6 ways to expand storage on your iPhone 6

2. Cut the storage cord

If you want physical storage but don't want the wires, you can choose to get a wireless hard drive or wireless USB drive. Wireless hard drives are the most economical for those with big storage needs.

Wireless drives create their own Wi-Fi direct networks, similar to a wireless media streamer, and users can connect their mobile devices to that network to access the contents on the drive.

Like media streamers, many of these drives cap how many devices can simultaneously connect, with some drives supporting five connections and others going up to ten.

Wireless hard drives vary in capacity and costs. Examples include the 2TB Western Digital MyPassport Wireless drive ($199, £131, AU$253). 2TB LaCie Fuel ($220, £145, AU$280), 500GB Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage ($99, £66, AU$126) and 2TB Seagate Wireless Plus ($190, £126, AU$242).

For faster speeds and reliability, a wireless solid state drive like the 128GB Toshiba Canvio AeroMobile Wireless ($150, £99, AU$191) is a great option.

SanDisk wireless flash drive

There are also wireless USB flash drives. Like the non-wireless counterpart, the 32GB SanDisk Wireless Connect Flash Drive ($40, £26, AU$51) works over USB so you can plug the unit into your Mac and PC to access your files. Once you're ready to share the files with your mobile device, you can connect your iPhone or iPad to the drive's Wi-Fi direct network. Users can also offload the contents on their phones to these drives to free up storage.

3. Let Lightning strike

Lightning drives are similar to USB flash drives for the computer. These drives plug into the Lightning port on your iPhone 6 as a USB flash drive plugs into your computer's USB port.

Many of these drives come with dual tips - one Lightning and one USB tip. This adds flexibility as you can connect the Lightning drives to your iPhone and to your Mac or PC to manage your files. If you have a file on your iPhone that you want to offload to the drive, you can connect the Lightning drive, move the file over using the supplied app, and then you can connect the drive to a computer to view the file.

Lightning drive

Examples in this category include the 16GB SanDisk iXpand ($68, £45, AU$87), 16GB Leef iBridge ($59, £39, AU$75) and 8GB Sanho Hyperdrive iStick ($79, £52, AU$100).

If you like the idea of a dual-tipped Lightning drive but would rather bring your own storage with your own microSD card, the Aizbo i-Flash Drive is a good solution.

Aizbo

It has a lower entry price than drives with built-in storage at just $28 (£19, AU$36). You'll need to provide your own flash storage through micro SDXC cards. If you already have multi microSD cards, the advantage is that you can create an infinitely expandable flash drive by swapping memory cards.