Wireless hard drives are making your life easier, but it’s good to study their usefulness before purchasing.

In the past 10 years, we have seen many categories of new gadgets and most of them include a significant group of models. Depending on the other devices you have in the house, it’s good to think if an investment like this is justified.

Wireless hard drives, a quick and convenient method for transferring files from a mix of devices without any wires. The price is significantly higher than the one of a typical external hard-drive and the interesting part is that there are several scenarios in which the purchase of such device is justified.

What is a Wireless Hard Drive?

An ordinary external hard drive requires an USB cable to interact with a laptop, desktop, tablet, TV or any other multimedia content player. Instead, wireless hard drives replace the need of a wired connection to a PC with WiFi or Bluetooth connection, depending on the model. Thanks to this feature, the compatibility is significantly increased.

Particularly useful for working in tandem with smartphones or tablets, the wireless hard drives can be used for both, wired connection with a computer, and free, if you want to quickly backup your holiday photos. Basically, whether your favorite gadget doesn’t have a standard USB port, but a micro-USB or Thunderbolt, as long as it has an operating system like Android, iOS, Windows and others, it can be used to wirelessly transfer data on the HDD.

It’s true that there are some models of hard drives that can be connected to Android tablets or even smartphones, but those involve a higher power consumption for the phone and a detailed analysis of compatibility.

Wireless Hard drives are highly portable because it integrates an internal battery. When turned on, they generate a low range Wifi connection, such as a classic router, and everyone who knows the password can connect to them. If you connect to the HDD from a PC or Mac, it will appear in Explorer or Finder, like a regular USB stick, to facilitate the data transfer.

If you connect to the wireless HDD using a phone or a tablet, a notification should automatically appear on the screen through which it will explain the steps you need to follow in order to access the files. But before that, you will probably need to install an application created by the hard drive manufacturer, to make things work.

The wireless hard drive’s autonomy varies greatly, depending on the number of devices that are connected to them and the activity they undertake. If you transfer 100 pictures or a video from your phone on the wireless HDD, the impact on the battery is insignificant. This increases dramatically if two people, with two tablets, are viewing videos stored on the same device for half an hour or two hours. In theory, wireless hard drives can achieve an average of 20 hours of battery life, and if are used constantly, the value may decrease about six hours.