All iPads Review on the Ravpower WifiDisk

[darky90]

I bought the Ravpower RP-WD01 Wifi Disk after reading some positive reviews on Amazon, and I feel this is one of the best investments I've made for my phone and tablet and for my traveling pleasure. I've looked into getting Seagate's wifi external hdd but that's just another device to spend a lot of money on when I already have so many SD cards and usb flash drives. I even have a perfectly good portable Seagate hard drive that I don't want to replace. With this device, I can finally use all these different storage types without the hassle of dealing with cables or other compatibility issues.

Where I got this: Amazon

What's in the box and Specs:
1 RAVPower WifiDisk
1 USB to micro usb cable
User Guide (hard to understand, Amazon reviews helped me greatly though)

1 SD card slot
1 Standard usb port
1 micro usb port

From the manufacture:
- Model: RP-WD01
- Wi-Fi Standard: 802.11b/g/n
- Wi-Fi Frequency: 2.4 GHZ
- SD card support: up to 128 G
- USB HDD support: up to 2 TB
- USB type: USB 2.0
- Micro-USB type: USB 2.0
- Power Bank Capacity: 3000 mAh
- Max Input: 5V / 1.5A
- Output: 5V / 1A
- Dimension: 4.65" x 3.11" x 0.55"
- Weight: 4.23 oz.
- Working Temperature: 5-35°C
- Storage Temperature: 0-60°C
- Certification: CE/FCC

Wifi Disk unit which doubles as a 3000mah external charger with your own charging cable.

App used:
AirStor

Also comes with its own user interface through the web browser if you rather not download an app.

Some basic Instructions and access:
Getting onto the network:
This device is essentially my own portable network where it comes with its own SSID and you will be able to find it in your nearby wireless networks. SSID for mine is WiFiSD-1164 (might be different for yours). Turn on the Wifi Disk and looked for the SSID in my wifi network. Enter in the default password which is 11111111. Now I'm in, and can access my portable storage.

Using the app "Airstor":
After downloading the app, and getting onto your WifiDisk's network, I can go directly to Airstor and it will pull up all data that's attached to my WifiDisk.

Using the Web interface:
After getting onto my WifiDisk's network, I go into my browser (should work for all computers, smartphones, tablets, any device that has a web browser) and typed in 10.10.10.254 and a green and black interface popped up prompting me for my login information. First time login information is "admin" all lower case and then nothing for the password. You can change this later in the settings.

I personally have not tried, but after reading some reviews of this product, it seems you can also use other file explorer apps to access your content within the WifiDisk. If anyone out there knows of any other file explorer apps, please share.

Performance and Likes:
I was able to test this out with my SD cards of varying sizes from 2gb to 64gb (I have 5 floating around). It also works with micro sd cards with an adapter. It has work with all my flash drives and my Seagate portable hdd.

5 devices can be connected to this at once. I have not tried out 5 yet but I've tried 3 and I think having the ability to have more devices at once makes this product even more worth on having because everyone in the family or your friends can access your videos and files during trips. And what's even better is that one person can be watching, for example, The Big Bang Theory, and another can be watching How I met Your Mother at the same time.

I was able to play a variety of video files such as avi, mp4, divx/xvid, mkv, mov and possibly even more. Everything played smoothly on a single device and on all 3 (galaxy s3, ipad, iphone 4s)

I tested the range on this thing and I believe I can go about maybe 30 feet before the signal is lost (from my front door to the bedroom). The 30 ft range has been enough for road trips and viewing files from around my apartment with little to no interference.

It connects wonderfully to my home internet. I was able to configure it through the browser interface, however there are options through the app as well. After setup, I was able to access both my files and my home internet at the same time. This is like a wireless bridge to your router so when configuring your internet, you will need to enter your password for your router.

The app Airstor is a very clean app and very straight forward. The only issue I had was that I could not figure out how to move a list of photos from the WifiDisk into my Photo's camera roll. Apparently you can only save one at a time. There maybe a backdoor way to doing this, however I'm not that savvy enough to figure this out. If anyone buys this and figures it out, can you let me know? It does tend to feel a little glitchy at times with the graphics, however it's very minimal.

The web interface works pretty much the same way as Airstor. Also since this devices comes with its own web interface, you can even access your media as well as adding media from a standard computer too. I can literally drop a file into the WifiDisk and after it finishes uploading, I can already access it from my iPad or phone without needing to plug cables into any other device.

Love that this is wireless! This can be tucked away in my bag or anywhere within range and I can watch my videos or listen to my music on my ipad or phone. Truly amazing device at a fraction of the cost of name brands wifi hdds.

