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
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
Battery life is an important aspect for wireless storage devices. Western Digital claims up to 6 hours of run-time on the battery, but we saw it was close to 5 hours (without actually streaming anything). To get a better idea of the actual power needed to keep the internals running, we connected the drive and its charger to a Ubiquiti mFi mPower unit. In the first pass, we recharged the battery from 0 to 100%. The graph below shows the power consumption at the wall for this process.
We find that the charging process with the supplied charger takes slightly more than 98 minutes to complete. During this period, the power consumption at the wall is around 7.55 W. This closely tracks the mAh rating (3400 mAh) of the Li-Po battery that we saw in the FCC teardown. After the charging process, the unit was switched on. However, with no activity, the drive moves to idle and eventually standby mode. In the standby mode, the power consumption is only 0.5 W.
In the second power graph, we show the behavior during the benchmarking process.
We find that the drive spin-up from idle draws close to 7 W. After that, streaming with disk read-outs consumes around 6 W.
Coming to the business end of the review, it is clear that WD has succeeded in differentiating itself in the crowded wireless storage market. Targeting the photographers with FTP support and a built-in SD card slot (with auto-import capabilities) makes the product stand out. The unit is DLNA certified for those reliant on a media server for their media consumption needs. It also exposes the contents as CIFS shares. Users who want to utilize the unit outside the My Cloud app also have nothing to complain about. Possible areas of improvement include better battery life (either with a higher capacity battery or better firmware) and a more modern Wi-Fi chipset for faster transfers and more reliable streaming of high bitrate content.
The product uses the highest-capacity 2.5" drive currently available. In terms of capacity, the closest competitor is the Seagate Wireless Plus at $200. The My Passport Wireless 2 TB variant currently retails for $220. A $20 premium for the extra features in this multi-purpose wireless storage unit is, in our opinion, completely justified.
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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.