WD My Passport Wireless 1TB Storage Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch

WD My Passport Wireless Internet Performance

The next thing that we will be looking at is the internet performance on the My Passport Wireless when the device is being used to share a Wi-Fi internet connection with the passthru mode. All of the wireless storage devices on the market today have a notable performance decrease, so let’s see how this new WD device does.

wired-performance

Our office internet with Charter Communications is rated at 100Mbps down and 4 Mbps up. When we tested it on our Intel test platform (Intel Core i7-5960X w/ ASUS X99-Deluxe Motherboard) we found that we were getting 104.4Mbps down and 4.43Mbps up with a latency of just 7ms and no jitter whatsoever.

wireless-performance

Running the same speed test through the WD My Digital Wireless just one minute later we found that we were getting 9.19Mbps down and 4.35Mbps up. This is a drastic decrease in download speeds, which is unfortunate, but this should still be plenty of download bandwidth for most anyone. It appears that our upload speeds are not being limited by the device, but clearly the downloads speeds top out at around 9Mbps. If you recall WD says that Wireless N with MIMO technology solution on this device allows for the streaming of four HD videos simultaneously at 8Mbps.

The latency increased four fold and the jitter went from being non-existent to being 15ms, which means our ping times are fluctuating. Clearly you wouldn’t want to play a first person shooter through the WD My Passport Wireless, but the speeds are respectable and are comparable to other wireless storage devices.