Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The Voyager Air from Corsair is a very fun product. The overall performance is as expected really at the maximum levels the internal HDD can handle. You'll be hovering at roughly 100 Mb/sec for reads and writes over USB 3.0 and well, there's nothing wrong with that. The Ethernet connection (we confirmed on the switch) was Full Duplex locked and loaded at 1 Gpbs, now the read performance was fine really, but writes resulted in lower than 20 MB/sec performance, which is a little lacklustre really. My advice is to simply stick to USB 3.0 if you need to move around big files fast, but yes that does mean you take the product outside the network and that the PC you connect it to is powered on (if you want to share a drive in your network). Now the WIFI connectivity is just great, but it's what you can expect in terms of performance though, so 50 Mbps is roughly where the device will be at. That's plenty to stream music and movies from, writing huge movies towards the device ... well for that you'd be better off again with that USB 3.0 port.

The 1000GB model as tested today will sell for roughly 225 EUR / 239 USD, it is not cheap and that could hinder the sales of this product. The reality is though that the Voyager Air is incredibly handy and innovative. If you need to go to a friend to share some files, heck you flick on the power and can share over WIFI. No cables, no power is required. When you need a little extra performance then just plug it into a USB 3.0 port and that will seriously speed up large file copying.

Then if you want to watch a movie, listen to music and basically stream content through your tablet, phone, Smart TV or whatever device, that's where the magic really happens as you can access it really fast and anywhere in the house. Depending on signal cluttering in your neighbourhood, WIFI will work nicely up-to roughly 20 maybe 30 meters from the Voyager Air. I still have to find the right name for this device, is it a streaming storage unit, a portable NAS or external HDD ? Fact is, it's all of that and that makes it a really interesting product. Features wise the product will not disappoint, performance wise the USB 3.0 connector will make magic happen. WIFI is as expected, Ethernet is okay but could be faster. But the strength here is that you can access content from anywhere in the house with your PC or mobile solution and really that is just very handy. Overall though it's certainly fast enough for whatever you need to do with it and as such we can definitely recommend the Voyager Air.

Scotty, stream me out of here!

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