I have an Apple iPad with Retina display (32GB) and would like to use it to watch movies while flying. With 32 GB of memory, my iPad fills too quickly. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have an SD card for external storage on their iDevices. I have found a possible work-around via SanDisk’s Wireless Media Drive. This drive is a small device that uses WiFi to make up to 64GB of internal memory plus an SD card slot for additional memory available for playback. While this is much better than current and I have the ability to have several SD cards that I could interchange, my collection of videos on my NAS are currently around 3-4 TB. I don’t need ALL my movies available but 1-2 TB would be better than 64GB plus a bunch of cards of similar size. As I have invested in nothing but WD Red drives for my NAS, I came to WD to see if they had any competing products. I like the size and capacity of several of the external drives, they appear to only be available in USB and not available via WiFi. Is there any potential here for that? Now that WiFi is usable on aircraft, this is a great product idea and I would like to see more competition in that arena. With what I already expect from WD, I’m thinking they would be the leader in that market.
I use a Ravpower Filehub along with my WD MyPassport Ultra for this very solution (or at least for use in hotels, as I’d still be careful about using WiFi on aircraft as to what is allowed or not by specific carriers). Works a treat, and may be an option for you too. It’s a combo battery/wifi hotspot/SD card reader/USB host, although only USB2.0. The Filehub can power the drive, with enough juice for ~4 hours or so (recharge connection via micro-USB).
There is apparently a rev.2 version of the device due soon (with added DLNA and LAN capabilities), but the rev.1 works fine for me (under Android, but they are Apple-compatible too).
You can pick up the rev.1 device from their website for £40 in the UK. And both fit nicely into an Amazon Basics MyPassport case, along with the USB3 cable for the drive.
