Follow Up - WD My Passport Wireless

In the spirit of one of my favorite podcasts (Accidental Tech Podcast, atp.fm ) who love their FU (follow up). I purchased this wireless hard drive before leaving for my Tasmania Trip predominantly to back up photos from my camera's SD card and then share them wirelessly to my iPhone and iPad. This failed pretty dismally mainly because the drive was so slow to copy photos from the card that it ran out of battery once before finishing the copy. The card was class 10 in speed and only had about 950 x 14 megapixel photos (roughly 5 MB jpgs each). I don't regard this as an excessive number of photos, so taking more than the 5-6 hour battery life to copy them to the hard disk was very disappointing. The next evening I set the copy up with the drive plugged into a 12 volt power source in the car and let it run while I slept. The copy worked fine. 

When I got home I noticed a review stating the same problems (http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/12/mypassport-wireless-review-a-hard-drive-after-photographers-hearts/) and suggesting that it would be speeded up by a firmware update. So I went through a couple of arcane ways of updating the firmware one of which finally worked and found that it decreased the copy time substantially to around 2.5 hours for the same 950 or so photos (for comparison this copy took less than 5 min on my iMac). This is better but still not ideal. Also, I found that the iPad app to connect and download photos to the iPad was not wonderful with it being very slow to show thumbnails of the images and then not being able to actually put it into the Photo Roll where I needed the photos to be so that I could upload them to my daily blog. It was much easier and faster to read the SD card in the iPad SD card adapter and load them into my blog that way. I guess I now have a rather expensive 1 TB wireless hard drive that I'll have to find another use for. :(