Seagate Wireless Plus review

Introduction

Seagate Wireless Plus is an external 1TB USB 3.0 drive with Wi-Fi hub and repeater.  It is primarily aimed for people who need to carry a lot of multimedia content that can be shared wirelessly.

From what I can see, this product solves three problems:

1. Limited storage of typical mobile devices, like notebooks, iPads and smart phones
2. Sharing of media across multiple mobile devices
3. Access to extended Wi-Fi range

I was planning for long flights with our young children on our next vacation, and I wanted to bring as much entertainment with me as possible.  I was even thinking of building a solution myself, using a Raspberry Pi, but that solution would have required external power, not to mention additional stuff to lug around.  When I found out about the Seagate Wireless Plus I was very excited to try it out, as it combines all those features in a portable hard drive-sized unit with a 10-hour battery life.

At $199 MSRP, it may seem a bit expensive for a 1 TB storage, but I think the premium is well worth it; you're essentially getting a portable media server with Wi-Fi!  (Try building one for under $200!)

Drive Capacity and USB 3.0 Performance

While our mobile devices come with reasonably good amount of storage, these days I find myself running out of storage due to many downloaded apps and games.  With its 1TB (1000 GB!!) capacity, all our iPads, iPhones, and notebooks are able to access the same movies, music and videos via one source.  Also, by centralizing your multimedia contents, you now have more storage on your mobile devices for apps and games.

To get the drive ready for the trip, I plugged it into a USB 3.0 port on my computer; as expected, it showed up like any other external USB drive.  I was really impressed with the disc performance of Seagate Wireless Plus via USB 3.0 interface - I was able to copy all my kids' favorite movies at over 140 MB/sec!  The performance of the drive made the process of getting the drive ready quick and painless.  I still had plenty of room left after copying those movies, so I decided to take a backup of all our existing family photos and videos.  And I still had over a hundred GB free after that!

OS X (Mac) Support

The drive comes formatted in NTFS file system, which is read-only when attached to a Mac (as of OS X Mountain Lion).  However, the good news is that Seagate provides a driver for OS X to be able to write to NTFS drives.  This support was not entirely obvious, however you can find it in on the drive. You can also download the driver from here.

You can also reformat the drive in MacOS Extended (HFS+) file system; the instructions are found here.

Wireless Networking

My next step was to setup the wireless networking aspect of Seagate Wireless Plus.  FYI, Seagate provides a nice YouTube video demonstrating the process.  I highly recommend watching this video, especially if you are not totally tech savvy.

The unit's wireless networking switches ON when you disconnect from the computer, and OFF when you connect.  (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to access the unit simultaneously via USB and wireless network.)  Once the Blue LED lights up solid, the Wi-Fi is up and you should see the SSID "Seagate Wireless xxx" on your notebook or mobile devices.  That wireless network is NOT secured, so you should enable security once you connect.  FYI, it seems to support 802.11n, and I'm going to guess it supports 802.11b/g as well.

To access the Seagate Wireless Plus dashboard, you can simply go to http://www.seagatewireless.com/ on the web browser.  FYI, that IP address maps to 172.25.0.1.  Once on the dashboard, you can click the gear icon on the upper-right corner to change its settings.  The unit will restart itself, depending on the settings changed.

Seagate also provides free iOS and Android apps for mobile devices, to view or playback multimedia contents on your Seagate Wireless Plus.  However, in lieu of those apps, you can always go to http://www.seagatewireless.com/ on your mobile web browser.

What is not terribly well advertised, is Seagate Wireless Plus's ability to act as an Internet router.  In the Dashboard, by clicking on the "Wi-Fi" icon on the upper-right corner, you can have the unit connect to a Wi-Fi network that has Internet access.  Then, everyone who is connected to Seagate Wireless Plus can now access the Internet!  By default, those who are on that other network can now also access the multimedia content on the drive.  This is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your intent.  Fortunately, there's a setting for you to block access from the external network, while still able to access the other network (and Internet).

Battery Life

The unit's battery charges to full in about 3 hours with supplied wall-charger, and 9 hours if connected to USB.

So, how did it actually perform on our trip?  For our total ~9 hour flights, and our Seagate Wireless Plus performed flawlessly, feeding movies to 3 iPads!  It really helped keeping our young children occupied during that time, especially our little girl who can stay quiet only when she is watching Finding Nemo!

Really, for those parents with little ones, this will add few years to your life.  I now look forward to our family road trips, minus the hours of tantrums and "Are we there yet?"  Ahhhh...

Using it as a Wireless Range Extender

One surprising utility I found with our Seagate Wireless Plus, was that you can use this as essentially a wireless range extender.  The hotel we stayed at had terrible Wi-Fi signal, and most of our iPads and iPhones could not either see the network or stay connected.  Interestingly, our MacBook didn't have this issue; I am going to guess that it has longer, higher-gain antennas.

Now, I wondered whether Seagate Wireless Plus is able to see the hotel's Wi-Fi... and to my surprise it did!   Then, everyone including my in-laws, were able to use our Seagate Wireless Plus to connect to the Internet.  At one time we had up to 9 devices connected, and everyone was surfing the web; we had no issues with speed or connection whatsoever.

Support

Seagate Wireless Plus comes with a 3-year warranty.  Hard drives DO FAIL sometimes, so it is great that Seagate is able to extend a support beyond relatively short 90-day or 1-year warranty.  Also, Seagate has published a very nice Frequently Asked Questions here, and I found them to contain answers to many questions I had.  Well done, Seagate.

Conclusion

Never having purchased a non-storage product from Seagate before, my expectation of Seagate Wireless Plus was not very high to start.  I am really happy with the performance of Seagate Wireless Plus, which solved may issues for me.

I see many possibilities for those with many DIY project ideas.  e.g. it could become an excellent base for a in-car entertainment platform.  Also, considering that its dashboard is purely HTML based, I can easily see 3rd party developers writing alternative interfaces to interact with the Seagate Wireless Plus.

With the Wireless Plus, Seagate has created a new commercial product category: Mobile Media Server. It is refreshing to see someone taking a new idea and make it into a user-friendly, functional product, instead of re-creating yet another me-too product based on old ideas.  They have definitely started in the right direction with this product, and I hope they continue to improve in the future.

If you have a similar need like mine, where you need to take large amount of entertainment on a long trip to entertain young children, I recommend that you give this product a try.

Roy

Disclosure: While I am not paid by anyone to write this review, I may be compensated if you purchase products through links on my blog.