I too was looking at the My Passport drive and although it does seem to be hackable I decided to go a DIY route. Primarily I just didn’t want to have to keep ti

I too was looking at the My Passport drive and although it does seem to be hackable I decided to go a DIY route. Primarily I just didn’t want to have to keep tinkering with software and likely compiling from source constantly. I also wanted the ability to encrypt the volume and there was no clear path to doing that on the My Passport. My use case is slightly different than yours though. My goal is to make a travel portable NAS. I can connect SD cards, any wireless device, or any USB device. I have access to my media on my server but public/hotel WiFi can make accessing video a pain. I’m editing on an older iPad that is storage limited as well. I just wanted to be able to have local copies of media accessible over WiFi for use on phones/tablets. My solution was a NanoPC-T4 with a 1 TB m.2 SSD. Using hostapd it acts as a hotspot and using samba it shares files. My todo list includes adding encryption and a web interface for configuration as well as some kind of battery power. Anyway, from what I’ve gathered playing with all of this, a single board computer with storage might cover your needs. The battery aspect doesn’t seem to be a requirement in your case so just setting up a board would be easy.