Dislikes:
I really dislike how I need to hold the power button for it to turn on, but perhaps they made it like this so you can't accidentally turn it on and waste battery. The load up time for the network to display takes a while. It surely isn't instant though. Lastly, I personally do not like the color combo of this unit however since this works so well for me, I can overlook it. I think if this came in other color choices or perhaps all black, it would make for a very sleek looking device.

Overall:
This is such a great device and Ravpower gives such personal customer service too. They have personally called me to ask how my product is doing and that alone really tells me that they truly care about their customer's input and satisfaction. I'm really liking this brand. I also own their xRobot 30 pin portable charger and their 10,000 mah portable charger. I hope to see more variety in their products soon. Perhaps cases and other accessories.

I hope you found this review useful and thanks for reading. Sorry if it was super long...

I'm not affiliated with Ravpower whatsoever. Everything was bought with my own money.

Pictures:
Here are some photos for comparison on size. Pictured with this is a Seagate external hdd and iphone 4s.

 

[sbddude]

Looks interesting. Can it act as a ftp server and stream to avplayer hd?

 

[darky90]

Looks interesting. Can it act as a ftp server and stream to avplayer hd?

I guess it can act as a ftp server, but you can't really manually pick which ever players to use. Once you open your file, it'll play in your default player.

 

[BarryL]

Hey thanks for writing that up. Might get one after all now.

 

[sbddude]

I guess it can act as a ftp server, but you can't really manually pick which ever players to use. Once you open your file, it'll play in your default player.

In AvPlayer you can connect to a FTP server directly. You don't need any other app. I use it to stream from my synology NAS.

 

[darky90]

In AvPlayer you can connect to a FTP server directly. You don't need any other app. I use it to stream from my synology NAS.

Oh I see. Hmm, I might look into getting the AVPlayer.

Well as far as I know, this Ravpower WifiDisk is a wifi sd card/flash drive reader. Any other storage formats, I cannot say for sure. I was looking through the network settings and there are settings for Wifi/LAN, DHCP Server, and DDNS settings.

 

[xtremr]

Interesting indeed. Thanks for the write up. I actually own one of their 10,400 mah portable battery chargers and loooove it. Saved me many times on charging my phone.

By any chance do you know how long this lasts before you have to charge it again?

 

[Menneisyys2]

Looks interesting. Can it act as a ftp server and stream to avplayer hd?

BTW, it can also function as an SMB server, which means nPlayer / EC Player can even play back MKV files off it hardware accelerated (!).

 

[darky90]

Interesting indeed. Thanks for the write up. I actually own one of their 10,400 mah portable battery chargers and loooove it. Saved me many times on charging my phone.

By any chance do you know how long this lasts before you have to charge it again?

From full charge, for me it last about 4-5 hours with constant usage.

 

[Thex1138]

From full charge, for me it last about 4-5 hours with constant usage.

That's why there is no mention of usage time in the description..
4-5 hours usage is pretty marginal.
They either need bigger battery, more efficient Wifi or Bluetooth 4.0 low power.

 

[darky90]

That's why there is no mention of usage time in the description..
4-5 hours usage is pretty marginal.
They either need bigger battery, more efficient Wifi or Bluetooth 4.0 low power.

Yeah, bigger battery and efficiency would be great. That's one of my biggest gripes with this thing. And they market it as a power bank too? Hmmm yes, it can be used as one for emergencies I suppose, but it doesn't really leave much room to use both purposes comfortably.

 

[darky90]

I just noticed they are currently out of stock and I called ravpower to see if there are any shipments coming in soon. Supposedly they won't be seeing stock until mid June - July.

 

[avezunchik]

Please somebody advise what is the best app for using ravpower with iPhone/ipad. I cannot opne not mp4 files on airstor and then I only can download such files. I'd like to have some file explorer instead of airstor to stream avi/mkv/divxx etc files directly

 

[paulbasi]

RavPower password

I seem to be getting connected just fine. Every time I try to access my disk, it prompts me for a password. I have reset the RavPower several times but to no avail. What is the password I should be using?
By the way, this was a very very well written review. Thank you so much for this.

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

By default, password for Ravpower is 11111111. This isn't listed anywhere in the manual that I can find.

Also, most recent release of Airstor for iOS is broken for me. It will no longer connect to the unit via wifi. Based on App Store reviews, it's broken for everyone. Don't update until resolved.

 

[GabyT]

They updated the Airstor App

Please somebody advise what is the best app for using ravpower with iPhone/ipad. I cannot opne not mp4 files on airstor and then I only can download such files. I'd like to have some file explorer instead of airstor to stream avi/mkv/divxx etc files directly

I had the same problem. I just got to know they have updated the Airstor App to iTune Store. I updated the app to the 1.3.454 version, it works now. You can have a try.

 

[GabyT]

Also, most recent release of Airstor for iOS is broken for me. It will no longer connect to the unit via wifi. Based on App Store reviews, it's broken for everyone. Don't update until resolved.

