Corsair Voyager Air

The Corsair Voyager Air ($219.99 list) is a sharable hard drive that works over both wireless and wired networks. It's one of the most flexible on the market, with Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity. You can use it to serve your digital life (photos, music, videos) to tablets, phones, and laptops both on the road and at home. The drive has a lot of potential and capabilities, but a few version 1.0 stumbles keep it from being the perfect sharable drive.

Design and Features
The Voyager Air is a notebook-class hard drive with a whole lot of networking built in. As such it is a bit larger than the usual pocket drive, but it will still fit nicely into your commute bag. The 1TB model we reviewed comes in a red paint finish on the top and sides, with a black front, back, and bottom panels. An all-black model is an option at both 500GB and 1TB capacities. The drive has two switches on the front for power and Wi-Fi, while the back has a power jack for the included power cables, USB 3.0 jack, and Gigabit Ethernet jack. Corsair included a simple slipcase for the drive, in case you're picky about nicks and scratches on the drive casing. The drive also comes with a 2 Amp AC to USB charger and a 2Amp car USB charger and all necessary cables. You'll need to carry one of the chargers with you at all times, as the drive doesn't charge its battery over the USB data cable.

The Voyager Air works like a NAS. If you connect it to your Ethernet network, the drive becomes visible to Mac and PC desktops and laptops instantly, and you can copy files to the drive at your heart's content. Once set up as a network drive on your desktops and laptops, you can use the drive as a wireless backup, but you'll have to bring your own backup solution, whether that's the one built into your OS or a third-party solution like Retrospect. When connected to the Ethernet network, you can wirelessly access the files from your laptop, desktop, phone, or tablet as long as you're all connected to the same wired/wireless router.

Hooking up the Voyager Air as a NAS is one of the simpler ways to share files. There's no complex user management here, so just be warned that all files and folder will be visible to everyone unless you lock the files themselves with passwords (like when they're zipped) or save them encrypted. One nit is that drive can't pass the Internet from the Ethernet port through its internal Wi-Fi radio, unlike the G-Technology G-Connect (500GB) ($199.99), so the Voyager Air won't add Wi-Fi to a wired network.

The 1TB drive is formatted for NTFS out of the box, so you'll have to reformat HFS+ or install a third-party NTFS utility on your Mac if you want to directly connect the drive to your Mac via USB. If you have a mixed OS environment at home, Macs can access the drive over the network without a reformat. If you reformat the drive HFS+, you can also use the drive with Time Machine (via USB or over the network).

You must copy your files to the drive manually. Therefore, it's up to you to be picky about which folder in which to store your files. The easy thing would be to copy your documents, video, music, and photo, folders to the Voyager Air, but this is dependent on you already having your files neatly filed away in those four folders. If you've not kept a tidy ship, and have media files everywhere on your various systems, then you can just copy everything over to the Voyager Air, but that's somewhat wasteful of space and you'll have to navigate to those folders manually later. The Editors' Choice for wireless hard drives, the Seagate Wireless Plus ($199.99) comes with a Seagate Media Sync application for Mac or Windows that can seek out those files and copy only those media files to your drive.

The Voyager Air works in home and on the road via its own Wi-Fi network. When you turn on the Wi-Fi switch on the Voyager Air, the drive sets up a local Wi-Fi network, which can share its files to multiple clients including phones, tablets, and laptops. This is the situation you'll find yourself in if you're away from Wi-Fi hotspots, like in a car or in the middle of a rural park. An example would be when you're on a road trip and want to bring all your video files with you. That way little Katie can watch all the episodes of Dora the Explorer she wants, rather than just the few that will fit on the 16GB iPad she's toting. This is the primary function of the Kingston Wi-Drive ($129.99): that unit is a drive that shares to its own nearby Wi-Fi clients. The G-Connect can also do this is stand-alone mode, as can the Seagate Wireless Plus.

If you're lucky enough to have a 3G/4G hotspot with you, you can set up the Voyager Air to pass Internet through itself. You can then setup a local Wi-Fi network on the Voyager Air, which will serve both the Internet and your files to wireless laptops and other clients. All your laptops, tablets, and phones will be connected to the Voyager Air's network, while the Voyager Air is connected to the hotspot. This is the theoretical perfect configuration for the Voyager Air, which is also applicable to the Seagate Wireless Plus, but not the G-Connect nor the Wi-Drive. The Voyager Air and Seagate Wireless Plus are the better travelling companions if you have a 4G hotspot and are travelling with your family.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/6jb-PPBYqLg/0,2817,2417160,00.asp

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