Review: Seagate Wireless Plus

It wasn't long after buying my iPad a couple of years ago that I discovered one of my favorite accessories: Seagate's GoFlex Satellite drive.

It's a battery-powered hard drive that connects to your device of choice via an ad hoc Wi-Fi network. You can browse whatever's on it using a simple app. The battery charge lasts about 5 or 6 hours – long enough for a couple of movies, and perfect for a cross-country flight. I have it loaded with a bunch of movie rips, and I take it with me every time I travel. There was enough agreement around the Wired office with regard to its general awesomeness to earn it one of our Top 3 "Best Features" awards in 2012.

The Satellite has some flaws. It's only available as a 500GB drive, the battery life could be better, the app is a little clunky and, at $200, it's more than twice as expensive as a drive without a Wi-Fi radio.

But – Hallelujah – the drive has been rebooted.

Seagate has just released an entirely new version of the same piece of hardware. It's now called the Seagate Wireless Plus (a much better name). It maintains its $200 price tag, but you get more for your money. Capacity has been upped to 1 terabyte, battery life has been improved to a claimed 10 hours, and the entire case has been redesigned to match the sleek, silvery finish of Seagate's more recent releases.

As tablet and phone manufacturers push us toward cloud-based storage services – either their own or those of their partners – they continue to offer devices with limited storage options. If you love to watch movies and you can only load three or four movies onto your tablet, high-capacity drives like this one, built to pair with a mobile device, make a lot of sense.

While all the enhancements to the Wireless Plus are definitely welcome, the biggest change is to Seagate's custom player app. I did most of my testing on iOS, where the app has been completely redesigned. It's much easier to browse the media on the drive, either in a thumbnail view or a list view. The app acts not only as a file browser for the drive, but it shows what's on your device, too. A simple drop-down menu at the top of the screen lets you switch between the drive and your mobile.

Video playback is flawless and basically buffer-free. Files will only play if the device supports the file type natively (on the iPad, I was limited to Mpeg containers – raw .avi and .flv files wouldn't play), but if there's an unsupported file on the drive, the app gives you a little alert icon. Tap the alert, and you're prompted to download the file to the device so you can open it in a different player app of your choosing. Transfers take only a few minutes. Likewise, if you have a movie stored on your device – either something you've transferred to it, or a video you just shot with the camera – you can upload the movie to the drive. If you're away from a 'net connection, it's a convenient way to back up your device, or to share video and photos among friends.

In addition to the new iOS app for iPads and iPhones, there's a new Android app (which I tested on a Nexus 7 tablet), as well as app optimized for the Kindle Fire HD (which wasn't available at press time). If you hate the apps, or if you're using a platform for which no app is available, Seagate provides a web-based interface so you can just access the drive through a browser.

Three more things of note. First, the drive has the ability to act as a pass-through point to your main Wi-Fi network. Basically, you connect to the drive, open the app, then go into the app's settings to connect to your regular Wi-Fi network. This enables you to stay connected to the drive and the internet at large at the same time. As a bonus, if you're watching on an Apple device and also connected to your home network, you can use AirPlay to throw the video (or just the audio) to a connected AirPlay device.

Secondly, it uses the Universal Storage Module (USM) interface, a SATA-based slot that lets you attach any supported connection type to the tip of the drive. The Wireless Plus comes with a USB 3.0 module, but you can buy a Thunderbolt module as an add-on if you prefer. When you're in wireless mode, you can unplug the USB 3.0 module and snap a small door over the USM port. Nice and clean.

Lastly, the drive is formatted as an NTFS device, and it must remain that way to work, which means Mac owners will need a special utility to write to it. The drive ships with one copy of Paragon's NTFS utility on it, but if you have a few Macs in your home, you're stuck spending $20 per license for each additional computer (unless you have some Terminal know-how). The workaround is to use basic LAN file-sharing to transfer your movies to the one machine that can write to the drive, then mount it to only that machine. Windows users suffer no such punishment.

Overall, though, these are hoops worth jumping through for the convenience of having a full terabyte of movies to watch on your iPad or Nexus 10 or hacked TouchPad or what-have-you. Well worth the $200, especially if you spend a lot of time on planes, in hotels, or at your in-laws' house.

WIRED Gives your tablet access to a vast media library wherever you are, with or without a Wi-Fi connection. Solid performance. Speedy USB 3.0 transfers. Battery life of over nine hours in my testing (Seagate claims ten). Redesigned app is much cleaner, easier to use. 3-year warranty. Can stream to any DLNA device, including game consoles and Wi-Fi TVs. Transfer movies to and from the drive wirelessly.

TIRED Convenience comes at a price. Drive is slightly bulkier and heavier than other 1TB options. iOS app can play most of your movies, but not all of them. NTFS stuff is a hassle for Mac owners.