Corsair Voyager Air 2 1TB Wireless Hard Drive Review

Performance and Battery Life

The performance of the Corsair Voyager Air 2 is obviously limited by the connectivity you choose: direct WiFi connection (which requires the Android/iOS app to access or a WiFi adapter), WiFi passthru or USB. We tested the USB performance by using our USB 3.0 ready X79 test system with an Intel USB 3.0 controller. We also tested WiFi passthru and accessed the drive from the same test system. The test system was a wired client to an ASUS WiFi N Router, the Voyager Air 2 was a wireless client to the same router.

Wired USB 3.0 Performance

The USB 3.0 tests show us the internal drive is being used to its fullest speed. Around 120MB/s sequential read and write is typical of a mechanical hard drive.

Moving over to ATTO, the benchmark most vendors use to quote drive speeds, and we again see results around that 120MB/s region: so far so good.

In Anvil the results drop to around the 110 region but this is still a solid showing. The IOPS results were fairly low but do remember this is a mechanical hard drive not an SSD.

One final benchmark worth running is the AIDA64 read test suite, this puts hard drives through a wide variety of data reading tests. The random read result is more typical of the user experience when you are accessing files randomly on the drive, linear read is more representative of something like watching a film.

Performance Over WiFi (Passthru)

As we’ve mentioned the Direct WiFi connection is only possible on iOS or Android with the app, or on a Windows/Mac PC if you have a wireless adapter. Sadly we didn’t have a wireless adapter so we used the passthru technique, this allowed us to get the Voyager Air 2 onto the network as a “NAS” type device, but wirelessly connected instead of wired in. Using our same test system which was wired into the router we ran the benchmarks again with the Voyager Air 2 mapped as a network drive. As you can see the results are all sub 6.25MB/s, what this screams to me is that the Corsair Voyager Air 2 uses an internal 50mbps 802.11 n WiFi adapter and so bandwidth to and from the device wirelessly will always be limited by that.

ATTO showed us the best passthru results of around 5.1MB/s.

Anvil reveals less impressive response times and IOPS due to the wireless interface. Of course in the real world these speeds are good enough for writing small and medium size files to the device such as documents, photos and videos from your phone or tablet. For moving large files onto the Voyager Air 2 the USB 3.0 is highly recommended.

General Tablet/Smartphone Performance

It is difficult to benchmark the general performance of the device when connected to a smartphone or tablet but as we said it is going to be limited by internal Wireless N adapter used. Using the device generally is very snappy for accessing photos and videos, the response time isn’t noticeably slow and there was no lag when streaming multiple 1080p streams. Of course you have to remember you are limited to around 5-6 MB/s (Wireless N 50mbps) so if you’re watching 1080p videos across the house each video stream is typically 1-1.5MB/s meaning the Voyager Air 2 is good for around three to four video streams.

Battery Life

Battery didn’t really have a direct benchmark but we charged the device up to full charge, verified it was full charge using the app, and then started streaming a 1080p video wirelessly to a client tablet. This video was 10 hours long, it was the same 1080p video file duplicated and stitched together. With Corsair’s claims of 7 hours we knew that 10 hours would outlast the battery life and that assumption was correct. The Voyager Air 2 managed approximately 5 and a half hours before it stopped streaming due to a lack of battery capacity. This is a fair battery life, it isn’t quite as good as the 7 hours Corsair claim but it is close enough. If you were using this device to watch films on your TV via DLNA then you’d be good for about 2-3 films which is a strong showing.