Looking for an affordable way to increase the storage capacity of your mobile devices, or stream HD content to your entire family's devices? Check out the Corsair Voyager Air, which offers up to 1TB of storage across your network, and can stream HD content to up to eight mobile devices with Wi-Fi.

Essentially, the Corsair Voyager Air is a portable USB 3.0 drive with a built-in Wi-Fi access point. It may sound like other products on the market, like the G-tech G-Connect and Seagate Wireless Plus, but it does have some unique features like a Gigabit network port and built-in 7-hour battery that make it a better choice.

Design

The Corsair Voyager Air is somewhat comparable in size to the Wireless Plus, measuring a bit longer and thicker. It comes with a Micro-USB 3.0 cable, and performs like your typical bus-powered portable drive. It is also USB 2.0 compatible, although it performs a bit slower. It features two switches on the side. One turns the Voyager Air on and off, while the other turns Wi-Fi signal on and off. The Gigabit Network port gives the Voyager Air the ability to work as a single volume NAS server.

Even with the internal battery, Gigabit Ethernet support, and built-in Wi-Fi access point, it is quite compact. The battery is said to give 7 hours of usage on a single, full charge. This is somewhat decent, but is 3 hours less than the Wireless Plus offers. To address this, the Voyager Air also comes with a car charger.

Features

When using the device as a portable drive, it works immediately upon connection to a Windows computer as it is preformatted in NTFS. It is also Mac-compatible, but you won't be able to write to it. You can reformat the drive into HFS+ which will allow it to work with Macs, but then it won't work with Windows. You can partition the drive with two different file systems, but this can be a bit awkward.

To use the device for what it was intended, a mobile media server, simply turn the power switch and Wi-Fi switch on. 30 seconds later, you're ready to rock and roll. You have the ability to connect up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices.

The network, by default, is open but you can easily choose a password to secure it, even from your mobile device. You'll just have to install the Voyager Air mobile app, available free of charge for Android, iOS, and Kindle Fire. Using this app, you can also connect to different Wi-Fi networks like hotspots.

The Voyager Air supports the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, working only on the 2.4Ghz frequency band, giving a top speed of 150Mbps. Of course, in reality, it is slower than this. That's why it can only support a max of five Wi-Fi clients simultaneously for HD streaming. If it were any faster, the battery wouldn't last as long, or it would be much larger.

If you wirelessly connect a laptop to the device, the Voyager Air becomes a NAS server you can peruse using a network browser, map the network drives, and copy data to and from it (Windows.) For a Mac, it shows up on the Finder. A downfall: all content is shared with anyone connected, and everyone is granted full read/write access, with no way to change this.

Additional Information

If you're looking for the perfect way to offer up these features to your network of computers or mobile devices or travel often, the Voyager Air is the perfect choice. It brings so much more to one device than was previously possible. Pick one up for $179.99.