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Any of these drives that uses an internal platter mechanism will cost less per gigabyte than one based on flash memory.

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Think of the Seagate Wireless Plus wireless media hard drive as a streaming photo, video, and music library for your familys phones, tablets, and laptops.

Road warriors and executives who travel with a team and need to share connections and conference calls will appreciate this uniquely integrated mobile-accessory set.

The SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick USB flash drive offers an affordable and simple way to transfer or stream files to and from your phone or computer.

The Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD is pricey, but this feature-packed drive can do much more than just wirelessly transfer files.

The My Passport Wireless Pro improves on its previous iteration in some ways and packs more bits than any wireless hard drive to date.

And, just like any other bundle of bits you may have created on a desktop or laptop, our first question is the age-old one: What are you doing to back it all up If youre like too many of us, the answer is nothing.

Now, if you have your tablet or smartphone configured to auto-upload your created media to the cloud or share it with your social-media accounts, maybe you dont need to worry.

But if you take lots of video or photos with your mobile device, and you would be crushed to lose it all were the device stolen, broken, or dipped in the sea, you need a backup plan.

Wireless Drives: The Landscape Note that portable, wireless hard drives are not just for backup.

Yes, they let you back up precious content from devices that dont typically take a direct data-cable connection, but they can also act as storage extenders and streaming-media sources for your tablet or phone.

Some wireless drives employ flash memory, but most use standard 2.5-inch platter hard drives inside, the same kind of compact drive mechanism used in laptops.

As you might guess, platter-drive-based models offer far more gigabytes for your dollar, but the flash-based ones are better able to survive jostling and bumps while operating.

Weve looked at a bunch of models on the market, of different paradigms, even including one solid-state (SSD) model from WD, using fast NAND memory inside.

Most of the drives profiled below are, at their heart, mobile hard drives in an external chassis, equipped with a battery for on-the-go operation.

Most also let you pass your Wi-Fi connection through the device, so its possible to maintain wireless Internet access while remaining connected to the drive.

A related wireless-drive paradigm is the excellent and flexible Kingston MobileLite Wireless, which acts like a wireless drive without the hard drive, letting you turn any USB key, USB hard drive, or SD card into a wireless storage drive.

If you own a host of existing USB storage, this could be a cheap and easy way to cobble together a wireless-drive equivalent without actually buying one.

You can use it for occasional wireless-drive backups without investing in a unit with its own storage.

And another still-different one is the Lenovo ThinkPad Stack (listed above), which is a mobile-accessory set that includes hard drive, power bank, and router modules that together can work like a wireless hard drive.

Its been on the market a while, but its a unique solution for serious mobile types.

Buying a Wireless Drive: The Basics A few key things to look out for in any wireless drive.

SD, or No SD A few wireless hard drives include an SD card slot built into the body of the drive.

Having this slot can make accessing (andor backing up) the contents of a camera card easy.

Wireless External Hard Drive For Mac