portable hard drives | Dan Bailey's Adventure Photography Blog

A Look at the New Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD

Posted on January 10, 2018 by DanJanuary 10, 2018

Outdoor and travel photographers, take notice: This week, Western Digital unveiled their brand new My Passport Wireless SSD and it’s something you’ll want to check out.

So much more than just a hard drive, the WD My Passport Wireless SSD is a powerful, multi-function tool that solves a number of very important issues for photographers who like to travel with minimal gear. In other words, leaving the laptop at home.

It’s a durable, shock resistant SSD hard drive that has an SD card slot, a USB port, Wi-Fi connectivity and and 6700 mHa charging battery built right in.

Here’s what you can do with it:

Download images from your memory card for backup right to the drive.
View/transfer your images (even RAW files) to your mobile device via the WD My Cloud App.
Stream 4K video from the drive to your phone or tablet.
Charge your mobile device via the powered 2.4A USB port.

So yea, this thing is pretty awesome!

For a long time, the main crux for photographers who like to travel with only a phone or tablet has been how to backup your images. Apple has the camera connection adapter, which lets you copy photos from an SD card, but it takes a long time to transfer and it eats up a lot of battery power.

And aside from that, do you really want to store all your shot images on your phone or iPad? Probably not. Most mobile devices aren’t really made for that. Download a couple of decent sized cards and you’ll fill up your iPad in a real hurry.

If you have a Fujifilm camera or any other wi-fi/Bluetooth enabled camera, you can transfer your images that way, but that’s only a realistic option if you’re transferring a few select images, not your entire card.

Built-in SD Card Slot & Wi-Fi Connection

With the WD My Passport Wireless SSD, you just stick your memory card into the SD card slot, press a button and your images will automatically be copied to the drive. With a 65MB/s transfer rate, it moves about 4GB per minute.

Then, you initiate a wi-fi connection from the drive and boot up the WD My Cloud App on your device. This allows you to view and manage your files, and transfer images to your mobile device, even RAW files. From there, you have all of your regular options- share, email, send to printer, open in third part apps, etc…

You can also connect the drive to your computer via USB and transfer image to and from the drive. When you’re back home, this offers an easy solution to get all of your images to your computer, instead of having to copy them card by card.

Back up To or From Your Computer

Another way to use this device is to put a batch of images onto the drive before you go on your trip, then you’ll have access to them when you’re on location.

I have the first generation My Passport Wireless and I used it this way during a trip to Labrador and on my 5-week Romania trip back in 2015. I put a folder of my best images on the drive, so if I client contacted me and needed some images, or if I wanted to access my photos for social media/blogging use during the trip, I’d have ready access to them.

It worked like a charm, although being the first version, it was a little clunky and quite slow. Being an SSD drive, this latest version is WAY faster, with speeds of up to 390 MB/s, and I imagine the software performance has been improved as well.

4K Streaming – Up to 8 Devices

In addition to letting you transfer your images back and forth, the WD My Passport Wireless SSD also lets you stream movies and 4K right from the drive to your mobile drive. You can connect up to 8 devices. You could either use this to preview video clips or show your work to clients, or use it as your travel entertainment hub and store movies on it that you can watch in your hotel, on the plane, or yes, even in your tent.

10 Hour Battery Charge

The 6700 mHa battery inside the WD My Passport Wireless SSD has a 10-hour life. This give you pretty decent amount of working time between charges when copying, transferring and viewing images. You can also use some or all of that charge to power up your mobile devices using the 2.4A USB port.

I carry a Goal Zero Venture 30 everywhere I go when I travel. It’s a 7,800 mHa battery pack, and I use it all the time to charge my phone and and camera batteries. The My Passport could potentially replace that on some trips, or else double my charging capacity. If you don’t already have a battery power pack like the Venture 30, this would give you a great charging source.

Durable and Shock Resistant

Not does the SSD design eliminate moving parts, which makes the drive more durable and reliable, it has a removable rubber bumper that makes it even more crash-proof. With the bumper on, it’s built to early survive a 1-meter drop on to the rocks. You can also take the bumper off if you want the unit to be a bit more compact and streamlined. So, again great for outdoor shooters and people who are rough on their gear.

