ocaholic - Storage > Corsair Voyager Air

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Preview

Page - 2 - Preview

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A closer look

Taking a closer look at Corsair's VoyagerAir shows that the drive features an appealing design. The top has been covered with a glossy coating and the bottom side is matte. Located at the front-facing plate, there are two switches. The one on the left hand side is to power on the drive and the other is to activate the wireless module. Also in this area you can find status LED's that indicate the the battery status as well as wether the wireless module is on or not. Regarding the battery: green means the battery is 100 percent charged, orange means it's above 20 percent and red means it's below 20 percent of charge.

A closer look at the back of the device shows, that there is an additional gigabit Ethernet port as well as an power plug for an external power supply. Inside the VoyagerAir you can find a 2.5 inch SATA-II drive from Toshiba with 1 Terabyte of capacity. The drive ships formatted with NTFS filesystem but it's also no big deal to format it with HFS+ if you're using a mac.

Last but not least there is the battery pack which boasts 6'200 mAh capacity. According to Corsair this should be enough to keep the VoyagerAir for up to seven hours from the next power plug.

Page - 3 - Closer look

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Software

If you want to access the VoyagerAir from your smartphone or tablet you have to install either an Android or iOS app. Once installed and you turned on the device it takes about 50 seconds until you see the device appear under wireless networks on your phone or tablet. In there you will see VoyagerAir appear. As soon as you arrived in the app you can start to access the files you saved on the VoyagerAir. If you want to do so you will have to browse through different folders and subfolders, since there is no automatic index that lists different file types when opening the app. On the other hand we have to say, that browsing the folders happens in a very smooth way. Still there is something else we noticed, when opening a video file: in this case a message appears, where you're going to be asked if you really want to show the video. Well, that message is a bit redundant.

Obviously it's also possibel to delete or rename files. If you stop by at the settings you can set wireless encryption and you can activate an internet passthru mode, which allows you to connect to the internet via wireless, while already being connected to the VoyagerAir through wireless.

Page - 4 - Software

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Performance

Atto

Blocksize	Write	Read
0.5	5500	4000
1.0	11000	8100
2.0	20400	15800
4.0	39900	30500
8.0	97200	73300
16.0	114000	11200
32.0	114000	113700
64.0	113900	113600
128.0	113900	113600
256.0	113900	113900
512.0	114000	112800
1024.0	114000	114000
2048.0	113700	113200
4096.0	114000	114200
8192.0	114000	114200

A closer look at the throughput rates in ATTO shows us that the USB 3.0 interface is becoming the limiting factor. While writing large files, we measured a maximum throughput of 107 Megabyte per second. It was also a good thing to see that the VoyagerAir can actually run for 7 hours, while streaming FullHD videos. There is only one thing you actually don't want to do, which is moving files from your smartphone or tablet using wireless. In this case throughput rate will drop below 1 Megabyte per second.

Page - 5 - Performance

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Conclusion

With the VoyagerAir Corsair created a wireless storage device, which pretty much does what you expect from it. Thanks to the compact dimensions and the 6'200 mAh battery pack it's a perfect companion when while you're on the way. You can store a lot of files and access them via a wired network, wireless network or USB 3.0. When we used USB 3.0 we achieved the highest throughput rates. You can also access the device from your smartphone or tablet. In this case you need to install a software, which also does what you expect from it. You can stream movies, look at pictures and browse files but unfortunately there is no index generated which lets you browse all the other files you have on your smartphone too. Apart from that we found it practical, that there was a pouch as well as a car adapter in the delivery.

Last but not least there is only the price left to come to our final conclusion. These days, the Corsair VoyagerAir sells for 175 Euro. Considering that a 1 Terabyte hard drive in a USB 3.0 case costs roughly 60 Euro you see that Corsair charges quite something for the additional goodies like, battery pack, enthernet port, wireless module and accessories. Nevertheless it is a practical device, but still, the price shouldn't be higher.