Seagate’s updated wireless drive gives you a lot of capacity in a portable form factor, along with cloud sync features.
I reviewed the Wireless Plus almost exactly a year ago in its 1TB variant. At the time, I thought it was a reasonable if somewhat niche device to allow you to tether a lot of your own data to a portable tablet or smartphone.
There’s the obvious point that the 2TB version offers a lot more storage capacity. Quite a bit more, in fact, and while it’s true that people will find new and innovative ways to fill storage space as and when it’s given to them, it’s also an undeniable truth that what the Seagate Wireless Plus will get filled with are movies and TV shows — legitimate or not.
The Wireless Plus does support iTunes movies via iPad connection, although oddly as I discovered in my testing, it does so by opening them as a Safari tab rather than as the native media player.
When I reviewed last year’s model I was struck by how it offered a Wi-Fi passthrough option, but it wasn’t very good or very stable. Connecting to the Seagate Wireless Plus 2TB involves hooking into its Wi-Fi connection, which by default leaves you with no other connection. You can then set a passthrough connection to your actual Internet connection.
CHECK.
Power light?
CHECK.
That’s it. We’re all out of lights.
On the previous model this was fiddly to implement and fell over often, and I’m happy to report that this has been fixed with the 2014 Seagate Wireless Plus 2TB. One word to the wise here though. By default the Wireless Plus sets its Wi-Fi connection up with no security enabled, which means that while you access your own files, you’re also opening them up to everybody else as well.
Seagate’s Wireless App remains relatively plain, and on the iOS side of the fence relies largely on the inbuilt player. It does offer the option to set up a dedicated folder for Google Drive and/or Dropbox synchronisation, which gives it a certain level of backup and access security.
There’s been little done with the aesthetics of the drive itself, although given its Wi-Fi connection status that might not be too much of a problem for you. It’s entirely feasible to run the Seagate Wireless Plus 2TB drive from a bag or large pocket without showing it off at all.
At $279 for a 2TB drive, the Seagate Wireless Plus remains a slightly expensive niche play of most interest to heavy travellers. Seagate does still offer a 1TB version at $219, but the small price drop doesn’t make a lot of sense there. It’s still not a drive for everybody, but it’s significantly improved over last year’s model.