Mainly a SD card transfer test and other thoughts

WD External Drives My Passport Wireless
5

This a fantastic thread Cekari. Thanks for taking the time to document what you found.

I’m on firmware 1.02.17. My experience so far:

177 Nikon NEF raw files, each about 20MB in size. Attempted to transfer using the web interface. The drive kept stopping, while still indicating the transfer was happening via the flashing white (WiFi) LED. After three restarts 89 files had been transfered. I didn’t measure the long time it took. I gave up at that point.

100 Nikon NEF raw files, each about 7.8MB in size. All 100 files transfered as I was actively using the web interface while the transfer happened. Only the first 11 files were readable, the rest being corrupt. I copied all files back off to my PC to check. Confirmed 89 of the files were corrupt.

100 JPEG files, all less than 2MB in size. All 100 files transfered, and all were readable.

At this stage I consider this drive “unfit for purpose”, and hence it will be returned unless a fix for these problems is provided soon. Specifically:

  1. The drive should never power down until the current transfer from an SD is complete.

  2. All files should transfer correctly, and not be corrupted. This is supposed to be a backup drive while mobile.

While not quite “unfit for purpose” issues:

a. The speed of transfer should be much better. The ONLY reason this drive was purchased was because it had an SD card reader built in. If the transfer takes so long the battery runs flat, then this is sufficient reason to return it for full refund.

b. While doing transfers and generally getting to know the device, the battery ran down to 16% in three hours.This is nowhere near the claimed six hours of continuous media streaming that was advertised.

Come on Western Digital. You have a potentially great little product here, and one that fills a gap in the market. Please make some effort and fix these problems. Even if the real SD card transfer rate was just 10MB/s, which should be achieveable with an SD 2.00 card reader, a full 32GB card could be transfered in just under an hour. That would, at a pinch, be acceptable.

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