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[nextpage title=”Introduction and Initial impressions”]
Wireless Storage is getting popular day by day thanks to new more improved wireless protocols. Keeping up with the trend Western Digital bought out a new wireless storage device late last year, called The My Passport Wireless.
The formula stays the same : get a capacious portable USB 3.0 hard drive, a battery for wire-free operation and a Wi-Fi radio, put it all together in a case and sell it. However the solution from WD differs in two ways in two ways :
- SD card slot
- MIMO-capable Wi-Fi chipset(for streaming to other devices in 2.4GHz
On the software side WD has enabled FTP capabalities. WD has provided the same WD My Cloud app used to access their EX2 and EX4 NAS units for this unit also.
Hardware and Platform Analysis
Coming to hardware and accessories the unit comes with a 10W adapter (5V@2A),a 2 ft. USB 3.0 cable (Male-A to Micro-B) cable for charge and data transfer and a quick charge guide.
In order get a bit more info about the info we went digging online, after a brief search we got to know that the WD My passport essential is basically a marriage between a western digital 2TB HDD(belonging to the Green series), a 3,400mAh battery , a Cortex-A8 system-on-chip (similar to the one found in the iPhone 4), 512MB of RAM, 128MB of flash memory, an SD card reader and a dual-stream 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi module.
More specifically the system consist of the following parts :
- TI AM3352 Sitara Cortex-A8 SoC
- TI WiLink WL1805MOD SDIO Wi-Fi (802.11bgn, 2×2 MIMO) Module
- SK hynix H5TQ4G63AFR 512 MB DDR3 SDRAM
- SK hynix H27U1G8F2B 128 MB SLC NAND Flash
- WD Green 2 TB 2.5″ HDD(AVGP series)
- 3400 mAh 3.7V Li-Po Battery
The TI Sitara platform is quite popular and wide spread choice in mobile storage so that brings a no surprise. Cmoing to the hardrive itself we were a bit skeptic about our finding that its a WD green HDD so we ran crystaldiskmark info and confirmed it our self.
The WD20NPVX is indeed the 2 TB WD Green drive, which as per the datasheet(PDF) needs only 1.7W for read/write operations, drops down to 0.8W while, while standby/sleep modes require only 0.2W. That keeps the whole drive under the USB 3.0 spec limit of 4.5W.
[nextpage title=”Benchmarks”]We decided to run only DAS benchmarks for this review since our internal network fell miserably short while streaming(time for another upgrade, sigh!).
regardless of that we decided against abandoning the whole review and went on with our normal storage suite.
Overall the drive shows acceptable numbers for a USB drive touching 100MB/s.
[nextpage title=”Conclusion”]
As for availability we could find the drive online only at Amazon and as of now this is the only 2TB wireless drive we could find so a direct price comparison was not possible.
Priced at around 14.1K the device seems to pack a lot of things so we think its totally VFM.
