Top Wireless Media Hubs for Home

A wireless hub—sometimes called a Wi-Fi disk or Wi-Fi drive—is a portable wireless access point that can share files wirelessly with other devices. A common use for a wireless hub is to stream videos, pictures, and music to connected phones, tablets, and computers. 

Another use for a wireless media hub is to offload data from those devices so that they can save disk space. For example, a computer or phone can copy files to the hub and then delete them from its own hard drive so that more local space is available for other things but the media files are still accessible wirelessly via the hub. Of course, doing that makes them available for other connected devices, too!

Why Get a Wireless Media Hub?

Normally, a network that uses Wi-Fi can share an internet connection with connected devices and allow for data to be transferred around between all the devices. However, sharing videos and other files among these devices isn't easy right out of the box.

For starters, and what's probably most annoying for most people, is that it can be hard for devices to find each other on the network and find out how to best share data—it's not an option by default with networked devices. Also, you run into the problem of storage capacity: some phones and tablets don't have a lot of free space left to hold lots of additional files. 

The wireless hub can connect to storage devices over USB, like external hard drives, to provide terabytes of storage, much more than phones and tablets support. Plus, with free USB ports on the hub, you can often use one to charge your phone, too, which is an added benefit of having one of these devices.