The Corsair Voyager Air is more than just your average, external hard drive. Most smartphone top out at about 64GB of onboard memory, and even if you’re able to double that with a microSD card, it’s still not a whole lot of space if you plan on storing movies, music, and photos on your device. Sure, Corsair’s Voyager Air may not solve that exact problem, but it does a pretty good job at trying.
So, the question is — can you justify the Voyager Air’s, somewhat, high price? Read on to find out.
Hardware
Corsair’s Voyager Air comes in two capacities: 500GB and 1TB. We’re reviewing the latter. It connects via backwards-compatible USB 3.0, and it sports a powerful, built-in 6,200 mAh battery that allows you to use the device while it’s not plugged in.
Build
The Voyage Air comes in at roughly 5.5-inches long, 3-inches wide, and a single inch thick. To give you an idea of just how small this external hard drive, it’s about the size of an old MP3 player. So much so that the device easily fits in my pocket.
Power and Wi-Fi switches are placed on the front, while the USB, power, and LAN connections are placed on the back. While you can connect the Voyager Air with just one cable for data transfer, using the second cable and a second port charges the device’s built-in battery as you use it. In other words, you’re going to be able to get a lot of juice out of this bad boy.
Software
While you can plug it into a computer via USB or use it as a NAS device if you connect it to a router, to use the Voyager Air with your Android device, you’ll want to enable its built-in Wi-Fi. It’s a simple process, really. Just turn the drive on, turn on WiFi, and connect just like you would to any other Wi-Fi network. It’s that easy.
Once you’re connected, you can use the Voyage Air app to manage settings and files; you just have to download it from the Play Store, first. One of the coolest things about this external hard drive is its built-in Wi-Fi Passthru.
When the Voyager Air connects to another wireless network and acts as a bridge between your device and the other network, meaning you can still have full access to the Internet, but this has... other uses.
Basically, when the Voyager Air connects to another wireless network and acts as a bridge between your device and the other network, meaning you can still have full access to the Internet, but this has… other uses.
Think about hotel rooms that charge per device you hook up to the Wi-Fi. Simply connect the Voyager Air to the Wi-Fi, and connect all of your other devices to the Voyager Air. While it’s a really cool feature, the best part about this is that it can potentially save you a lot of money if you travel a lot.
Battery
As for the battery, Corsair claims that the Voyager Air’s 6,200 mAh unit allows video streaming for up to seven hours. While I didn’t test this specifically, I did get quite a substantial amount of life out of the Voyager Air. However, you can always check the battery capacity of the Air through the Voyager Air app, if you want to try and pinpoint how long this device can actually last.
Video review
Wrap up
I connected the Voyager Air to a few Android devices as well as computers running Windows 8, Mac OS X Mountain Lion and a few different Linux distributions, and it was plug and play on every one, although it's formatted to NTFS, so I wasn’t able to write to it out of the box on Mountain Lion. Still, it’s extremely easy to use.
The Voyager Air is a bit high when it comes to price. The extremely portable, external hard drive will cost you around $200, depending on where you look online. However, if you travel a lot, you could potentially save yourself a few extra bucks. It’s definitely a cool little gadget.
Brad Ward contributed to this review
Buy Now
No comments:
Post a Comment