For some reason, Western Digital only provided maximum read speed for the drive in its technical specifications, which was advertised at “up to 390 MB/sec”.

Once attached, you can wirelessly access content on a USB device using your computer, or a mobile device through the My Cloud app. And finally on the right side is another button used to initiate SD card backups or to briefly check the battery life, indicated by four blue LEDs on the upper surface of the drive. All I need to do is insert a memory card from my camera into the side of the My Passport, then throw the unit back into my camera bag – without having to do anything else, the unit creates a fast backup to its internal SDD of the contents of the card. You can either do this using the free WD My Cloud app for Android or iOS smartphones and tablets, or via a web browser on a computer. The exceptions are high-end cameras which support FTP over wireless, such as Canon and Nikon’s pro bodies with the appropriate wireless adapters.

But while a direct USB connection is massively faster, it does restrict the drive to being accessed by one device at a time; ideal if you’re simply dumping a load of data to or from it, but in effect no different to a basic portable hard disk. To compare the connection speeds, I connected my MacBook Pro (13in / late 2013) to the drive first via a shared access point, second with a direct 5GHz wireless connection, and third using a direct USB 3 cable. Since the My Passport contains a high performance SDD, you can connect it directly via USB to your computer to function as a fast external hard drive. Above: One on side of the drive you’ll find a spring-loaded SD slot which like those in camera bodies will swallow a card whole without any portion sticking out; push it in and it’ll spring out sufficiently for you to grab it.

This way, if you still have space in your card and you want to keep shooting to it, you don’t have to duplicate data each time you insert the memory card.On the positive side, the transfer process was still faster and the battery discharge was still far more efficient compared to what I had previously seen on the Gnarbox. On an Android phone you can tap your way through the various nested folders, or drill-down by photos, music or videos. Lastly, if I were to do this in the field without access to WiFi, trying to copy anything from the cloud would eat up quite a bit of data. The experience on an iPad was far superior, as the larger screen allowed the app to display thumbnails on one side and a large view of the selected image on the other. In either case, you’ll need to switch on the drive and connect your device to its Wifi access point – the My Passport Wireless SSD broadcasts two Wifi networks, one at 5GHz for speed and the other at 2.