WD My Passport Wireless Pro Review: Portable Storage For Mobile Devices

As we noted earlier, this device is basically a wireless NAS that you can take with you for file sharing with mobile devices. With its claim of 10 hours of battery life (which we put to the test), it's ideal for taking on the road or for out-of-office work.

WD has added a few things to this device since the first release, making it bigger and a little heavier than its predecessor. The original My Passport measured in at 1.17" thick, 5.0" long, and 3.39" wide. With a doubling of the battery, the new generation is 0.94" by 5" by 5". It also weighs 1.5 pounds, much more than the 12.3 ounces of the previous generation.

The drive itself has two LEDs on the front for power and battery status, and there's a Wi-Fi activity indicator as well as four battery charge lights to indicate increments of 25%.

The SD card reader supports up to 65 MBps reads and 40 MBps writes, depending on the capabilities of your SD card. The wireless support comes in the form of both 802.11ac and 802.11n. The battery is nearly double the capacity of the original product, 6400 mAh vs 3,400 mAh in the original, providing up to 10 hours of battery life while streaming HD video, according to WD. In my tests, it lasted about nine hours, but the more you use it, obviously, the faster the battery will run down.

The My Passport Wireless Pro unit comes with a 12.24W adapter and a foot-long USB 3.0 cable. If you've got easy access to a charging station or charge-capable USB port, they'll work to charge the device, but we found the included cable to be annoyingly short when trying to plug the My Passport Wireless Pro into a wall outlet. 

With a PC, all you have to do is plug the USB cable into a port and the My Passport Wireless Pro will show up just like any other external drive. It comes pre-loaded with both PC and Mac software, and is formatted in exFAT so both computers can read it. The one drawback is that the device doesn't function well when running on PC USB power. It was slow at copying files while recharging simultaneously. Once plugged into the charging station though, it perked right up. But that's to be expected with USB charging.