Corsair Voyager Air 2 Wireless Mobile Storage
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,811 words · ~9 min read
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this product brings back some actually pretty amazing memories for me this
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promotional video for the original Voyager air was actually the first
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Revenue generating project that we ever did for lonus Media Group that was a
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really uncertain time for us but we've kind of stuck together through the
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amazing journey that the last year and a half has been and I feel like both my
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team and I have grown and changed so much as content creators in that time
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but what about the Voyager air how has it changed welcome to my video of the
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Voyager Air 2 wireless media streaming drive from
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Corsair the Jazz mini phone and tablet stand from Cooler Master is now
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available in a variety of cool colors from these great retailers click now to
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learn more out of the box the most obvious change is the industrial design
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the Voyager air the red one in particular had an angular aggressive
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looking style to it that I personally really liked and while the bottom of
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this new generation product is buold gold and eye catching with a quality
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feeling soft touch finish on the blue part and a nice grippy rubber ring to
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keep it in place on the table unfortunately this design language
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didn't carry over to the top where instead we find an unexceptional matte
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and glossy black plastic Affair thankfully the glossy plastic accent
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isn't easily scratched but it'll still always look smudgy no matter what you do
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because the buttons for power and wireless are both built into it which I
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guess leads pretty well into a physical tour of the unit on the front aside from
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the aforementioned buttons there are indicators for remaining battery power
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and DC power in then on the back there's a usb3 micro connector for charging and
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data that Corsair includes a cable 4 as well as a 5vt 2 amp power input just for
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charging that unfortunately corer doesn't include the cable 4 in fact the
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accessory package has been slimmed down in a few ways you no longer get a wall
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adapter a handy cigarette lighter to 2 Amp USB adapter or an accessory pouch
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just a drive and a USB 3 cable and while normally I'd complain bitterly about
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this Corsair does get a pass here because they are passing along a
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significant price reduction to the customer so if you really want this
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stuff you can just buy it yourself and you won't be paying any more than the original Voyager air all right so enough
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staring at this black box what the heck does it actually do lonus great question
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inside you'll find a few things first is a one tby hard drive second is a
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wireless network card and third is a large 6200 Milah battery to power both
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of those other things the hardware on its own actually doesn't do much it's
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all about the software with the voyage R so start by powering up the drive and
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turning on the wireless interface wait a minute or two and using a smartphone or
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tablet there are apps for iOS Android and Kindle download the Voyager air app
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connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot that the Voyager Air 2 generates on its own
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launch the app and start setting up your new toy from the settings menu we can
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configure Wireless pass through so devices connected to the Voyager Air 2
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can also access the internet through another nearby Network set up a password
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for the onboard Wi-Fi set up a DLNA media streaming server if
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you want and set up automatic sync for Dropbox or Google Drive a feature that
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makes the device much easier to load up prior to a trip or something very handy
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active transfers is the next button down the Voyager air2 can either stream media
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like the old one or here you can see the que of files that you've selected to
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cach locally on your device to save power I prefer this approach since less
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Wi-Fi streaming will cut down on battery use for both devices you can see and
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manage everything you've cached in the download folder or by using any standard
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File Explorer program on Android anyway speaking of managing files one of the
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big complaints about early Wi-Fi drives was that you couldn't really do that
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through the included apps nowadays with the Voyager rir 2 you can you so you can
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view reorganize rename and delete stuff at will with the only drawback being
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that's a little bit awkward and it's not the only thing that's a little awkward
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about the UI the built-in music player is well integrated on iOS and you can
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swipe up to change tracks and whatnot whenever music playing but on Android
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when you want to get at it you need to launch the whole app rather than Corsair
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throwing it in notifications or providing a widget and another Quirk
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that I noticed here is that it's the only part of the Voyager air app where
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you have to press the top left of the screen to go back because swiping in
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from the left doesn't work which I guess
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since we're in there now is the last stop in our little tour so I showed the
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folder-based navigation and file management none of that stuff was really
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new in the voyage rare software but Corsair has added some other stuff some
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of which is not that important some of which is pretty great so using metadata
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and tags Corsair tries to organize your files for you in four categories music
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actually worked pretty well with it sorting by artist album Etc and even
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doing a pretty good job of displaying thumbnails and whatnot but photos only
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really let me sort by a year videos didn't sort at all with any of my stuff
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even though Corsair said TV shows should split out by season and episode so let
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me know if you guys have a different result there and documents ended up just
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being a bit of a mess of desktop.ini files subtitle files and other random
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junk that didn't fit into the other categories
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now they're kind of getting there but there are a lot of ways that they can
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continue to improve this and I think the big thing missing right now is granularity how come I can only sort my
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uncategorized videos alphabetically why can't I sort by whatever has been most
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recently transferred to the drive and then why isn't there a search function
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so I don't have to rely on tags that sometimes work or manually scrolling
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through endless lists of random files
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which I guess sort of leads me to another positive point it's got support
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for thirdparty media players now so you can use o player or VLC or whatever else
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instead of worrying about running all your videos through handbreak before transferring them to the Voyager air
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this is Handy but my dream device would
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be even better than that while addressing the whole metadata thing um I
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guess I'll need to wait a few more years for this but I'd really like to see something that has a Plex server running
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on it or something like that that transcodes media on the Fly the Voyager
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Air 2 has improved over the original one but not to that degree which leads us
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into our conclusion on the hardware side
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nothing from my big wish list has really
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improved there's still no dualband Wireless a key feature for media
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streaming and wireless still turns off
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as soon as you plug something in via USB meaning that without a DC plug adapter
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you can't power the drive off of an external source and stream at the same
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time on the software side while it's certainly not perfect it is better
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better enough to call it a sequel to the original one even though it's lacking
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the Ethernet port tough to say especially since
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they're not getting rid of the original Ethernet equipped model and that one
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gets all the new software updates as well so this review puts me in a bit of
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a weird position where I have to call the name Voyager Air 2 kind of
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misleading when it isn't better than the first one really in any way
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but I also have to give kudos to Corsair for supporting their 18-month-old
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product with new software when they could have just as easily abandoned it
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and told their customers no you need the new Voyager air to for that so basically
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the same conclusion as last time it's a concept that I like even though its
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utility is limited to pretty specific use cases now with 30% more gen I guess
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