AC86U + 8TB

[bilboSNB]

I was thinking about getting this or something similar:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01IAD5ZC6/?tag=smallncom-21

Would the AC86U be able to cope with this okay given the extra grunt it has over the AC68U?

 

[RMerlin]

Would the AC86U be able to cope with this okay given the extra grunt it has over the AC68U?

Officially, no. Not enough RAM to properly handle such large disks for starter, and Asus hasn't officially tested anything larger than 2 or 3 TB as far as I recall.

 

[bilboSNB]

Officially, no. Not enough RAM to properly handle such large disks for starter, and Asus hasn't officially tested anything larger than 2 or 3 TB as far as I recall.

Thank you RMerlin, is that also the case with all media functions turned off and the only use case SMB shares?

I want to consolidate the several disks I have in my current win10 machine and get a smaller case, it sounds like it will be better to buy an internal 8TB disk and a smaller case but for some reason disks on their own seem more expensive, mm or a NAS .

 

[Eyerex]

I've used a Seagate Expansion 5 TB USB 3.0 without any problems which stored my movies to stream to TV

 

[bbunge]

http://event.asus.com/2009/networks/disksupport/
You may be able to use two partitions on your 8 TB drive. The above list from Asus seems to say the 4 TB is the drive size but...
I would recommend using a thumb drive in the other USB slot with a swap file on it. I use a 1 TB NTFS external drive and occasionally writes to the drive use up the router RAM. For that reason I discovered a way to use a thumb drive with a swap file on stock Asus routers. The how to is somewhere in this forum.

Sent from my P01M using Tapatalk

 

[ColinTaylor]

If you're going to plug a HDD into the router and you decide you want to have swap you might as well create a swap partition on the HDD. Putting swap on a USB flash drive is the worst option because it has the slowest write speed (and write speed is the most important consideration for swap).

 

[RMerlin]

Thank you RMerlin, is that also the case with all media functions turned off and the only use case SMB shares?

I want to consolidate the several disks I have in my current win10 machine and get a smaller case, it sounds like it will be better to buy an internal 8TB disk and a smaller case but for some reason disks on their own seem more expensive, mm or a NAS .

If you're really willing to entrust 8 TB of data to a non RAID setup, then look at the QNAP TS-128A:

https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-128a

Will be far more reliable, and provide much better performance as well. A router with 512 MB of RAM (of which roughly 70% is used by the router itself) will bring you nothing but trouble. For starter, there isn't even enough RAM to do a proper filesystem check in case of unexpected shutdowns, which will lead to data corruption at one point or another. You will also not have much RAM to cache data, meaning you will be stuck with the USB bottleneck for all disk access.

 

[bbunge]

If you're going to plug a HDD into the router and you decide you want to have swap you might as well create a swap partition on the HDD. Putting swap on a USB flash drive is the worst option because it has the slowest write speed (and write speed is the most important consideration for swap).

Hmm... not so. The spinning hard drive will go to sleep and not be available when the Linux system needs it. A thumb drive should always be available to accept reads and writes and even if it is a bit slower than spinning rust it will be there when needed. Of course you could invest in a USB SSD but a USB3 thumb drive is a lot less expensive.

 

[ColinTaylor]

The spinning hard drive will go to sleep and not be available when the Linux system needs it.

Seems unlikely that the router would be using so much memory as to necessitate paging but still not be accessing the HDD in some way. I suppose there might be a use case I'm not seeing.

 

[bilboSNB]

If you're really willing to entrust 8 TB of data to a non RAID setup, then look at the QNAP TS-128A:

https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-128a

Good point, and thanks.