Western Digital My Passport Wireless Review
by Ganesh T S on December 3, 2014 4:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Gadgets
- Mobile
- wireless storage
Wireless Benchmarks
Prior to benchmarking the actual bandwidth that the My Passport Wireless could provide, we first checked up on the signal strength of the SSID at varying distances within a 1500 sq. ft. house (even across multiple rooms / drywalls). It behaved like any standard modern Wi-Fi router, with the strength falling to -91 dBm around 45 ft. away from the unit. That said, we expect typical usage to be with a mobile device in the same room as the My Passport Wireless unit. In such a case, we had a signal strength of around -43 dBm around 8 ft. away with direct line of sight to the unit. The gallery below shows some screenshots from Wi-Fi Analyzer on a HTC One M8.
Western Digital indicates that the performance of the My Passport Wireless is best when used in 'Direct Connection' mode (i.e, the device itself is not connected to any other Wi-Fi network) with the performance mode for streaming turned on (at the cost of battery life, though). The device supports up to five simultaneous wireless clients. For our testing, we connected the following clients to the device:
- HTC One M7
- HTC One M8
- LG G2
- Ramos i9
- Zotac ZBOX CA540 nano
While the HTC One M7 and M8 and the LG G2 are smartphones, the Ramos i9 is an Intel Clovertrail tablet. All of them were running the WD My Cloud app on Android 4.2+. The Zotac ZBOX CA540 nano was running Windows 8.1. A screenshot of the web UI of the My Passport Wireless (as seen from the ZBOX in the above configuration) makes the situation clear.
While photos and music streaming are not expected to make the unit sweat, video streaming is a different story. Hence, to determine wireless performance, we took 720p streams of varying bit-rates from 5 Mbps to 30 Mbps and loaded it on the My Passport Wireless (with a different copy for each client to access). It must be noted that the Android version relies on third-party video player apps for playback. However, the iOS version can play videos within the My Cloud app itself.
With five clients attached to the device, we first tested playback on each system one by one to determine the maximum bitrate stream that could play without any network issues / hiccups. The table below presents our findings.
| WD My Passport Wireless - Wi-Fi Bandwidth | ||
| Device | Video Player | Max. Bitrate for Stutter-Free Playback (Mbps) |
| HTC One M7 | VLC for Android 0.9.10 | 25 Mbps |
| HTC One M8 | VLC for Android 0.9.10 | 35 Mbps |
| LG G2 | Stock Streaming Player | 28 Mbps |
| Ramos i9 | Native Android Video Player | 10 Mbps |
| Zotac ZBOX CI540 nano | Windows 8.1 Video App | 30 Mbps |
Moving on from the single-client access mode, we attempted to check the behavior of the unit with multiple simultaneous accesses to different copies of the same stream within the unit. Unfortunately, even basic two client scenarios playing back 10 Mbps streams each ended up stuttering on one of the clients. This is probably due to the WD Green drive not being optimized for such types of accesses.
In any case, the performance is more than acceptable for single-user scenarios. Video bitrates of the order of 35 Mbps are in the realm of uncompressed Blu-ray rips currently - consumers looking to stream those collections to their tablets and smartphones are power users who need to look into a NAS with transcoding capabilities. Photographers looking to upload photos from a camera to the My Passport Wireless using FTP over Wi-Fi can probably expect data rates of around 4 - 6 MBps. The target market for the My Passport Wireless should not find any reason for disappointment with the above results.
Obviously, higher speeds with 802.11ac and 5GHz support would be welcome for faster photo transfers and other similar non-streaming scenarios. Thankfully, for the consumption side, WD creates thumbnails for faster browsing via the My Cloud app. This makes the currently possible speeds tolerable while browsing high-resolution albums.
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name99 - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
A laptop also a lot larger than a disk...If someone both wants to take their iPad on a cruise AND wants to take a large number of movies to watch, this is a more convenient solution.
That may not be what you want to do (it's not what I want to do) but I think it's silly to immediately say "I don't need this product therefore nobody does". I'm not in the market for maternity jeans, but that doesn't mean that there is NO market for maternity jeans, or that people who buy maternity jeans are stupid and don't realize what they really want to buy is miniskirts.
probedb - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
But this is not it's designed use case as already stated. A friend at work bought one as it's ideal for him, instead of taking a bulky laptop/notebook on holiday he takes this and a tablet for viewing photos. Less bulk than he used to carry around.Arbie - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
A similar product but with an SSD might be better. Much less space - but still a lot - and much less power and weight; these matter more in a portable.name99 - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
SSD requires substantially higher power than a mechanical disk when writing. That's why very few SSDs run reliably off a single USB2 connection.And the disk is not performance limited by the mechanicals anyway --- in the expected usage model it is limited by WiFi.
frodbonzi - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
SSDs are DRAMATICALLY more expensive.... to get 2TB of storage in an SSD would cost over a grand... $200 is only going to get you 256GB... you can get that in an SD Card nowadays.... the point of this is to provide LOTS of storage that your mobile device doesn't already have!marvdmartian - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
But honestly, who needs 2TB of writable storage for their phone or tablet? How many movies can you possibly watch? How much music does the average person have in mp3 format? How many photos can you take, and how much storage capacity will it require, especially when you're talking lower resolution cameras on phones and tablets?Personally, I put a 128GB SSD into an external drive case, and can plug it into the micro-USB port of my tablet or phone. Even if I'm loading 720p videos on it at home, it would allow me to bring more movies or TV shows on vacation with me, than I'd ever have time to watch. If I want to write to something, I'll bring along extra micro-SDHC cards, or USB jump drives.
Patriot came out with a wireless drive case a few years ago (called the Gauntlet Node), that works great with wireless devices, and allowed you to put your own 2.5" drive inside. You could run it plugged into a USB power source (>1 amp) or run it up to a couple hours on its own internal battery. Cost of the case was usually around $100, so dropping a drive you already had into it would be less expensive than this offering from WD. Too bad it seems they never sold well, so Patriot stopped making them, because I'd consider that a much better idea than this WD drive.
marvdmartian - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Looks as though there's still some new units out there for sale, if anyone wants to check out the Patriot WiFi enclosure:http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Gauntlet-Hard-drive-...
~$60 now, free shipping.
You have to use their app (supported by Amazon's Fire tablets, as well as Android and Apple), but if you're looking for a simple way to allow your kids to watch movies on their tablets, while you're traveling, this is worth looking at. I also forgot to mention that it supports up to 3 different wireless streams at one time.
frodbonzi - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I'd like to point you to a similar comment given already... if a device isn't something YOU need, don't assume that there is noone else who needs it!!There ARE people who need more storage.... hence this 2TB solution - and plenty of others.... If you are only in the market for 128gb, go buy one - but don't comment here saying noone needs this!
marvdmartian - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
In the immortal words of Sergeant Hulka, "Lighten up, Francis."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pA1h1FjBZg
tbutler - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
"But honestly, who needs 2TB of writable storage for their phone or tablet? How many movies can you possibly watch?"Completely missing the point. The use-case is not to have 5000 hours of movies/MP3s/etc. to stream straight through; it's to have *your entire media library* with you wherever you go. So you don't have to guess 'Oh, I'm going out of town for the week, which movies am I going to want to see?' - you've got them all. All your songs, so you're not missing that one song your friend in Indianapolis wanted to hear. No need to pick and choose. Simple.
The 'cheap laptop' post is also completely missing the point. This is something my sister can pack along in her purse, turn on, and let the kids stream from on long road trips - no muss, no fuss, no maintenance, and the battery lasts a lot longer than that cheap laptop will.