Western Digital Announces New WD Pro Series Wireless Hard Drive and NAS Units

With greater demand and access to our digital lives, storage solutions have been changing from pure density, to quick access and connectivity. The new WD Pro range of storage solutions is meant to provide that instant access to storage, wherever you may be. So far, the WD Pro series encompasses three products; a wireless portable hard drive, and two full-featured Network Area Storage (NAS) units.

The My Passport Wireless Pro is, as its name suggests, a wireless-enabled portable hard drive with a couple of cool features tucked away under the hood. Portable hard drives have been around for a while, but nearly all of them require a USB port to get the data on to them in the first place.

The My Passport Wireless Pro is equipped with 802.11ac technology, to enable fast transfer of data over any wireless-enabled device. There is also a battery pack too, capable of providing storage access for up to 10 hours. The battery also doubles up as a charging station for USB connected devices, such as phones.

What makes the My Passport Wireless Pro slightly more interesting is integrated Plex Media Server, so that you can wirelessly host a DLNA server nearly any device can access (including mobiles, TVs and even consoles), for streaming movies, music or pictures. If connected to the internet, the My Passport Wireless Pro can also be used as a cloud storage server with the My Cloud mobile app. It can even store/backup files to Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform, for instant sharing of photos when you are out in the field. You can also plug SD cards directly into the My Passport Wireless Pro for quick backups.

The My Passport Wireless Pro comes in two storage densities of 2TB and 3TB, priced at $230 and $250 respectively.

In the NAS space, are two new units, which for the most part are fairly standard network storage units. The 2-bay My Cloud PR2100 and 4-bay My Cloud PR4100. Both NASes are equipped with Intel Pentium N3710 1.6GHz processors and 4GB of DDR3L memory – which for a NAS, is quite significant. The PR4100 can be further upgraded to 16GB of DDR3L, should you really need it. Dual Gigabit comes as standard for both, with USB 3.0 ports available for external hard drive backups or printer sharing.

While transcoding is not explicitly stated, both NAS units support the installation of the Plex Media Server, and the massive 4GB of RAM will certainly help keep things snappy (caching can chew up a fair bit of RAM). The wide assortment of backup utilities, as well as Apple Time Machine compatibility, means you can keep your systems backed up safely.

Full array of cloud integration is supported, through the likes of Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. Adobe Creative Cloud is available for when you need access to your images/movies, or assets in general, with all the meta information on tap and ready to be pulled into your latest Adobe project.

Pricing for the My Cloud Pro series NAS starts at $400 for the driveless 2-bay PR2100, and $500 for the driveless 4-bay PR4100. Added hard drives will increase the price, depending on density (both support up to 8TB drives, meaning up to 16TB or 32TB worth of storage available for the respective NAS).