the settings on your Mac or http://mypassport to access on Windows OS. WebUI has a very nice interface as compared to the app.

SD Card Compatibility

SD, SDHC, SDXC and micro SD card if used along with supporting adapter. Almost all kind of file formats are supported by the hard drive but My Cloud app has an issue with displaying thumbnails (it worked with jpeg files but not with RAW files).

Put in your SD card inside the slot and press the WPS button, it will start copying of data from SD card to the hard drive.

Pros

• Compact Size – Easily fits in 1 hand
• Built-in SD card slot
• Wireless connectivity – connects with up to 8 devices at the same time (including mobile devices)
• Rechargeable Battery
• Stream media to connect devices – Can be used as Bridge to share internet and DLNA media server
• Wi-Fi password protection
• USB 3.0 connectivity
• Power button
• FTP Support
• Nice WebUI
• MyCloud app support

Cons

• Slow transfer speed in Wi-Fi connectivity and USB – Avg. performance
• Overpriced
• Setting up Wi-Fi connection takes too much time.

My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage 2 TB variant is available for Rs. 15300 from Amazon India, $174 from Amazon International, and for £146 from Amazon UK.

My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage overall is a very expensive deal and transfer speed is not very nice though wireless connectivity option, SD card slot, FTP support, media server features have the ability to attract attention of interested users. For a 1 TB hard drive, there are many other options available in the market if one is looking for a normal USB connectivity hard drive.

Let us know if you have used My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage or used similar hard drives, drop your comments below with your experience.