WD My Passport Wireless SSD

A must-have tool in every travelling photographer’s bag.

“The drive is more than just an external SSD: it offers the travelling photographer a way to back up images from an SD card directly to the drive with a single tap.”

Storage giant Western Digital is no stranger when it comes to creating gear that serves the needs of pro photographers. Over the last few years, it’s focused on this segment with a range of devices that makes transferring and backing up photos while in the field quicker and simpler — chief among them its two Wi-Fi hard drives. The company has now added a third with this new SSD model, with the main draw being the additional speed and durability that solid-state storage provides.

Like its hard drive-equipped siblings, the My Passport Wireless SSD has been built for life on the go: it comes packing a built-in SD card reader, 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity and a built-in battery that gives you up to 10 hours of use. Once you’ve got the images from your camera’s SD card transferred, you can view them on your smartphone or tablet via a the My Cloud app without needing to go near a computer. While the device isn’t weather- or dust-proof, it does come in a removable drop-resistant bumper, giving it a rugged look and a non-slip surface. Moreover, all the ports and buttons are flush with the exterior, and in combination with the thickness of the bumper, that should help protect them.

Setting up the Wireless SSD is a breeze — just connect via Wi-Fi using the details that are printed on a sticker on the drive’s top, then log in via a web browser or the WD My Cloud app. On both, the user interface is straightforward, and although the drive is already configured for immediate use, there’s a range of optional advanced features you can take advantage of. For example, users wishing to stream media (up to 4K resolution) directly from the drive can install the Plex Media Server and watch movies on their smartphones or tablets without consuming their precious onboard storage space.

While the older harddrive models in Western Digital’s wireless range are decent performers, the SSD version leaves them for dead, with roughly triple the speed increase when transferring files to and from a PC or Mac via USB. In our tests, we clocked a top read speed of 390.1MB/s and 385.5MB/s for writes. While that doesn’t make this the fastest portable SSD money can buy — we’ve had USB SSDs hit 500MB/s — it’s a big boost over the 130MB/s you’ll see from the fastest conventional hard drives.

But the drive is more than just an external SSD: it offers the travelling photographer a way to back up images from an SD card directly to the drive with a single tap. Simply insert the card into the slot, press the transfer button and voila! It’s that simple. It can even transfer files from other USB flash drives as well, and can charge your devices via its USB On-the-Go port that supplies up to 1.5A of power.

It is disappointing to see only a non-standard 10-pin micro-B USB 3.0 port on the drive for connecting to PC — a USB-C port would have been preferred — and means you’re stuck using the included ‘USB micro-B to USB-A’ cable for PC transfers. That makes connecting to newer laptops with only USB-C a pain. Plus, that On-the-Go port is USB 2.0 only, meaning transfers from external USB 3 devices will often be severely throttled.

If you can live with those caveats, and need the extra robustness and speed that solid-state storage offers, however, this one’s a great alternative to WD’s existing wireless hard drives.