visortgw
Very Senior Member
Unfortunately, these routers were not designed to be pseudo NASs. Yes, occasional file transfers to attached USB drives will go generally unnoticed, but large or continuous transfers indeed bog it down. Consider a dedicated NAS if the SMB shares are accessed on a regular basis.L&LD,
Decided to check what were you talking about - "quad-core 1.8GHz models with 1GB of RAM are woefully underpowered".
Well, I run an AC86U, considered it a beast when I ordered it. (Previous router in its place was TP-Link with 560 MHz CPU and 128 MB RAM.)
Not so impressed now and it seems like I already went too far with it. Swap is pretty efficient on a USB 3 SSD drive but that's a lot of it. The 2 CPU cores are also often maxed out. For some reason, reading / writing files to the SMB shared USB 3 drive just seems to hog the poor thing. Maybe I have to optimize the Samba somehow but that's for another topic.
FYI, I migrated from RT-AX88U to RT-AX86U to GT-AX6000 over time, replacing lesser powered AiMesh nodes with former routers as I went. The difference in performance of the GT-AX6000 (quad-core 2 GHz processor, 1GB ram, newer kernel, ...) compared to all others is absolutely amazing, especially with its 2.5 Gbps WAN and LAN ports. My entire network backbone is now upgraded to 2.5 Gbps. My 2 GB swap is rarely touched despite running a whole list of add-ons (AMTM, Diversion, Skynet, scribe, nsrum, connmon, scMerlin, spdMerlin, and YazDHCP).