Wd - My Passport Wireless Pro 4tb Usb 30 Portable Hard Drive Review

Western Digital'due south My Passport Wireless Pro difficult drive is the company's second foray into the wireless hard drive market. And with it come some improvements, as well as some stumbles.

The original WD My Passport Wireless came out 2 years agone, sporting a recognizable rectangular design, with some additional thickness to adjust an SD-bill of fare slot and a bombardment inside. The new-for-2016 Wireless Pro ($229.99 for WD's 2TB version, and $249.99 for the 3TB model nosotros tested) retains the bones thought, merely it shakes things upward a fleck with a drastically different design, new features, and improved hardware inside—notably, a higher-capacity hard drive and a larger battery.

The My Passport Wireless Pro is non to exist confused with the entirely different (and non-wireless), two-year-old My Passport Pro ($712.eleven at Amazon Canada) , which is a RAID model with two drives within the shell. Information technology joins a small core of portable hard drives that cover the concept of a mobile, personal deject designed for our increasingly mobile world. Competitor Seagate was the early on player in this connected portable hard drive infinite, but Seagate's current Wireless Plus Mobile Storage bulldoze tops out at 2TB for $180. Others that have dipped in—and some of these, already out—of this hard bulldoze niche include Buffalo, Corsair, LaCie, and Toshiba.

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Whereas other drives take made a play for folks toting smartphones and tablets, WD aims the Wireless Pro not only at space-constrained mobile users but likewise at photographers and videographers who want a place to offload images while on the go and in the field. WD says it changed upward its focus when it found that about one-half of its users of the starting time-generation wireless drive were using the included SD-carte du jour reader to import a "healthy mix" of images and video. WD ran with that, and this time around, included features such as Adobe Artistic Cloud connectivity, 802.11ac wireless, and FTP back up for connecting to cameras wirelessly; an updated SD-card slot; and the ability to siphon ability from the battery for charging other USB devices, such equally a GoPro (which is notorious for its short bombardment life).

All of these features add upwards to WD aggressively courting photographers and videographers, a unique tactic and an approach that tries to address a void for pro shooters and casual shooters alike. Simply, alas, the operative word in that location is tries: If WD were truly gunning to provide a useful storage device for photographers, the Wireless Pro's features and software would be even improve implemented.

Being more-than-coincidental photographers, we took the drive for a spin to see how it stacks up to the competition—and how well it fulfills its mission of streaming wirelessly. As mentioned, nosotros tested the 3TB version, which sells for $249.99. A 2TB version carries an MSRP of $229.99, virtually $l more than the Seagate 2TB wireless bulldoze. Let's dig in.

Blueprint and Features

Everything about the vanquish of the Wireless Pro is designed to stand up out, except its color. The drive is made of solid, matte-black plastic, with shiny inlaid striping on its forepart to give it a piffling visual panache.

Different a typical rectangular difficult bulldoze, the Wireless Pro is shaped in a distinctive 5-inch square, more like an onetime CD Discman. In that aforementioned vein, information technology stands 0.9 inch alpine—in other words, thicker than today's typically slim portable difficult drives. Information technology's large, simply not unwieldy.

What is noticeably unlike is the drive's weight. We've used near of the wireless hard drive competition, and noticed the Wireless Pro'southward weight immediately. We weren't surprised to notation that it weighs 1 pound, indeed hefty when compared with Seagate'due south Wireless Plus Mobile Storage (2TB), which weighs 0.6 pound. Granted, the Wireless Pro adds an SD-card slot that most others don't accept, but even with that, it feels heavier than you'd expect for a hard bulldoze plus a battery. Is that extra weight due to the 6,400mAh battery, up from 3,400mAh on the outset-gen Wireless drive? That's unclear, since both the Seagate and the Wireless Pro claim ten hours of battery life, though we don't have the spec on the Seagate's battery. (See our Operation section for more on how the Wireless Pro did in our battery tests.)