It’s already a pretty compact device for all that it does. It’s just over 5″ square, and 1.2″ thick. The smallest configuration only 14 oz., while the largest 2TB version weighs about 22 oz.

Great All-Around Travel Photography Device

With wi-fi enabled cameras, better apps, and the occasional adapter cable, true mobile photography workflows have inched closer to hitting that sweet spot, and this new WD My Passport Wireless SSD finally gets us there with a unique, but extremely useful and well thought out offering.

I definitely plan on getting one of these and I see it becoming an essential cog in my own travel and outdoor photography setup. If you’re travel or outdoor shooter who is looking to put together a more mobile, laptop free setup, then I highly recommend giving this thing a look. It comes in three sizes: 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, although it seems like the 500GB would get you by in most situations.

WD still has their regular non-SSD, non-shock resistant version of the My Passport Wireless, which comes in for sizes, 1, 2, 3 and 4TB. They’ve been upgraded considerably from the original version, which is the one I have. If you’re looking to save a little money and are ok with slightly slower transfer speeds and don’t need 4K video streaming, you might consider this model.

Even if you do take your laptop with you on your trips, this unit could still come in quite handy.

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3 Bestselling Portable Hard Drives

Posted on July 18, 2014 by DanJuly 18, 2014

Small portable hard drives are considered essential tools for any photographer today. Combined with the slim size and high storage capacity that the latest drives feature, they fill a number of important functions for shooters of all styles.

A small USB drive that fits inside your pocket or camera bag can house your entire image library. Paired with a laptop that’s running Lightroom, you have the freedom to take your entire business on the road. This means you can edit and process images anywhere, fulfill photo requests from clients, share any photo with anyone, anytime, send images for printing and update your catalog as you shoot new photos.

Portable drives can also be used to deliver images to clients and they make for perfect backup solutions when you’re on location. For many assignment photographers, it’s standard procedure to backup each day’s work to a pair of drives.

Finally, external drives offer a great solution for off-site backup. Having an extra drive allows you to keep an extra safe copy of your image archive, just in case there’s a fire, flood, tornado, hurricane or break-in at your home or studio. Think about it: a hundred dollar hard drive is pretty cheap insurance. The idea is that you keep an current backup at home and swap it out each week with the off-site drive.

With these examples, it’s easy to see why you should probably have at least a couple of external drives, if not more. Here are three of the most popular slim style USB drives on the market today, I’d recommend any one of these models. They all run on Macs and PCs and are Apple Time Machine compatible.

1. Western Digital My Passport Ultra USB 3.0

The #1 best selling slim external hard drive is the Western Digital My Passport Ultra. It’s is a rock solid storage unit that comes in three sizes (500GB, 1TB and 2TB) and four colors (black, blue, red and gray), which lets you differentiate your drives way better than labeling them with masking tape and a sharpie.

I’ve used multiple incarnations of this drive for years for and they’ve never let me down. It’s small, reliable and reasonably priced. I’ve got three of them sitting on my desk right now.

2. Seagate Backup Plus Slim USB 3.0

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is another very reliable and versatile drive, and they’re the thinnest portable drives on the market for the size. I just used a pair of these on my last big assignment for master storage, backup and delivery of image to the client and I loved how small and sleek they were. The Backup Plus Slim come in four sizes (500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB) and four colors, just like the WD Ultra.

3. LaCie Rugged Mini Disk USB 3.0

The LaCie Rugged Mini Disk has become a very popular hard drive with outdoor photographers because it’s built with a shock absorbing rubberized housing that protects your data if you drop your hard drive or get it wet. It’s rated to withstand being driven over with a one ton car, and it offers reasonable weather resistance in the rain and snow.

The LaCie Rugged comes in 500GB, 1TB and now there’s even a 2TB version as well as Thunderbolt compatible drives for the newer Macs. Here’s a complete list of all the different configurations and sizes. They cost a little more, but that’s a small tradeoff for the how much more durable it is compared to other non-rugged external drives.

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Photography Backup Solutions. What are You Waiting For?

