Wireless Hard Drive Adds 2TB to Your Phone Without the Cloud

Western Digital

With cloud services in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, rest assured you can still expand a device’s storage without putting anything online, springing for the 4-petabyte model, or even using a microSD card. The WD My Passport Wireless is a portable storage hub that can connect to up to eight devices at a time, allowing you to offload and access data as well as stream video from the drive.

There’s no cloud-based access to your content, so you’ll need to be in close proximity in order to access or offload files to the drive. The My Passport shows up as a Wi-Fi access point for your phone, tablet, laptop, smart TV, or Wi-Fi camera.

Once connected, the files on the drive are accessible via the My Cloud app for iOS and Android or through the browser on a desktop or laptop. There’s also a USB 3.0 port on the drive if you want to connect physically.

There are a lot of wireless storage devices out there already, but the My Passport should be especially useful as an on-the-go storage device for photographers. There’s an SD card slot built in, and the drive automatically offloads any images it hasn’t already saved once a card is inserted.

Unlike most other storage devices, you’ll need to charge this one up. WD says the My Passport Wireless gets up to 6 hours per charge for non-stop video streaming or 20 hours of standby time. It’s a relatively cheap way to add a ton of non-cloud storage to any device: It’s available now as a 500GB drive for $130, a 1TB drive for $180, and a 2TB drive for $220.