On the top edge of the drive sit ii mechanical buttons, a USB Blazon-A 2.0 port, and the USB iii.0 port for direct-access connections to our laptop or desktop. The left button (looked at from the drive's forepart) does a agglomeration of things: activates an LED battery gauge on the front face of the drive, triggers a WPS connection to your router for easy configuration, and initiates an SD-card information transfer. The button at right turns the drive on and off.

When we get-go tested the drive, the power push was actually our first source of frustration: It behaved inconsistently upon power up, and it took seemingly forever to ability down, ane of the scattering of glitches nosotros experienced with the firmware that the drive shipped with. A little more than than a calendar month after the drive was appear and made available—this behavior and all—to consumers, WD released a new firmware (version 1.01.11) that addressed many of the glitches we experienced during our first laissez passer of testing.

The new firmware sped the shutdown to a count of one-two, with a blinking LED to indicate the drive was doing something earlier it shut downwardly apace. (Earlier, it wouldn't give whatever indication that it was spinning downwardly, and it required a 3-second concord, plus another 40 seconds to spin down and plough off. Ordinarily, nosotros'd be left doubting that we had held downward the button long enough.) Powering upwardly got more consistent, though nosotros did have to press the button a little harder than we'd expected. Merely post-firmware-update, the difference was nighttime and twenty-four hour period.

In addition to the bombardment-gauge LED, the front face has two additional LEDs. The tiptop one is the Wi-Fi status LED, while the bottom is the drive-condition LED.

At the height left border sits the SD-card slot, which this time around supports the SD 3.0 spec. The SD-card reader in the Wireless Pro supports read speeds of up to 75MB per 2d and write speeds of 65MB per second, co-ordinate to WD, depending upon the card used. Those speeds are an improvement over those of the My Passport Wireless, just they don't come close to maxing out the speeds of Ultra High Speed (UHS) and UHS-1 SD cards.

In addition, as we mentioned, the drive at present has a USB 2.0 host port. Information technology may be a seemingly odd inclusion until you realize its presence—and WD'southward design—means that the drive can serve equally a ability bank. That means y'all can connect a phone or tablet (or a short-lived action photographic camera) to siphon power from the Wireless Pro's battery, albeit slowly; the port outputs five volts, at one.5 amps.

Why USB 2.0 for the power-banking company connexion? WD explained that the Realtek 1195 chip within the drive had support for only so many ports for fast USB (and two were used for the card reader and the USB iii.0 direct-attached connection).

The Wireless Pro boosts the wireless to 802.11ac, with the wireless connection at 5GHz via 802.11ac and 2.4GHz via 802.11n. We continued to our Apple iPhone 6S Plus using the 5GHz ring. While the 802.11ac wireless is an comeback, we couldn't gauge how much the presence of 802.11ac affected our experience during our usage. A more notable distinction: The Wireless Pro can office every bit a wireless access betoken for up to viii devices as well every bit a wireless drive, simultaneously. More than on that in a fleck.

Setup and Apps

WD markets this drive toward "professionals," but that doesn't hateful every user will be tech-savvy plenty to dope out how to get the most out of the drive. At least, not without reading the 60-some-odd-page manual bachelor on WD's site.

The included quick get-go guide will indeed get you lot started on a wireless connection, but then y'all take a chip of detective work ahead to suss out what to do next, beyond downloading the WD My Cloud app, which is at present updated to support the Wireless Pro. On a Windows PC, we had to figure out where the software was on the drive. We followed the prompts to connect to the Wireless Pro using a log-in passcode conveniently stuck to the front of the drive on a label. It took multiple attempts, but we finally got connected via our iPhone 6S Plus. (At that place's an Android app version of the app, as well.) WD says that this glitch is stock-still in the latest firmware update, though we did take success connecting an iPhone 5, a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, and an Nvidia Shield Tablet without incident fifty-fifty pre-update on a second sample of this drive.

