Use

To charge the Wi-Drive, simply connect it to any PC or Mac. Two drives will show up in the operating system: one virtual optical drive, which holds a backup of the software and the drive itself, with the exact same contents. So even if you end up deleting everything, you can just copy it back over from the virtual CD. It should be mentioned at this point, that you cannot use the Wi-Drive wirelessly and connected at the same time. As soon as it is plugged into a host system, the wireless functionality is turned off.

As any connected device can only connect to a single wireless network at a time, Kingston has added a bridging functionality to the Wi-Drive. This allows the drive to give internet access to any connected device, by bridging its wireless with a wireless router.

There is a small green LED below the Kingston logo, which denotes read/write activity of the drive, while the two blue LEDs give you the status of the unit and its connections. When the battery is about to run out - which is at the 4h mark according to Kingston - the LED turns orange and then red to warn the user of this aspect.

Battery Performance

Testing the Wi-Drive battery performance was simply done by charging it fully first. To do so, it was attached to a desktop PC, which was left on for 24 hours. Once ready, the HTC One V was connected to the device and a 720p video playback was started and looped until the Wi-Drive shuts down.

Runtime results:

• Time until LED turned red: 3h04m
• Time between red LED and shut-off: 39m
• Total battery runtime: 3h43m

Performance

HD Tach shows a pretty much straight line at just below 20 MB/s read performance. While this should be more than enough to stream Video and Music, I would have expected to see slightly better read speeds. A faster performance would be beneficial when pulling files from the drive when connected to USB.


ATTO shows very similar results for read performance, just a tad bit slower, while the write performance maxes out at just below 9 MB/s. Since you will not be able to write to the drive when connected through Wifi, there is no real need for the flash to be fast in this regard, but it would have been nice to see somewhat better performance to fill the drive via USB in the first place. Maybe Kingston can bring out a USB 3.0 variant next?