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Initially ADATA recommend that you charge the battery inside the DashDrive AE400 for eight hours.
After turning on the AE400 it is worth checking the battery life. If the light is green, you have a 50-100% charge. If it is yellow then the charge is 25-50%. If red then you are down to the last 25% of battery life.
The Power button toggles via three different modes. If you press it once for a long time it will switch to the default wireless-transfer mode. This allows you to transfer content on a USB drive across the device to the computer or tablet. If you press the button again then the wifi is switched off and the powerbank device charging feature will be activated. You will obviously need to connect the device via the USB port.
This shows a limitation of the device, in that you can not charge a device and transfer wireless content at the same time via a connected drive on the USB port.
The default password for the AE400 is ‘12345678'. Simply key this into your PC wireless security key panel.
We only connected at 72.0Mbps to the AE400, normally in the same room connecting to my Netgear Wireless router we would get around 144.0Mbps. The official ADATA documentation does say that up to 150 Mbps is possible over wireless, but I never got anywhere close to that figure.
This had the negative effect of degrading internet speeds, often by half.
By this stage you will be able to see the device in your network section within the Windows Operating system.
Initially there will be no internet access because you have obviously disconnected from the Wi-Fi network. Open a browser and key in 192.168.99.1 as shown above.
The default log in to access the AE400 admin panel is ‘admin' and ‘admin'.
The main interface panel gives access to various aspects of the AE400 functionality. The default setting is for Internet Access to be disabled.
You can then enable Internet Access and then you will be asked to key in the network password.
There are other settings in the admin panel, for updating the firmware, changing the admin password and to adjust the time.
In operation we had no problem getting the DashDrive to transfer over jpg files from an SD card to our Windows 7 system, both wireless and when connected directly to the computer via the USB cable.
We also hooked up a 1TB Western Digital USB 3.0 drive and it worked perfectly. The system only supports the FAT32 and exFAT format, so it is worth pointing out that if you have a NTFS drive you will need to reformat to a compatible file structure.
ADATA say that the AE400 can support three mobile devices when handling 1080p content and five devices with 720p content. We tested this and the company claims are accurate. Streaming a 1080p AVI file to four connected computers did cause playback issues.
We copied a 2GB MKV file from a connected SD card to a Windows 7 PC. It took 9 minutes and 12 minutes. Quite slow. When connected directly via a USB 3.0 port it took around 1 minute to complete the same task (58 seconds).