The My Cloud app has had some top-level interface enhancements over earlier iterations that ameliorate accessing the drive and the general layout of the app. A My Cloud account is not necessary to use the app with the Wireless Pro, only if you already have a My Cloud production, you can log in and therefore have access to that bulldoze, as well.

Some things about the app were crude around the edges. For example, when we starting time signed in and got connected, the app prompted united states of america to automatically back up our entire iPhone. Great idea, or so we thought. When we realized how slowly that was going—and how long it would take for 77GB of photos and video to upload—we wanted to abolish the backup, and quickly found nosotros couldn't. It took deleting the app and reinstalling it to nix that action.

The app defaults to showing all files and folders. Along the bottom is a navigation bar with tabs for photos, music, and videos. However, none of these did a convincing chore of organizing and accessing our content. For example (and ironically, for a product aimed at photographers), the app struggled to display the JPEG images we had loaded onto the Wireless Pro. These files ranged in size from to 2MB to 8MB.

When we viewed the Photos tab, we saw the drive showed null but icon placeholders, every bit y'all tin meet beneath. After the firmware update, we did get JPEG previews for some folders via the All tab (which is how you lot access the file-folder construction on the drive), and some through the Photos tab, but not for all.

Mail service-firmware update, loading images went faster, likewise, from 30 to 40 seconds to 20 to 25 seconds. Images viewed through the app however lacked the clarity and detail of images viewed directly on a PC or via an alternate app. WD says this is considering of how the My Cloud app handles JPEG files. RAW shooters are out of luck, since the app doesn't support this format.

On iOS, you demand the My Deject app to access the Wireless Pro's native file-folder construction, or to access files past Photos, Music, or Videos. The topic-specific tabs we had more difficulty with, simply as is typical for wireless drives in the iOS universe, we did everything via the app. That meant file sharing relied on the file-sharing protocols of iOS, which means you can practice some sharing and moving of files, simply your flexibility is tempered past the My Cloud app. Shown beneath is the interface for what you can practise with a Photograph.

When we first tested the bulldoze at launch, the Music tab did a similarly ho-hum job displaying music stored on the My Deject app. We transferred files from our reckoner to the Wireless Pro drive, into a new binder we created called "Music." But neither that folder, nor the dozen artist folders we transferred, were recognized in that tab, nor were any of the songs residing exterior of those folders. Fifty-fifty worse: The search mechanism nether the Music tab didn't even find files that had an artist'southward proper name in them. Nosotros could access the music, just only straight from the All tab—which lets you admission the pure file-binder structure on the drive. However, this proved problematic, considering our songs were organized equally they were downloaded via Amazon Music: Information technology meant nosotros couldn't get a playlist going, or play through a series of songs stored in a nested binder structure.

After talking with WD, the company managed to better the feel with the first firmware update and a subsequent app update...albeit only barely improved. The folders of songs showed under the Music tab, but there was all the same no way to organize music into playlists, as the tracks were all the same trapped nether private folders, aforementioned as in the binder view. And the search bar still didn't work.

When we did play music, it streamed without hiccups. Sadly, video streaming was less consistent. We tried a variety of video files, primarily formatted every bit .MP4 or .MOV, and experienced choppy video playback with frequent buffering pauses, before and later on the firmware update. We also tried a 2d version of the drive, and it too was plagued past finish-to-buffer behavior when streaming video wirelessly (fifty-fifty with WD My Cloud's own 30-second-long 1080p sample videos), on the iPhone v, Galaxy S7 Border, and Shield Tablet. Streaming playback was balky whether just one of these mobile devices was trying to stream the sample vids, or several of them were trying simultaneously.

We so tried a very highly compressed MP4, a rip file of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (a iii.2GB file), and we were able to get much smoother streaming on the iPhone five past itself. We and so added the Shield Tablet, and got that going on a simultaneous stream, with merely occasional buffering pauses interrupting the playback. (In both cases, it took the better part of a minute to starting time up the file.) The conclusion we have to describe: Your streaming mileage will vary depending on the specific devices you connect to the drive, the video-file types and their resolution/bit rate, and the combination of mobile devices you try to connect. Ostensibly, the drive tin can stream to eight devices simultaneously at 720p, but in our experience, it struggled with just a few.

