Fortunately, there are no major restrictions when it comes to purchasing an external hard drive, and if you're looking for one, you can always check our buying guide with the best models and their prices. However, that list doesn't include wireless options. If the convenience of WiFi connectivity is a priority for you, the Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro shapes up as a great candidate, but if the Western Digital-Seagate duopoly bores you a bit, you shouldn't ignore the Toshiba Canvio AeroCast, a workhorse that brings USB 3.0 support and an SD card reader.
One of the most positive pieces of news I can share with our readers today is that storage device prices keep dropping. An average one-terabyte hard drive doesn't exceed 50 euros. Our list with the best SSDs to speed up your PC presents options ranging from 20 to 110 euros, and we can already find ultra-portable units like the SanDisk Extreme Portable 250 GB at 100 euros. In other words, if you need to add space to your computer, now is probably the time to do it, but it doesn't have to be the only beneficiary. Just adding an external hard drive with WiFi support allows us to extend its advantages to all devices in the house, and one of the most interesting alternatives is the Toshiba Canvio AeroCast.
Toshiba Canvio AeroCast: Wireless Storage for the Whole Household
Activating the Toshiba Canvio AeroCast is as simple as pressing the power button that starts its wireless connectivity mode, switching to your computer, looking for the hard drive in the list of available networks, and entering using the factory password (according to the manual it's 123456768, and it's recommended to change it immediately). Once linked, access to its storage space is done as if it were any other network drive, with a connection through Windows Explorer. Toshiba's mobile app lets us view all the content of the hard drive from a compatible smartphone or tablet, and includes the possibility of redirecting videos to a Google Chromecast directly (the instructions for this are in the manual).
The Toshiba Canvio AeroCast is a bit more 'manual' compared to its direct competitors, but I think many advanced users out there will appreciate this profile. Beyond the special use modes (Access Point and Station), the integrated battery that takes about three hours to charge, and the maximum transfer of 150 Mbps in WiFi n mode, the only technical detail I want to highlight is the extended support from Toshiba. The original firmware editions on the Toshiba Canvio AeroCast carried some vulnerabilities, and if your unit comes with a version lower than 1.2.8, we recommend doing the update. Other than that, the Canvio AeroCast is a good hard drive, at a more than reasonable price.
