SD, or No SD? A few wireless hard drives include an SD card slot built into the body of the drive. It's been on the market a while, but it's a unique solution for serious mobile types.Ī few key things to look out for in any wireless drive. And another still-different one is the Lenovo ThinkPad Stack (listed above), which is a mobile-accessory set that includes hard drive, power bank, and router modules that together can work like a wireless hard drive. You can use it for occasional wireless-drive backups without investing in a unit with its own storage. If you own a host of existing USB storage, this could be a cheap and easy way to cobble together a wireless-drive equivalent without actually buying one. Most also let you pass your Wi-Fi connection through the device, so it's possible to maintain wireless Internet access while remaining connected to the drive.Ī related wireless-drive paradigm is the excellent and flexible Kingston MobileLite Wireless, which acts like a wireless drive without the hard drive, letting you turn any USB key, USB hard drive, or SD card into a wireless storage drive. Most of the drives profiled below are, at their heart, mobile hard drives in an external chassis, equipped with a battery for on-the-go operation. We've looked at a bunch of models on the market, of different paradigms, even including one solid-state (SSD) model from WD, using fast NAND memory inside. As you might guess, platter-drive-based models offer far more gigabytes for your dollar, but the flash-based ones are better able to survive jostling and bumps while operating. Some wireless drives employ flash memory, but most use standard 2.5-inch platter hard drives inside, the same kind of compact drive mechanism used in laptops. (You access the content, or transfer it to and fro, using vendor-supplied apps.) Plus, they'll also work with ordinary PCs equipped with a wireless connection, so you can pair the drive with your laptop over wireless-or you can just use a USB wired connection, like you would with an ordinary external drive. (Forget about that if you own an Apple i-anything they're all slot-less.) One of the wireless drives profiled here can come in handy if you want to, say, carry a library of movies on a trip to watch on a phone or tablet, but don't have the room in its local storage. Most tablets and phones come with just 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of onboard storage, with, if you're lucky, a little wiggle room for expansion via MicroSD card. Yes, they let you back up precious content from devices that don't typically take a direct data-cable connection, but they can also act as storage extenders and streaming-media sources for your tablet or phone. Note that portable, wireless hard drives are not just for backup. But if you take lots of video or photos with your mobile device, and you would be crushed to lose it all were the device stolen, broken, or dipped in the sea, you need a backup plan. Now, if you have your tablet or smartphone configured to auto-upload your created media to the cloud or share it with your social-media accounts, maybe you don't need to worry. If you're like too many of us, the answer is "nothing." And, just like any other bundle of bits you may have created on a desktop or laptop, our first question is the age-old one: What are you doing to back it all up? Holding up a tablet at a wedding or party to take snapshots: fair game, or just lame? The etiquette jury's still out on that score, but wherever you fall on the issue, we bet you've used your tablet or smartphone to create photos, videos, data, or files you just can't replace.
#Wireless external hard drive for mac how to
#Wireless external hard drive for mac free
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