Seagate Wireless Plus 2TB: A wireless drive with massive storage capacity that fosters streaming of content over multiple devices simultaneously

A wireless drive with massive storage capacity that fosters streaming of content over multiple devices simultaneously

— Ashok Pandey

Seagate has launched this new wireless HDD with a 2 TB capacity. It comes in a plastic casing body with the brush metal finish on the top. Comparing it with other Seagate backup plus drives, this one is larger and heavier in size. The power button is placed on the top left side panel. This lets you access it via Wi-Fi. The drive comes with a USB 3.0 interface that allows you to use it as an external drive as well as charge the battery which is fixed inside the large body.

Access via smartphone apps: Wireless drive houses a 2 TB capacity Samsung Spinpoint M9T drive at 5400RPM, in which about 1.81 TB is available to the user. It comes with in-built Wi-Fi adapter that makes wireless connection possible and enables wireless streaming without connecting the drive to a power source. Though the in-built battery can be charged using the USB, yet it is shipped with a separate adapter to charge it externally.

The company has made available the Seagate media app that can be downloaded in smartphones from Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Windows Store as well as Amazon Appstore. The app allows you to access the drive using your smartphone on the go and stream content wirelessly. The app comes with a simple interface. You can categorise your contents according to their type such as videos, music, images, documents, etc.

Performance: Though, it’s not a regular external hard drive, but we do tested it using the USB interface to compare it with similar drives. The drive performed well while transferring the 10 GB assorted data using the test bed (Intel Core i5 CPU, 4X2 Kingston DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 OS and Cooler Master 350 Plus). It resulted in 44.4 Mbps read and 42.1 Mbps write speed using USB 2.0 which transformed to 107.2 Mbps read and 95.3 Mbps write speed through USB 3.0. It gave 34.87 Mbps read and 29.08 Mbps write speed on CrystalDiskMark benchmarke while on HD Tune Pro it gave 30.7 Mbps read speed.

The company claims that the drive can be connected with up to 8 users at one time, so we connected several mobile devices at a time using the device Wi-Fi and it worked perfectly. We were able to access contents and stream videos simultaneously, but yes it does took some time to load up. The Wireless Plus 2TB drive allows you to create backup of all your cloud content using services such as Google Drive or Dropbox.

As the drive has its own Wi-Fi, once connected, you can lose internet access if you are using wireless internet on your mobile device. However, from within the Seagate media app, you have the option to connect to your local router. The in-built battery can last up to 10 hours but this depends on usage and the amount of devices that are connected to the device at a time.