Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The Voyager Air from Corsair is a very handy product, it does however resemble the first model quite a bit aside from swapping out an Ethernet jack for USB 3.0. The overall performance is as expected at the maximum levels the internal HDD can handle. You'll be hovering at roughly 110 MB/sec for reads and writes when using USB 3.0 with large files, there's just nothing wrong with that. WIFI is a different story, it seems you can use just a single link 2.4 GHz N connection that can do just over 50~65 Mbps, and that is just a little below par for fast file transfers on larger files. AC would have had my preference or a dual-band setup with 5 GHz enabled as well. Dual band would get you to 150/300 Mbps, and that would probably have been a whole lot more tasteful to see. So yeah, 65 Mbps is roughly where the device will be at, now that is plenty to stream music and movies. But if you need to write huge files to the device - well for that you'd be better off again with that USB 3.0 port. Also a note I should mention is that if the drive runs out of battery, the USB cable must be used to charge the Air 2 and here is the thing, once USB is connected - the wireless functionality does not work. So the USB cable has to be removed to use WiFi and thus media cannot be streamed from Air 2 whilst it is charging up. 

The good news is that the prices have been slashed for the AIR series, the 1000GB model as tested today on the initial AIR series would cost 225 EURO, this new model however hovers at 160 EURO (USD a notch cheaper) while not cheap, it does seem to feel like a fair price for external storage with included USB 3.0 and WIFI. The unit really is a mini NAS and, with the Android application software we tested, is downright 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 10, maybe 15 meters from the Voyager Air 2.

Final Words

Features wise the Corsair Voyager AIR 2 will not disappoint, especially the link with media streaming on smart-phones and tablets is very nice. The hardware is a bit of a thing to discuss really. the 1TB HDD is great to store a lot of content on. And performance wise the USB 3.0 connector will make everything happen, in fact on that connector this product is speedy enough for my taste. Proper NAND flash based storage would obviously speed that up even better, but in this price-range using a 2.5" HDD makes a lot of sense. That makes this unit nice for travellers' media demands. The WIFI however is considered too slow anno 2015 and it will hold many of you back as this product on WIFI just isn't fast enough to copy larger content at around ~5 MB/sec (give or take). 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 recommend the Voyager Air 2 if you need a quick access point to access your data wirelessly or stream movies and music.

Also a fun feature is that you can have the Voyager Air 2 unit connect to a WIFI connection on a router, and then have all your devices share that internet connection once you login to the Voyager Air. That makes this an access point for WIFI, very handy in say a hotel room where often you can only connect one device to WIFI. Anyhow, for revision 3 we do hope to see NAND flash based storage but at the very least faster WIFI – most notably 802.11ac support. It is a fun product though, but serves a very specific customer and as such this product line is probably a bit of a hard sell. But for the money it is definitely worth it.

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