Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD
By Jim Bask
Modern smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S9 take stunning video and images, but if your life is frequently capture-worthy, you’ll find yourself running out of space on your phone to store all of your photos and clips. That’s where a portable hard drive like the Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD ($499) comes in, allowing you to wirelessly transfer files from your phone. Because it uses an SSD instead of a spinning drive, it’s very expensive (we tested the 1TB model), but it’s compact, rugged, fast, and does double-duty as a power bank and a media server once you return home from your hang-gliding session or night out on the town.
Sturdy, Not Stylish
The advent of external SSD-based storage has manufacturers cramming a ton of gigabytes into tiny packages. To wit, the 512GB Adata SD700 measures just 0.5 by 3.3 by 3.3 inches (HWD) and weighs less than 3 ounces, and it’s far from the lightest or tiniest drive we’ve reviewed. This miniaturization trend does not apply to wireless external drives, however, even ones that use SSDs like the My Passport. In part because of its ruggedization and in part because it has to fit a Wi-Fi antenna and the associated hardware, this square drive measures 0.95 by 4.97 by 4.97 inches and weighs 15.6 ounces.
By itself, the drive feels sturdy, like it’s able to withstand a few drops or spills, and indeed Western Digital claims that it can withstand shocks, vibrations, and drops of up to 1 meter (3.28 feet). That’s assuming you’re using the included rubber bumper, which adds a few millimeters of girth in each direction. This type of protection should be more than adequate for the types of everyday abuse that the drive will likely suffer, from passing in and out of a bag several times per day to occasionally being dropped from a desk or coffee table…read more