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Maxell Portable Wireless Hard Drive 500GB review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £120
inc VAT

Not a bad wireless hard disk, but a little overpriced and not polished enough

Ever wanted to add a significant amount of extra storage to your smartphone or tablet? The Maxell Portable Wireless Hard Drive lets you do just that.

Maxell Portable Wireless Hard Drive 500GB

Files are copied to the Drive from your computer over a USB3 connection, after which they can be accessed from your smartphone, tablet or laptop over Wi-Fi. Its built-in battery is charged when plugged in via USB. The Portable Wireless Hard Drive isn’t the fastest USB3 portable disk we’ve seen, but it was fast enough to keep us happy. Large files were written at 65.7MB/s and read at 79.5MB/s, while small files were both written and read at 23MB/s.

The Portable Wireless Hard Drive can create its own 72Mbit/s 802.11n Wi-Fi hotspot. Maxell claims that up to three devices can stream video from the Drive simultaneously, but we found that streaming two different video files to two devices was demanding enough to cause the video to judder. Wireless transfer speeds from a Windows 7 laptop were slow at 2MB/s for large files. Battery life when playing a H.264 video on loop was short at just under four hours.

Maxell Portable Wireless Hard Drive 500GB

Windows laptops can access the Portable Wireless Hard Drive as a standard SMB share or via UPnP. Android and iOS devices have to use the free Air Stream app, which looks and works almost identically on both platforms. Unfortunately, it has a garish appearance and in the way it works.

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Basic Specifications

Rating***

Storage

Hard diskToshiba MQ01ABD050
Capacity500GB
Formatted capacity465GB
Price per gigabyte£0.24
Disk size2.5in
InterfaceUSB3
Power connectorUSB from host, external
Spindle speed5,400rpm
Cache8MB
Seek time12.0ms
Weight190g
Size127x93x21mm
Power consumption idleN/A
Power consumption activeN/A

Buying Information

Backup software includednone
Price£120
Warrantytwo years RTB
Supplierhttp://www.box.co.uk
Detailsuk.maxell.eu

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