As for accessing the drive via a PC? You'd be forgiven for forgetting that information technology could practise that, because that that process was left off the Quick Installation Guide entirely and buried on page xvi of the full manual. We intuitively jumped in by plugging in the bulldoze over USB and nosing around on the drive'southward Windows software folder to notice the necessary installer files, and figured out how to get to the Spider web-browser-based dashboard. No question that this direct-attached setup procedure can (and should) be clearer. That'south especially so since the WD Access PC software has cipher to do with the basic Web-based dashboard for the device...and that software isn't fifty-fifty mentioned by name anywhere in the manual.

To handle the bulldoze'southward basic configuration, just open a browser and type http://mypassport or type the DNS accost (http://192.168.60.1) every bit establish in the manual to get started on a PC. (Sometimes we plant the erstwhile worked, sometimes nosotros needed to use the DNS.) We walked through some simple setup screens, configuring our Internet access, setting up the auto-backup behavior of the SD-card slot and the USB ports, checking a box to download and install Plex Media Server (which we still ended upwards doing manually). And then you're into the My Passport Wireless Pro dashboard—much every bit nosotros've seen earlier on other WD My Deject-enabled drives.

The chief screen of the dashboard shows the capacity, battery condition, and the Wi-Fi connections (that is, if it'southward beingness used in a direct connexion, sharing Wi-Fi as a hotspot, or if the drive and the device are both connected via the network). The final is the "standard" connection manner that gets configured via the Wi-Fi tab on the dashboard…

We moved through the options to run across what was available to tweak. Under Media we could adjust media server settings and gear up the SD-carte slot and USB port to auto-import; this browser-based interface is the merely spot to view the progress of a transfer.

We're savvy almost the general workings of network-continued drives, yet we missed seeing more-thorough guidance through the software install procedure for PCs. Yes, the point of the drive is as a wireless drive—simply at some point there will be a PC connection. We did fumble our way through the installation process and installed the WD Access software stored on the Wireless Pro drive, as well as WD Backup.

While Backup is optional, Admission, it turns out, is integral to accessing the drive and transferring files to information technology. The app integrates into your Windows system tray or is accessible via Windows' Get-go Card. The whole process could be meliorate streamlined, but it does get in piece of cake to map the My Passport Wireless Pro to a drive letter, create a shortcut, and upload files to the drive. Just over again, hard to know where all this is without being your own sleuth.

As for the Plex Media Server that y'all're prompted to download and install, the WD setup software never really downloaded and prompted us through the installation and sign-upward procedure. Nosotros had to become manually to Plex'southward site, sign up for the service with an email address, so download the software. We're not delving deep on the Plex software here, just we will note that the integration could be stronger, especially for offline apply of Plex every bit an interface for accessing the media content of the drive. Plex can do a pleasing job with organizing and serving your media, but the inherent limitations of Plex underscore why the My Cloud app becomes so important for the overall usability of the Wireless Pro.

Performance Testing

We ran the My Passport Wireless Pro through our standard retinue of straight-attached storage tests, and found it to be a pretty solid performer compared with other wireless portable drives. The other contenders we've lined up hither are the Seagate Wireless Mobile Hard Drive (the 500GB version we tested, mentioned earlier), the LaCie Fuel (1TB), the Toshiba Canvio AeroCast Wireless Portable Hard Drive (1TB), and the at present-defunct Corsair Voyager Air 2 (1TB).

On Anvil's Storage Utilities one.1.0, which assesses read and write performance into a rolled-up alphabetize score, the My Passport Wireless Pro zipped to the top of the class with a score of 258.vi. It was more than twice as fast every bit the Seagate (unsurprising to u.s.a., given that that Seagate wireless model targets a value price point, and the drive was poky on other tests, as well), and edged ahead of the Corsair, which scored a 248.5.