They just released a 1.3.454 version Airstor App, I just updated to the new version and the Wi-Fi disk works now.

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

^ Yes, I just updated the app last night and it WAS working for a minute. Then I tried surfing through three different movies, and the app locked up my iPad. Rebooted my iPad, closed all apps, then tried accessing the device again. Now it wants a non-existent password to access the device (I never set one, didn't need one the first time). Had to turn off the RAV unit and then back on. Got it reconnected, repeated above steps, no request for a password, but now it can't see any of my SD cards or USB keys...says "folder empty" each time.

Buggy solution, I still say avoid Airstor until they get their act together.

That said, if you use the web interface, you can access the device. And using an app like GoodPlayer, you can access the files on the drives via SMB server detection. That will let you play MKV's and such...although with GoodPlayer, AC3 was gutted a long time ago (I still have an older version with AC3 enabled).

Device is about on-par with Airstash in my opinion. I've got both and don't think either is bulletproof, a bit flaky here and there and not quite finished product. But they mostly work.

 

[Donka]

Received one of these yesterday and overall I am very happy with it as a product. My main reason for purchase was to supplement disk space on my work issue iPhone 5 since they only supply a 16Gb model. After using this FileHub, I can see my only buying the base model of iPad in the future instead of my current 64Gb model. Why spend the extra £120 for a 64Gb model when the 16Gb and this device will give me what I need!

A few observations.

IOS app. Works 100% for me every time. This is the latest version of the Airstor app and device firmware. It always connects and all transfers I tried completed successfully without issue. My main use for the device is movies and photographs when I am travelling. The app will play back IOS supported movies without issue. Unsupported movies will give you the option of downloading. Once downloaded, the app will give you the option to open in another app so provided you have a media player that supports the file you are trying then this is an acceptable way of getting access to the media - you need to download and then transfer to the supported app instead of just streaming. The alternative is to use an app that supports streaming and SMB - see below.

Download speed. While the transfers are way fast enough for streaming a movie, I like the option of downloading to my choice of app for playing locally instead of streaming. I haven't timed this properly yet but regardless of the source being a normal USB pen drive or a high speed SD card, I was only getting transfer speeds of a bit over 1Mb/sec. Not a deal breaker but it was taking around 10 minutes to transfer a 700Mb movie file.

Movie streaming. I was streaming 720p content to my iPhone 5 and it was streaming flawlessly without a single issue. This was both with MP4 in the Airstor app and also MKV in the nPlayer app.

SMB sharing. Using nPlayer as my media player of choice, I couldn't find the FileHub doing an SMB search. I could set it up as a manual connection using the IP address of 10.10.10.254 and username of admin. This would see the FileHub but as soon as I tried to access any content folders, I would get a connection refused error. I set up a password for the FileHub and rebooted it and tried with my manual connection again. This time, nPlayer could navigate the folders and stream perfectly or download the file for local playback. It seems you need to set a password before you can use SMB.

Disk format. I tried an SD card formatted as exFAT and this could not be read by the FileHub. I'm not sure if exFAT would work with a USB drive or not but I see this as a real limitation of the FileHub. FAT and FAT32 work fine and looking at the firmware notes, it appears NTFS does too.

Photographs. At a push, this device could work as a replacement to the camera connection kit. Inserting an SD card or USB drive (CF card using a USB card reader) lets you browse your images and select specific or all images. You can upload these to your IOS device, the Airstor app lets you navigate it's own internal folder hierarchy and select a location. You could then open these images in your camera roll although I'm not sure if you can open multiple images in one go. This isn't as elegant a solution as the camera connection kit and involves an extra step but it is at least functional. What is probably of more use is the ability to upload images from your IOS device directly to an SD card or USB drive say when on vacation either as a backup or to allow you to then free up that space on the IOS device. You also have the option of using this method to share these files with other users although there are already apps that let you do that directly via Wifi or Bluetooth and airdrop in IOS 7 will also let you do this sharing function.

For me, this purchase is a no brainer if you want to travel with a lot of media and are running short on space on your IOS device or if you have just the base model to start with. It also makes sense for a whole family travelling with IOS devices as you can treat this as a portable NAS device and share content to all clients. You can easily swap out SD cards and USB drives when required but because it is a full sized SD slot, you can insert a large capacity SD card fully so it sits flush with the unit and use it as a form of semi permanent storage. You can pick up Ravpower Wireless Filehub and a 64GB SDXC card for less than half the price it would cost you to upgrade from a 16GB to 64GB iPad. You may lose a little bit of convenience with the limited internal storage but you would gain much more practicality and flexibility as well as this being a one off cost so you would save even more each time you bought a new iPad for example.

I'm a fan and the only two things I would love to see are improved transfer speeds and exFAT support.

