For several years now, HDDs with WiFi have appeared on the market from a significant number of gadget manufacturers. Wireless hard drives make your life easier in certain scenarios, but you'd better research their utility carefully before purchasing.
In the last 10 years many categories of new gadgets have appeared and most of them include a significant group of models. However, depending on the other devices you have around the house, it would be good to think twice if such an investment is justified.
Wireless hard drives, on which you can quickly transfer files from an amalgam of devices without any wires, seem very attractive. The price of one, however, is significantly higher than a regular external hard drive. The interesting part is that there are several scenarios where such a model makes sense.
What are wireless hard drives?
On the one hand, the name says it all. Regular external hard drives require a USB cable to interface with a laptop, desktop, tablet, TV, or any other media player. Instead, wireless hard drives replace the need for a wire to connect to your PC with a WiFi or Bluetooth connection, depending on the model. Thanks to this feature, compatibility is significantly increased.
Especially useful for working in tandem with smartphones or tablets, wireless hard drives can be used both wired for interaction with a computer and wireless, if you want to quickly back up your holiday photos . Basically, regardless of whether your favorite gadget does not have a standard USB port, but a microUSB or Lightning, as long as it has an operating system such as Android, iOS, Windows Phone and more, it can be used to transfer data to a wireless HDD . It is true that there are certain models of hard drives that can be connected to Android tablets or even smartphones, but those involve increased power consumption for the phone and detailed compatibility analysis.
Wireless hard drives are very portable because they integrate an internal battery. When turned on, they generate a WiFi connection around them, like a classic router, and anyone who knows the password can connect to them. If you connect to them from a PC or Mac, they will instantly appear in Explorer or Finder, like a regular USB stick, to facilitate data transfer. If you connect to such a device using a phone or tablet, a window should automatically appear on the screen explaining the steps you need to follow to access the files on the HDD. However, on mobile, you'll probably need to install an app created by the hard drive manufacturer to make things work.
The autonomy of hard drives with WiFi connectivity varies greatly depending on the number of devices that are connected to them and the activity that they undertake. If you're transferring 100 photos or a clip from your phone to your wireless hard drive, the impact on your battery is minimal. But this increases radically if two different people, with two tablets, watch movies stored on the same gadget for an hour and a half or two hours. In theory, in standby, wireless hard drives can reach an average of 20 hours of autonomy, and if they are used constantly, the value can drop to around six hours.
Do I need a wireless hard drive?
An iPhone 6 or iPhone 6S user can immediately confirm that they have a free space problem. Many netizens criticized Apple's decision to continue selling a 16GB smartphone, when they stopped selling the 32GB model, in a context in which it would have been more useful to do the exact opposite. It is enough to take a few Live Photos or a clip of several minutes in 4K resolution and you will run out of space for applications. If you have a recent generation Galaxy S, which is just as efficient at taking up space on the internal memory, but no longer offers the possibility of expansion via a micro SD card, you are in exactly the same situation.
With a wireless hard drive in your bag or pocket, right after you turn it on, you can download the clip you shot at the baby shower or on the beach at sunrise. Thus, in a few minutes you have fixed the free space problem. Although not small, the transfer rate between devices almost doesn't matter, considering that an HD clip lasting a few minutes can be moved to the HDD in a few minutes as well. So, if you don't trust cloud storage services or simply don't want to invest in such a thing, a wireless hard drive is a huge help.
If you're using a Smart TV that can handle multimedia content from the network, a wireless hard drive can work just as well as a media server that you can easily take with you on trips. The best and most expensive models on the market integrate an amalgam of functions optimized for streaming from smartphones, tablets, smart TVs or dedicated players, such as Apple TV or Google Chromecast. You just need to be on the same WiFi network as the external hard drive and you can initiate playback of content remotely, both at your home and at a friend or neighbor's.
By the way, a wireless hard drive works just as well as a regular external hard drive. You connect it with the cable included in the package to a PC, and in addition to charging its internal battery, you also gain a significant advantage in terms of transfer speed.
Is it worth investing in a wireless hard drive? What are the options?
The only problem when it comes to wireless hard drives is the price. The amalgamation of additional functionality is reflected in a significant jump when it comes to the purchase price, compared to a regular external hard drive of the same capacity. The reason for this discrepancy has to do with the extra components that are needed to turn an external hard drive into a wireless one, from the battery to the wireless communications chip. In addition, the same additional components may be reflected in a slightly larger hard drive size, a relevant feature if you watch every extra gram when traveling. In most cases, however, an external hard drive, wireless or not, is negligible in a larger bag or briefcase.
In a world where more and more phones shoot 4K, and a one-minute clip is around 300MB, the problem of free space on our mobile devices is very real. In such circumstances, wireless hard drives work wonders. However, it is advisable to regularly back up the photos and videos on your phone, and with limited storage space on your smartphone and a wireless HDD in your bag, you will be forced to do this weekly or monthly, depending on the speed at which you take new photos. On the other hand, with a 128GB phone and 1TB of cloud space, the issue of free space is not as pressing, as a result, in such a scenario, the additional investment would not be justified as much.
In short, if the slightly higher price doesn't bother you too much and you need an external hard drive anyway, you're better off going with one that also has wireless capabilities. In the future you will realize that you have made a very good investment. In addition, there are several models on the market for every pocket, with different capacities and from different manufacturers, in case you have personal preferences. As a miscellaneous fact, you will not find major performance differences, regardless of the model you opt for.
Below I will detail some models of such hard drives that you can purchase right now. Seagate Wireless Plus with a capacity of 1TB, USB 3.0 connectivity and support for three HD streams played simultaneously on the wireless network it creates costs 710 lei. Western Digital also has a 1TB My Passport model with USB 3.0. At a price of 770 lei, however, it also comes with a discreet slot for SD cards. In addition to automatically accessing your photos from your card wirelessly, you can download that content to your HDD without a PC around. Another solution is a LaCie Fuel 2TB. The latter looks the best in my opinion and has a slightly longer battery life of 10 hours and supports up to 5 devices connected simultaneously.