Maxell Portable Wireless Hard Drive 500GB review

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.

Files are copied to this external hard 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.

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.

Playing videos on iOS was limited to MP4 and H.264 files. The Android app has marginally better file format compatibility, playing some MKV and Divx files. Most of these videos had muted audio, though, and we could only hear it by downloading the file to the Android device and opening the file in another video player app.

We had no problem viewing photos or playing music. Disappointingly, there’s no way to upload files to the Drive from the iOS app, while the Android app is limited to uploading photos and videos taken using the app. You can’t upload existing ones from your camera roll.

The Maxell Wireless Portable Hard Drive is a mediocre wireless hard drive with apps that could be a lot better, and it’s not cheap at 24p per gigabyte. The 1TB model of the similar Seagate Wireless Plus is available for just £20 more or just 14p per gigabyte and is the better wireless disk for your smartphone or tablet.