 

[mrbliss]

Has anybody tried it with MusicMount?

I'm looking for a solution for a friend who has a large music collect on a portable drive and wants to stream it to her iPad. I understand the iPad version of iTunes can't normally see devices like this, so I'm looking for a good Itunes style music app that can.

The other device I'm looking at is Kingston Mobilelite, would this be a better option? Looking for the easiest solution to set up as she's not very technically minded and I won't be able to configure it for her as we're about 150 miles apart.

 

[Donka]

I haven't used that app but you want to ensure you can connect to it using a suitable interface e.g. SMB. If the app supports any kind of networking share then either of these devices should work fine for your needs.

 

[peapody]

I just picked this up a couple days ago, and had some trouble setting up the device. It kept sending me to that website where you can configure the device, but then would not connect to the app. Eventually I reset the device and now it is working how I would expect.

So far I am loving this thing -- it is doing what I wanted - stream movies and tv to my apple tv without the need for my to launch my computer or store media on my mac. I mean.. this is a great feature, and saves me on my electricity bills too lol since my Mac PRO is power hungry.

I also love the fact that the SD card sits flush in the device...which means that I can have it stowed away in the wifi disk on the go, and effectively expand the space of my devices at all times. I ended up picking up a 128 gb sdhc card for this purpose lol. Not sure if it will work, but I will let you know.

What I don't like is that it appears battery power is consumed when I leave a low profile USB connected to the wifidisk. I would have loved if there was a switch for me to turn on or off this charging feature, because I have sandisk cruzer fits that could just stay on the disk at all times.

All in all. This is a must have for anyone with peripherals and large media collections.

 

[Donka]

I just picked this up a couple days ago, and had some trouble setting up the device. It kept sending me to that website where you can configure the device, but then would not connect to the app. Eventually I reset the device and now it is working how I would expect.

So far I am loving this thing -- it is doing what I wanted - stream movies and tv to my apple tv without the need for my to launch my computer or store media on my mac. I mean.. this is a great feature, and saves me on my electricity bills too lol since my Mac PRO is power hungry.

I also love the fact that the SD card sits flush in the device...which means that I can have it stowed away in the wifi disk on the go, and effectively expand the space of my devices at all times. I ended up picking up a 128 gb sdhc card for this purpose lol. Not sure if it will work, but I will let you know.

What I don't like is that it appears battery power is consumed when I leave a low profile USB connected to the wifidisk. I would have loved if there was a switch for me to turn on or off this charging feature, because I have sandisk cruzer fits that could just stay on the disk at all times.

All in all. This is a must have for anyone with peripherals and large media collections.

This is what I love. I have a 64GB SDXC card in there all the time which is more than adequate for any vacation/travel. It means my iPad only needs to be the cheaper 16GB model as all my media is stored on the SDXC card and I just store apps on the iPad.

 

[TJ61]

Has anybody tried it with MusicMount?

I'm looking for a solution for a friend who has a large music collect on a portable drive and wants to stream it to her iPad. I understand the iPad version of iTunes can't normally see devices like this, so I'm looking for a good Itunes style music app that can.

The other device I'm looking at is Kingston Mobilelite, would this be a better option? Looking for the easiest solution to set up as she's not very technically minded and I won't be able to configure it for her as we're about 150 miles apart.

You might also consider the SanDisk Connect as an alternative. It kind of depends on whether you want some storage capacity in the device itself, or if you only want to use SD cards. To some extent, these devices are only as good as their apps, and so far the SanDisk app has been pretty good. I mostly use this for streaming movies to multiple devices, and for offloading photos/videos from camera (SD card) and phone while traveling. I like the smaller form factor, and the 8 hour battery life is nice, too.

Just a happy customer.

 

[mrbliss]

You might also consider the SanDisk Connect as an alternative. It kind of depends on whether you want some storage capacity in the device itself, or if you only want to use SD cards. To some extent, these devices are only as good as their apps, and so far the SanDisk app has been pretty good. I mostly use this for streaming movies to multiple devices, and for offloading photos/videos from camera (SD card) and phone while traveling. I like the smaller form factor, and the 8 hour battery life is nice, too.

Just a happy customer.

Thanks for your replies.

The built in memory of the Sandisk (32gb or 64gb) is not enough for the music (about 300gb) so it comes in as an expensive option compared to the others.

From what I've read none of the apps associated with this type of device is perfect, and none seem to be particularly good for music. They are more like file managers rather than something that can browse a collection of 1,500 albums displaying artwork etc with ease.

That's why I was asking about MusicMount as it does seem to do this well and has been developed as a solution to this problem.

I would be interested to hear from someone who has got something like this up and running. As I mentioned, it needs to be easy enough for a lay person to set up with some easy to follow instructions.