Wireless enabled disk drive

There are many portable hard drives available for home use that requires USB connectivity.  Though USB connectivity is ideal for data transmissions, developing a portable hard drives that also provide wireless connectivity would help for homes with many desktop/laptop/Mac/IPAD devices to share the wireless enabled portable hard drive as a shared drive over the home network much as wireless printers do and facilitate sharing of music, photo and video files easily. 

Please feel free to post your opinions on this idea.

Regards,

ideaman

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Maybe another way around this idea is to provide a network interface to the drive (LAN connector), so that the drive can be placed next to the “home” Internet router/modem. It would be connected by ethernet (“blue” cable) to the router/modem (assuming many systems have LAN connection ports nowdays)… and many home set ups have “wifi” router/modems.

As a connected “network” drive, it would provide easy connection to many different portable devices via the WiFi signal of the modem/router? Therefore, WD only need look at how to make the “network” connection to the drive (and use the existing WiFi capabilities and existing router/modem to send data)?

Hello Friend,

         I also wish to see a External portable drive with wifi option. I think it needs power to use wifi which means we need to have external powerd adapter type external drive or connect the drive to a system or laptop through USB port type. But in the later, once we are connecting to a system or laptop would make the wifi a redundant feature.

         I would like to add to your idea of wifi supported hard drive with an option of having battery to enable wifi even  if power is not available for a short period of time. Otherwise an additional power adapter facility should be there.

Thanks & Regards,

Stallion

Look at Sprint’s wireless hotspot for internet. It’s battery powered and has a slot for a memory card to share storage. It’s a tiny black box. Add a battery, give it an IP address and your in business. Any device can connect to the divice, set a password and access the interface. It would work. You just need people to take the time to work it out.

Please see new and similar idea in the New Ideas tab at top of page.  This product already exists; it’s made by Seagate!  We need a WD version.  Please vote for the New Idea.

AdHoc wifi access would be great for this Idea. Operating in ad-hoc mode allows all wireless devices within range of each other to discover and communicate in peer-to-peer fashion without involving central access points. Doing this would allow you to take the wireless HDD anywhere and wirelessly connect to Smart phones and tablets when you are away from home making it a high capacity storage solution for different kinds of devices when you are on the go. There is already the My Cloud but it requires internet bandwidth, this solution does not require users to dip into their limited internet plans in order to back up files on the go.

Have a look at the Ravpower Filehub. 2 versions are available (I have the rev.1) and it will happily power (3000mAh and 6000mAh batteries in the rev.1 and rev.2) a USB drive and make it network available via SMB via its own wifi hotspot. I use my rev.1 with my MyPassport Ultra and it works a treat for travelling…