Corsair Voyager Air 1TB Wireless Hard Drive Review

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To say that the Voyager Air is not a big deal when it comes to revelations in portable storage would be telling a lie, the simple inclusion of a Gigabit LAN port along with the USB3.0 and WiFi is something that has not been done before and I’m sure that this particular feature will end up appearing on another product or two (whether it be one form Corsair or not) in the not too distant future.

Looking at the build and design of the Voyager Air, given the fact that there is a heck of a lot of hardware to pack into as smaller space as possible, Corsair have pulled off the compact build very well. Naturally the vast majority of the build is battery and hard drive, but in order to have the long battery life that Corsair promise, there has to be a slight compromise. Overall though, a rock solid level of build quality with no rattles or squeaks is what is to be found – exactly what one would expect from a high end manufacturer.

Moving on to the nature of this product and its storage accessibility on the go, this is where things are in some ways a little rocky but on the whole very good. The Voyager Air’s USB performance is bang on target giving near 155MB/s of transfer speed in either direction and when using the WiFi option, the App (whilst a little rudimentary), does as it needs to – and with relative ease at that. We did find that if you try to connect to the Voyager Air in an area where a large number of other WiFi networks are present, then the connecting device may struggle to connect first time, but there are two counter factors to take in to account here. This first of these is that even though the Voyager Air has quite a large operating radius for a unit of its size, its actual transmit power is relatively low in comparison to a dedicated WiFi access point, so taking the eTeknix office as an example, there is a powerful Netgear WiFi access point on the network and when the Voyager Air was moderately close to that (even though there was a large degree of channel separation) the devices would struggle to connect first time. This is not a fault of Corsair’s, its just something to take into consideration when using the device. On the go and in the car, there are no problems at all connecting to and using the unit and the battery life stood up pretty well, giving me just over six hours of use before the battery needed charging.

The one area that I’m sad to say disappointed me a little was the Gigabit LAN performance. I know this is only an additional feature on top of the portability factor, but the performance experienced was down quite a margin on what Corsair specified, topping out at around ~35MB/s max. Whilst this is OK for streaming content from the device, its not as fast as they claim it to be. We also found that with smart TV’s becoming more popular it would have been nice to see some compatibility when connected via LAN, but due to the lack of DLNA on the Voyager Air at this moment in time only a very small number of devices actually recognise the device. There is said to be a firmware update coming in the next few months that will give DLNA compatibility so this is something to look out for.

Rounding everything off, I have to say that on the whole I’m quite impressed with the Voyager Air, yes there are one or two areas that do need some attention and improvement, but some of these can easily be sorted over time through firmware and software updates. Does the Voyager Air warrant the ~£170 (€200 / US$260) price tag? Given that you are getting a drive with a whopping 1TB of storage with all the mobile features that we’ve seen before but with a longer battery life as well as LAN, it’s pretty much spot on, yes there are a couple of rough edges to be smoothed out, but if you’ve got to keep the kids entertained with loads of films on a long car journey for example, how many other products can take on the challenge and succeed? Red not your colour? – Fear not there is also a matt black model to play with as well for those that prefer the more subtle approach.