Other than that, there isn't much to see. The Micro-USB 3.0 port is flanked by a power button and a WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) button. Two multi-coloured LEDs show the battery and wireless connection status. The top is plain black, with a panel slightly overlapping one edge where the SD card slot is, reminding us of the styling of WD's external desktop hard drives. The grey sides of our review unit had quite a few scuffs even before it reached us, which goes to show that WD might not have taken into account how this product will typically be used. It will still slip into a bag without much hassle, but that's the tradeoff for 1TB of storage space. It's quite a bit thicker but also longer, wider and heavier than a regular portable hard drive thanks to the battery and Wi-Fi hardware. The WD My Passport Wireless is definitely one bulky hard drive. We're curious to see how this combination pans out, and whether the usage experience is better than what we've seen before. WD's take combines both - a hard drive and an SD card slot.
We previously reviewed the Seagate Wireless Plus and also the Kingston MobileLite Wireless, which substitutes a hard drive for an SD card slot. WD isn't the first to introduce a portable hard drive with integrated wireless networking hardware and a battery.
There is one workaround though: your smart device's Wi-Fi connection can be used to hook it up to a network-based storage device. Unfortunately, very few phones and tablets allow you to simply plug a hard drive in, and even then, using it would be a pain.
Unless you're willing to pay a massive amount of money, spinning drives are your best bet for storage when it comes to requirements of 1TB or more. Even with a microSD card slot, you aren't going to get more than 128GB of space, which isn't enough to store a serious music or movie collection. Apple is perhaps the most famous offender, charging an enormous amount of money to step up from the basic 16GB models of each of its portable products, but others also sacrifice expandability in the name of simplicity or aesthetics. You can never have enough storage space, and unfortunately today's smartphones and tablets don't offer very much of it.
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