This article was published on June 22, 2016

WD’s new portable hard drive lets you take your Plex library wherever you go


WD’s new portable hard drive lets you take your Plex library wherever you go Image by: Plex

Plex is great for wirelessly streaming your entire library of movies, TV shows, music and other locally stored media to all your devices. But if you’re not within range of your home Wi-Fi network, you’ll incur data costs when accessing content from your setup.

Western Digital has a solution for that: its new My Passport Wireless Pro is a portable hard drive that can run Plex on its own, negating the need for plugging it into a computer. It can also set up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network so you don’t have to bother with a router either.

That means you can carry up to 3TB of media to a friend’s place and play files off the drive on any device. It has a built-in battery so it can run for 10 hours on a single charge, and you can also back up content from SD cards or USB 3.0 drives.

My Passport Wireless Pro starts at $230 for the 2TB version; the 3TB variant will set you back by $250. That makes it a fair bit pricier than plain-jane portable drives, but if you have a large collection of content, it’s worth looking into for streaming on the go.

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