Map a Wireless HDD as a drive letter?

[fxfx]

Hi All,

I am very keen to purchase a "Western Digital My Passport Wireless 2TB USB 3 Portable" wireless hard drive. Reason being is that I wish to keep it in my car / laptop bag etc. and use it as ANOTHER HARD DRIVE on my windows 8.1 PC (or maybe linux and freeBSD as well).

My question is can I map this drive to windows as A DRIVE LETTER (s: e: whatever) when connected WIRELESSLY (not with USB cable) so that I can use this drive in windows in a normal manner? It's nice to know that I can stream to my mobile smart devices but what I care about MOST is added storage to my laptop without hassle of cables etc. I realise that I'll take a performance hit as my data will travel over WiFi but i don't think it should be too bad and worth it not too be tied down with hassle of being wired etc. (if i need to copy a lot of files etc. i can then use the USB 3 cable obviously)

I have spent over three hours researching this topic online, it isn't that easy to map (requires 3rd party software such as Net Drive) an ip drive etc. to windows etc. I have also gone through the user manual but it doesn't give me the anwer I'm looking for

Does anyone have any experience with this - perhaps bought one of these? or possibly (as a lower priority answer) can you recommend something else besides the WD drive? I don't mind a 3.5" drive solution either although i guess the power consumption could get heavy with a desktop hard drive. physical size of the drive isn't a big concern for me - a 3.5" drive will easily fit in my laptop bag, car boot etc. etc. smaller is always better but the 2.5" drives only go up to 2tb it seems and the 3.5" drives are also cheaper per tb... bigger battery is another option...

I live in New Zealand but I guess i can ship stuff over here from amazon, eBay etc.

If you would also know about freeBSD and linux that would be an added bonus - even if you can only speculate...but windows is my primary concern for now.

I would like to have answers before i fork out a lot of money buying this - as mapping this wireless drive wireless to my pc AS A DRIVE LETTER is a dealbreaker for me with this purchase (it needs to shows up under my computer as a drive letter). Guys at computer store aren't very helpful.

also if you can comment on battery life that would be great. do you think i can use the drive for 8-10 hours with one charge. i won't be using hectic bandwidth but the drive might be playing mp3 files most of the time. also working with office documents, ascii files etc. etc. (not playing large movies alotough i guess i might work with large ISO files every now and then) etc. etc. battery life is a lower prioirity to me, i can always charge it once or twice a day.

Any other suggestions are also most welcome and appreciated. thanks for your time...

if i have posted this in the wrong place please advise. or maybe i should use other sites such as Stack? or contact WD directly? But I'm also looking for Seagate etc.

thanks again

 

[i7Baby]

It will turn up as a network device - same as someone elses PC on your network. It'll have a name, not a letter.

 

[fxfx]

It will turn up as a network device - same as someone elses PC on your network. It'll have a name, not a letter.

thanks, anyway to map a network device as a drive letter?
Or, could I map a sub-folder of the network device (wireless hdd) as a drive letter?

 

[i7Baby]

Just change its name to say "f"

 

[fxfx]

i

Just change its name to say "f"

thanks, if I renamed it to "f" for example could I use it as a reference?

example if I had a text file called "text.txt" in the root of the so-called wireless 'f' drive could I run the following command:
f:\text.txt and it would open the text file?

(I am looking for a direct reference to the drive - the name is irrelevant)

 

[i7Baby]

Yeah. Or you could call it hard-drive and use "hard-drive\text.txt"

 

[fxfx]

unfortunately I don't think this will work. I don't think there is anyway to browse to the wireless hard drive using the windows command prompt...

I have tested this by adding a network location which links to a ftp site

windows seems to map this to
C:\Users\<userName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts\test
where test is the name I gave it

 

[fxfx]

In otherwords I want a full path to the files. So I work with files as I normally would. Example pin a recent file or program to my taskbar etc. If that program or file is on the wireless hard drive I don't think I could do that (at least not based on my ftp server test)

 

[fxfx]

I am thinking that a program such as NetDrive (or FTP client etc.) could work but I guess I can't test this until I have purchased this drive - very annoying!

Anyone else had experience with this? Help please

 

[fxfx]

i bought it and yeah it's pretty easy to map the drive luckily