The market is no shortage of wireless SSDs. Here’s another newcomer, known as AIRmini. What makes AIRmini stands out is, well, a lot of things but it also has one heck of confusing spec sheet that makes us smell fish. But first, we do have to give credit for the sleek, stick-style design with rounded-off edges.
The AIRmini‘s form factor, which measures 112 x 38 x 9.5 mm (4.4 x 1.5 x 0.37 inches), resembles a USB hub. However, it is fairly weighty, tipping the scales at 168g – almost as much as a small smartphone. A little heavy but still fine up to this point. AIRmini is not just a pretty face. It is IP67 rated for dust- and waterproof, and it has supposedly passed the 2 meters (6.6 feet) drop test.
It can be configured to do a one-touch backup with the drive featuring a physical button for this purpose. However, things start to get rather weird as we started to “specs”. Dominar Tech, the company behind AIRmini, said AIRmini “is powered by Thunderbolt 3”. How’s that possible? TBH, I have absolutely no idea.
The marketing campaign touts super fast “2,200 mbps” read/write speed but before you go ga-ga over that number, you have to know that is wired transfer speed. Wait a minute… 2,200 Mbps translates to 2.2 Gb/s. That’s like half of USB 3.2 Gen1x1’s speed? Hmmm. I am confused. How is that fast again? Never mind.
On a side note, I am sure we are all well aware of the difference between MB/s (aka Megabytes per second) and Mbps (aka Megabits per second) at this point. If not be sure to give yourself a refresher HERE.
Let us move on to the star feature: wireless SSD. As a wireless SSD, it has WiFi 6 connectivity which the company claims could do “900mbps” (exactly as it was written on its Indiegogo page) but then, further up the page, it says AIRmini is capable of “900MB/s” wireless transfer speed. I was stumped.
That’s not the end. At some point, in one of the GIF graphics, it says it does data transfer rate “up to 2200 MB/s”. I am even more confused now. So, does it have a wired transfer speed of 2200 Megabytes per second and 900 Megabytes per second, or does it as 2200 Megabits per second and 900 Megabits per second? That makes a crazy amount of speed difference (differences of 15400 Mbps and 6300 Mbps, respectively, to be precise), ya’ know.
Can someone enlighten us? I will give the company a benefit of the doubt that those may be typos but until proven to be so, I suggest staying away from this. I myself was about to take the plunge but the numbers just do not make any sense.
Images: Dominar Tech.
