re: external hard drive on router

[whosit]

I recently bought the rt-n66U with the intention of future proofing my network as my old wirelss just died.

I want to purchase an external hard drive to be a time machine backup and a media server.

I have read that wireless and wired transfer rates seem to be slow using almost every router if the external is connected under USB 2.0 port

Does anyone have any expeience trying to hoop up an inexpensive ethernet port based hard drive?

Does anyone have any real world numbers on the rt-n65u using USB 3.0. If the USB 3 drives produce confimed faster file transfer rates, i would consider trading in for the 65u, but don't really want to

thanks

 

[nubyOz]

Hi,

Considered a cheap NAS?
For some extra cash you get far better performance and flexibility.
Also consider depending on what filesystem etc you use there is not only slow trasnfer rates, but you might also saturate the router CPU and possible memory as a whole leading to overall reduction in router throughput for all LAN and WAN traffic.
This problem seems to increase with large new drives, especially above 2TB.

My NAS, (Synology DS211J) does backups, central storage and sync of folders (home cloud), DLNA server for my movies and music, download server, printer share, video surveillance of my drive way,....

Cheers

 

[joegreat]

II have read that wireless and wired transfer rates seem to be slow using almost every router if the external is connected under USB 2.0 port

Hi,

I have never heard about this type of problem.
Do you have a reference where this is explaind?

Does anyone have any real world numbers on the rt-n65u using USB 3.0. If the USB 3 drives produce confimed faster file transfer rates, i would consider trading in for the 65u, but don't really want to

USB 3.0 will not give you ANY benefits in respect of speed: The bottleneck is the CPU in the router. It does not even run into USB 2.0 speed limits...

With kind regards
Joe

 

[whosit]

Originally Posted by whosit View Post
II have read that wireless and wired transfer rates seem to be slow using almost every router if the external is connected under USB 2.0 port
Hi,

I have never heard about this type of problem.
Do you have a reference where this is explaind?

I am just reading data tranfer rates of various people with this modem and others. I wouldn't call it a "problem", but more just lacking to meet my needs. the biggest concern is that my time machine backups are about 70gb due to having a running virtual machine. On my USB 2.0 connection, it currently takes about 30 minutes, and that's alot of disk activity.

USB 3.0 will not give you ANY benefits in respect of speed: The bottleneck is the CPU in the router. It does not even run into USB 2.0 speed limits...

I didn't realize that the router CPU was the limitation. does this mean that maybe, in theory, some years down the road transfer speeds will be incrased big time due to faster routers?. I feel taken advantage of xxxMbps marketing, not to mention USB 3.0

NAS sounds like a good idea, but i can't justify paying $200 for an enclosure.
As far as media server goes, is the USB 2 drive sufficient speed for 1080p playback on the dedicated 5ghz band?

 

[ddelorme]

This might work for you

I also had issues running usb drives off my router DIR-825 openwrt but it was cheaply solved. using a Seagate goflex home and ditching the stock fimware for arch linux arm with ext4 and nfs it easly handled movies etc for a few computers. the cost was around $150 cnd and some time to reflash and set it up.
I dont know about Timemachine so you might have to research that..
Here is the link if you want to read more..
http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/seagate-goflex-home.
I used this for a year before i decided to build a ubuntu fileserver with a raid 5 but still use it to hold backups,etc....
i did a cheack i get 10-15 MB/s wireless on this system 104MB/s write 117MB/s reads off my ubuntu file server using Gbit network. using the same Laptop.

 

[redpants]

.
As far as media server goes, is the USB 2 drive sufficient speed for 1080p playback on the dedicated 5ghz band?

Yes. I have a 1TB WD 2.5" Passport USB 2.0 connected to the n66u and I stream 1080p via 5ghz without any problems. Even if i pause during the movie and go away for a while and return to hit play, it plays back as if I was watching from my laptop's HDD.

 

[joegreat]

I am just reading data tranfer rates of various people with this modem and others. I wouldn't call it a "problem", but more just lacking to meet my needs. the biggest concern is that my time machine backups are about 70gb due to having a running virtual machine. On my USB 2.0 connection, it currently takes about 30 minutes, and that's alot of disk activity.

In any case a NAS (even a cheap one) will do a better job then the ASUS router, but it might not be as good as your USB direct connected drive.
Only if you have a 1 GBit network and the NAS supports high transfer rates you will come into the same speed range as the direct attached USB drive.

I didn't realize that the router CPU was the limitation. does this mean that maybe, in theory, some years down the road transfer speeds will be incrased big time due to faster routers?. I feel taken advantage of xxxMbps marketing, not to mention USB 3.0

Currently the router has only a 600 MHz CPU and there is no need to upgrade to more powerful (and power hungry) CPU for the basic router functionality.

I cannot predict the future, but I do not foresee that this will change in the coming years.

With kind regards
Joe

 

[RMerlin]

Currently the router has only a 600 MHz CPU and there is no need to upgrade to more powerful (and power hungry) CPU for the basic router functionality.

I cannot predict the future, but I do not foresee that this will change in the coming years.

Broadcom released a new SoC last year that has a dual-core A9 ARM CPU in it that can run up to 1 GHz. I would expect routers based on this new SoC to start appearing sometime this year. These should bring a decent performance boost I suspect.