We look at a hard drive that has its own wi-fi hotspot
A good external hard drive can be immensely useful in a number of ways, including for transferring files from computer to another, or to provide a straightforward backup solution. Logically, though, the market for them must have shrunk in recent times, considering how many people these days do most of their computing tasks on a tablet or smartphone.
There are, however, ways to serve mobile devices with external disks, while also bridging the gap between them and tradition personal computers: wireless drives. Yes, you can use a USB hard drive with many smart devices by using an OTG (on the go) converter, but with a wireless disk, you don't even need to do that.
The Asus Travelair N, as you’ve probably guessed, is one such drive. And as you've likely also worked out, the N part of its name refers to the N-class wi-fi technology that it possesses.
Powered by its built-in 3300mAh internal battery, this 1TB unit transmits its very own wi-fi hotspot with WPA2 security. Connecting to this with a PC doesn't yield any useful results, and the same applies to mobile devices - until you install the Asus AiDrive app for Android and iOS (Windows Phone isn't currently supported, but we doubt Asus is losing any sleep over that).
To get AiDrive, you simply download it from either Google Play or the iOS App Store. Alternatively, you can use the drive's NFC feature, which will take you directly to the relevant store entry when you put your mobile device in contact with the Travelair. This same action will also open the AiDrive app once it's installed.
The point of AiDrive is to let you do all sorts of clever things, like accessing music, photos and videos stored on the Travelair drive, as well as altering various settings. Among these are wi-fi security, SAMBA, UPnP and, best of all, the ability to still connect your phone or tablet to the internet, in spite of being hooked up to the Travelair hotspot. Unfortunately, this isn't perfect, though, because it only includes 2.4GHz wi-fi, so any 5GHz connections will be unavailable. Nevertheless, the important thing is that connecting to the Travelair won't stop you doing anything else.
On the main screen of AiDrive, you have three main choices: Photos, Videos and Music. Tapping on one of these will show you what's stored on both your Travelair drive and the storage of your mobile device. Where applicable, there are thumbnails, and tapping on them opens them for viewing. You can also choose to share to Facebook, your local photos or email. What you can't do here, though, is transfer anything from your phone to the drive, which would be enormously helpful.
Fortunately, though, you can perform such tasks elsewhere in the app. Simply select the less prominent Files option from the home screen. From here, you can see everything in all locations, and you can even transfer things too, but it involves selecting the relevant files, then tapping an option icon in the top right and selecting Copy, before navigating to another location, tapping the same option icon and selecting Paste. This is far too clunky, but it's something that could perhaps be improved in a future update.
What's more positive is that in the settings, there's a backup feature. Opening this part of the app takes you to a page where you can back up your phone contacts and camera files (photos and videos) in one go. In our test, it only seemed to back up the images in one particular location on our phone, though, ignoring everything on our external SD. We also tried inserting our SD card in the Travelair's built-in card reader, but that didn't give us a one-touch backup option.
All of these problems limited the Travelair's usefulness for us, but we can't ignore the possibility that our phone was the cause of them.
But what about its performance as a regular external disk, connected to a PC via its USB 3.0 port? Well, on one PC running Windows 7, we saw a 900MB file transfer to the Asus drive at an average speed of just 45MB/s, Fortunately, these results were limited to that system, and on a laptop running Windows 10, things looked more convincing, with an average read speed of 105MB/S. That's not bad, but we also have an old 5400rpm Hitachi drive we put in an cheap USB 3.0 enclosure, and that transferred the same file on both systems at around 247MB/S. We also tested both of these drives with ATTO Disk Benchmark, and again our Hitachi drive performed better.
Hopefully, the relatively poor performance of the Travelair N in our tests was an anomaly, because at more than £100, you'd reasonably expect more. That said, the headline feature here is the wireless connectivity, and that does work well enough, even if the mobile app could do with some work. If that's what you're after, then the Travelair N is worth a look. Also, the fact that it's IP43 water resistant means it's fully ready for life on the move.
As it stands, then, the Travelair N is a good solution for sharing content to a mobile device, but its flaws prevent it from truly excelling. Anthony Enticknap
Has a lot going for it, but software needs improving.