On Crystal DiskMark, the LaCie edged the Wireless Pro on both its sequential-read and sequential-write tests, just it's really a wash on this one. The LaCie scored 114.2MB per second on sequential read, and 113.1MB per 2d on sequential write, to the Wireless Pro'due south 112.3MB read and 111.6MB write.

PCMark viii's Storage Exam saw the Wireless Pro come in a solid second, again to the LaCie Fuel. The LaCie scored 1,977 to the Wireless Pro's 1,893, merely alee of the next two comers.

On PCMark 7'south Secondary Storage Test, the Wireless Pro fell to third, scoring ane,490 to the Seagate's 1,588 and the Corsair's 1,752.

Battery Life

Battery life wasn't quite upwards to WD'southward claims, at least in our video-streaming tests. The My Passport lasted 6 hours and xix minutes playing our standard test file, a rip of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, streamed wirelessly to an Nvidia Shield Android tablet. That's enough to go you lot across the land, if not long enough for a full twenty-four hour period of use; nor is information technology close to the 10 hours WD claimed. Still, it was better than the starting time-gen WD drive, which lasted iv hours and 39 minutes. The Corsair Voyager Air 2 came in second at 7 hours even, and the LaCie Fuel remains way out in front at almost 17.5 hours. That drive is a large hunk, though, with room for a beefy battery inside.

Conclusion

In add-on to our formal wired testing, we ran some informal numbers to try out the other transfer aspects. Our xvi folders of 90 MP3 files (representing 670MB total data) required half-dozen.5 minutes to transfer wirelessly via 802.11ac, for an average rate of most 1.7MB per 2d. And a big SD-card transfer proved slow: It took twoscore minutes for half of a 59GB prepare of images to transfer from an SD card, and at the hour marking, nosotros'd only gotten through 46GB. Every bit with the automobile-backup of our iPhone, nosotros had no fashion to pause or cancel the file transfer.

Almost as frustrating: While you tin can set an SD card to automatically transfer, you can't get whatsoever confirmation of a successful transfer on the drive lone. The software is no ameliorate: The My Cloud app doesn't show the status of the backup, and the browser-based dashboard only shows the progress buried under the Media tab.

When we questioned WD about the speed, the visitor best-selling the obvious—that performance volition depend upon the speed of the carte you're using. Withal, WD likewise revealed something that wasn't obvious elsewhere: During the copy process, the Wireless Pro is doing an analysis on the card to first copy only what's new since the card was final inserted, and to perform a bit-by-bit comparison to verify the information being copied to the drive.

If the My Passport Wireless Pro were solely another portable Wi-Fi bulldoze, it would be a reasonable recommendation based on its high chapters, practiced functioning, and ability to share the Internet connectedness. Sure, the software setup could be smoother, and the apps need more than just a facelift, just that doesn't backbite from the fact that this is the near capacious wireless difficult bulldoze you tin buy, and that information technology can be useful (especially if you can go video to stream smoothly).

If nosotros consider the drive as a tool for photographers, that's where it gets to be a tougher sell. Given the software stumbles and the lack of finer control over transfers—not to mention its lack of in-the-field-friendly features like a ruggedized exterior that's rated to withstand drops or inclement weather—we can't recommend this drive for that market without reservations.

That'due south especially truthful considering how inexpensive wink media has become these days. Yes, you tin transfer files sans computer—and for some, that will exist useful. Merely what skillful is a file transfer if it takes too long, or you tin't hands view and confirm that everything successfully transferred? The solution, for many folks, might only be a much simpler one: Buy (and carry) more flash cards.

Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro

The Bottom Line

The My Passport Wireless Pro improves on its previous iteration in some ways and packs more bits than any wireless hard drive to engagement.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/western-digital-my-passport-wireless-pro

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