Posted on January 2, 2014 by DanApril 24, 2014

I recently got the “Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup…” message. Have you seen that one? Turns out that those enormous hard drives I bought a few years ago were’t quite so enormous anymore. I’d filled them up and and hadn’t gotten around to replacing them.

I don’t need to remind you how important backing up your system and your imagery is, but I’m going to do it anyway. Not just for you, though, because I’m the one who hadn’t backed up my stuff in awhile. I let it slide. Maybe you have too.

Now I’m not one of those paranoid guys who worries about everything, but in reality, this is my life’s work and I’d hate to see it all disappear in a flash of ones and zeros. Mostly zeros, I guess. Plus there’s all the personal stuff that lives on my system- scanned family photos, music that I’ve recorded over the years, projects, emails. You name it. We live in a world of computers these days, and just about everything we do is on there in some form or another. How would you like to lose it all?

We depend on our hard drives as if they’re infallible devices. They’re not. Sooner or later, they do fail. Don’t get me wrong, they’re built well and I’ve actually never had that happen, (knocking on my the wooden shelf next to my desk right now…) but there are plenty of people who have experienced the catastrophic loss of important data because some stupid little mechanical device that was made in Southeast Asia burned up, froze, got dropped or whatever.

Time Machine Backup

I figured that I’d played hard drive roulette long enough, so on the last day of 2013, I went out and bought two brand new Seagate 3TB Backup Plus desktop hard drives, formatted them as a RAID 1 array, hooked them up to Time Machine and did a full backup of my entire system. It’s actually backing up the most recent stuff right now as I write this post. I feel better already.

I’ve always had good luck with Seagate drives, but I would have just as easily grabbed the Western Digital My Book 3TB drive instead if they’d had that one at the store. They’re both solid drives and I wanted one immediately, so that’s what I ended up with.

I figured for the price, 3TB of desktop RAID storage would get me through for awhile, and even if I decide to go with a more complex system down the road, such as the G-Tech G-RAID drive, which actually looks VERY nice, at least I’m covered for now and I didn’t spend very much to get there.

Lightroom Catalog Backup

Another big need that I have is to have a complete backup of my Lightroom catalog that I can take with me. That way, if I’m on the road, I have access to all of my images, not matter where I am. Last year, I sent a final hi res file to a client while I was on a bike trip.

I use small, portable hard drives for this purpose. As my library has grown, though, I’d already filled up my 1 TB drive so I needed something bigger. I’ve long been a big fan of the Western Digital My Passport drives for years. Having owned quite a few of them, they’ve never let me down, and they’re small enough to fit right anywhere. The other day, I picked up a WD My Passport Ultra 2TB portable drive to back up my Lightroom library and other works files that I might need while I’m away from the office. (The WD 1TB portable drive is only $59 right now.)

My other choice would have been the G-Tech Mobile drives, which have rugged aluminum housings. Again, I wanted something now, and that’s what they had. I also like the Lacie Rugged drives, which have bright orange, rubberized housings that are easy to spot in your pack and are built to withstand being dropped from 6 feet. Recently, a client had me back up to a pair of 2TB Seagate Slim drives, which are also very nice, and I might add, tiny.

Using a great backup program called SuperDuper!, I make a copy of my Photo Hard Drive, which is where my LR catalog and images live. SuperDuper! lets you create, update and even schedule backups, which makes things REALLY easy, and when it comes to backing up, we all know that easier is better, or we won’t get around to it. This way, I can make a weekly backup of my entire LR catalog and keep it with me at all times for safekeeping away from the office. (I also have all my images backed up on three separate drives for total redundancy.)

Backup your stuff now!

I feel as if I started my year off right, and quite honestly, I’m glad that I did. I’ve got WAY too much invested in all this stuff not to play it safe. Also, with memory prices getting cheaper every year, the investment in a backup system is pretty nominal, especially when you consider what you stand to lose.

Now that we’re back to the top side of the calendar, this is an excellent time to take stock of your own backup system. Is yours adequate? Is it simple? Is it redundant? Sure, you could agonize for weeks and months over what the ideal system might be, or you could take a few short minutes, order yourself up some new hard drives and be done with it.

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