Corsair Voyager Air 2 review

Corsair is best known for its range of PC components, but the company has been branching out into storage products too. One of its latest is the 1TB Voyager Air 2, a battery-powered NAS for smartphone and tablet owners. The Voyager 2’s appearance is hardly ground-breaking, though. Even when compared to other mobile NAS devices, it’s large, chunky and plain-looking at best, with sharp corners.

As with all mobile NAS devices, files are copied onto the Corsair Voyager 2 from your computer over USB3 and then accessed wirelessly from your mobile device. The Voyager 2’s USB3 performance was good. We tested the Voyager air 2 over a USB3 connection. Large files were written and read at around 103MB/s. Small files were written at 36.9MB/s and read at 41MB/s.

We’re also pleased to say that we didn’t have any trouble wirelessly streaming three HD video files simultaneously, and that we wandered 20 feet from the Voyager 2’s built-in 802.11n hotspot and up a flight of stairs before we lost the wireless signal.

The Voyager 2’s accompanying app is available for Android and iOS devices. On iOS you can only upload photos from your camera roll to the Voyager 2 due to Apple’s current app restrictions, which is what we expected. On Android, you can upload any file you want. You have to tap on the Folder tab in the app’s sidebar before you can upload files, which is an unintuitive interface quirk that baffled us at first. You can at least rename files, organise them into folders, download them from the Voyager to your device, cancel downloads if you change your mind and sort the file view.

Although both the Android and iOS apps coped fine with H.264 and MPEG4 videos, neither could play our MKV videos. Although we could play most of our DivX videos, they played without sound in most cases. The app’s user interface is also frustrating, with cryptic icons that are hard to decipher. While we could enable the Wi-Fi pass-through mode so that we could connect to our existing wireless network at the same time as the Voyager 2’s hotspot, we could only do so as long as the router wasn’t password protected. Bizarrely, the app doesn’t have an interface for inputting a network password.

Although the Voyager 2 is described as both Mac- and Windows-compatible, it’s formatted as NTFS out of the box so Mac users won’t be able to copy files to it unless they buy a separate NTFS driver or reformat it as FAT32. Its cost per gigabyte of 13p is reasonably low for a mobile NAS, however, and a USB wall charger is included, which is a useful extra.

The Corsair Voyager Air 2 is a good mobile NAS that’s let down by its apps. It could be great with some bug fixes and improvements, but for now it’s merely fair value.