Corsair Voyager Air Wireless Mobile Drive Review

Corsair Voyager Air Testing

The Voyager Air is currently only capable of connecting to Android, iOS, or personal computers. Corsair does advertise that the Voyager Air can connect to network connected smart TV’s, Blu-ray players, game consoles, DVR’s, and streaming media boxes. Unfortunately the latter half is completely untrue at this point in time. The Voyager Air does not have the ability to connect to anything more Android, iOS, or personal computers, but they do have plans to release a firmware update that supports DLNA. We did reach out to Corsair regarding this, and they plan on having the firmware to support this available soon. So with that said, we were unable to take a look at how the PS3, Xbox 360, or any other device would handle the Voyager Air.

To start off, I wanted to verify the read and write speeds on USB 3.0. Corsair claims 120MB/s read and 119MB/s write.

As you see from the ATTO benchmark, we came pretty close. We capped out at just over 114MB/s read and just under 114MB/s write. When I was writing a ton of data to the drive, via the USB 3.0 interface, I was pegging 108MB/s on average each time I tried.

While time consuming, I had to take a look at Corsair’s battery claim. The Voyager Air has a 6200 mAh battery, which Corsair claims would give you 7 HD streaming hours. When I ran my test looping a 1080p movie, I got 6 hours and 50 minutes, which is darn close to their claims!

Speaking of claims, Corsair mentions the Voyager Air can go broadcast out up to 90 feet. In my tests, I found that I could approximately 50 feet before I started having troubles. I still think this is a sufficient range, but it sure doesn’t hit the claimed 90 feet.

The next thing that I like checking, is how bad of a hit your internet connection takes when using the passthru mode. This happens with all of these types of devices, but some worse than others. My internet is an 18Mbps AT&T Uverse DSL connection, which I was pulling in at 16.8Mbps at the time of testing.

Running a speedtest through the Voyager Air, I pulled in at 12.2Mbps, which is roughly a 28% reduction in throughput speeds. This is unfortunate, but again, I half expected a decrease around this big.

Finally, copying a 102MB file from my Galaxy S3 to the Voyager Air took approximately 1 minute and 55 seconds, which is awfully long. If you want to copy files, you’ll probably want to stick to the USB interface.