Page 89 - Photoshop User December 2016

My Passport Wireless Pro
Wireless Storage Wherever You Go
Review by Larry Becker
It’s been a long time since I've seen something compelling about new hard-drive technology, but the folks at Western Digital have delivered an especially interesting portable hard drive with the release of My Passport Wireless Pro. If you’re in the market for a portable drive, you need to consider this drive—it does quite a bit more than just hold data.
My Passport Wireless Pro is available with either 2-TB or 3-TB capacity drives, and I tested the 2-TB drive. Obviously, having “wireless” as part of its name gives away one of the really interesting new features of this drive: wireless data transfer. It’s surprisingly fast, because it can use 2.4-GHz or 5-GHz WiFi for wireless data transfer. And of course, it has a USB 3.0 port for a direct, wired connection to a computer, just like a traditional portable drive. This description, however, only scratches the surface of all that this road warrior can do.
A word of warning: because of all this drive can do, under- standing how to get it to do each task will require spending some time with the PDF manual. There’s no paper manual and there’s very little printed help in the package, so you’ll want to plug the drive into your computer using the provided USB 3.0 cable. A habit I have with a new hard drive is to format it when I first plug it in. Do not do this: whether you’re using a Mac or a PC, the drive does not need to be reformatted.
There are a lot of materials on the hard drive that you’ll need, and for safety’s sake, go ahead and copy all of the drive’s native files to another drive. (I copied them all to my laptop internal drive, and it took only 1.34 GB of space.) Among those native files, you’ll find the PDF manual, utilities for the hard drive with a corresponding installer (Mac and PC), and a few helpful videos. I highly recommend that you watch all three videos. The videos answer some basic questions, but you’ll still need to reference the manual for a number of tasks. Go ahead and install the utility software too. While you’ll be able to access the drive from a Web browser on your com- puter when the drive is wirelessly connected to it, the utility software gives you an additional quick way to access the drive.
Beyond the hard drive itself, the device has an SD card slot. This allows you to pop in an SD card and upload specific files from the card, or you can set the device to automatically upload any images from the SD card to the drive. I was able to access the SD card when the drive was wirelessly connected to my Mac so I could see all of the hard drive’s contents and
all of the files on the SD card, and transfer the files from the SD card to my Mac. Obviously the wireless drive has an onboard battery to power the Wi-Fi radio and the spinning hard drive (it’s not an SSD), but what truly surprised me is the fact that you can also charge your mobile devices, like a smartphone or tablet, from the drive’s battery. I plugged my iPhone into the USB slot and it charged my iPhone! That port is not for data transfer though; just power. You connect your smartphone to the drive via Wi-Fi for any information exchange.
When you turn it on, and it’s not plugged into a computer, My Passport Wireless Pro creates its own (ad hoc) Wi-Fi net- work. You can join the network from your computer, smart- phone, or camera with built-in Wi-Fi, and transfer files wire- lessly, even if there’s no other Wi-Fi network available. But if there is a nearby network, once you connect your phone or computer to the hard drive’s wireless network, you can use your computer or phone to tell My Passport Wireless Pro to connect to that Wi-Fi network, so you have Internet access too. And once that’s set up, you can even connect to the Adobe Creative Cloud and manage your images there. It’s kinda complicated, but that process is covered in one of those videos on your new hard drive.
The My Passport Wireless Pro is physically about 50% larger than the regular portable Western Digital 2-TB drive I bought a few months ago, but with the addition of wireless capabilities, the SD card slot, and the battery (with device- charging capabilities), that’s to be expected. And when it comes to external hard drives, my experience with the reli- ability of Western Digital is better than my experience with all of the other popular drive manufacturers.
Western Digital drives in the 2-TB and 3-TB range are somewhere in the $100 price range, and this new My Pass- port Wireless Pro is around $200–$250 depending on which capacity you choose and where you buy it. You’ll pay much more, but get much more in return. I happily include this drive as an innovative tech recommendation for my holiday gift ideas list. ■
Company:WesternDigitalCorporation Price:$199.99(2TB);$229.99(3TB) Rating: ◆◆◆◆
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