Any pitfalls with NAS by USB HDD Router?

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Batman

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#205206 3-Nov-2016 07:14

I love all these hidden things about computers, like buying a mobo that supports 3200MHz RAM and buying RAM marketted as 3200MHz means you can only run them at 2133MHz! Who would have known!

Anyway, I bought a 4TB USB 3 2.5" HDD a year ago. Thinking of getting either an Asus RT-AC68U (front USB port) or Netgear R7000 (rear USB port) to plug the thing into and use as a "NAS".

Can't be that simple right? I'm missing something? Like wifi signal will degrade? Wifi get slower? Doesn't work? Something else to know?

Thanks

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#1663076 3-Nov-2016 08:07

Carefully check the size of the drive the router will support, I have found that many router usb "NAS" setups don

't support large drives.

shk292

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#1663081 3-Nov-2016 08:28

Whenever I have tried this, drive access and transfer rates have been very slow. But that has been on ISP-provided routers so you may get better results with a better router.

Comparatively, even a bottom-end NAS will give a higher transfer rate than 100Mbps ethernet can handle

Resnick

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#1663091 3-Nov-2016 08:51

I used to have an ac68u with a 2tb hard drive and eventually switched to a dedicated synology NAS.

The issues I had were mainly speed related; large files took an age to write although in general movie streaming to kodi was okay. The best performance was with ext4 formatting from memory, but still sub-optimal.

In addition, there seemed to be a lot of stability issues with the router as a whole when the drive was mounted. Random crashes, gui freezing and vpn services were less than rock solid.

In contrast the synology has been a set-up and forget it even exists exercise :) There is also the benefit of a raid array should a drive ever fail. I only have 2x 4tb western digital red drives with two empty slots in the ds412+ so I guess I'm relatively future-proofed.

If you can afford it a dedicated nas is the way to go imho.

jonb

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#1663095 3-Nov-2016 09:01

When I have tried, the drive was always audibly spinning without powering down when idle. Now have a cheap synology DS112 from trade me, and only use the USB on the router with a 32GB USB stick for some file backups.

Resnick

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#1663098 3-Nov-2016 09:15

jonb:
When I have tried, the drive was always audibly spinning without powering down when idle. Now have a cheap synology DS112 from trade me, and only use the USB on the router with a 32GB USB stick for some file backups.

Good point. I also had this issue although the seagate desktop-type drive I used had software to manage spin down and hibernation. This didnt work out of the box however.

Batman

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#1663101 3-Nov-2016 09:27

Ok all good points. Thanks.

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richms

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#1663135 3-Nov-2016 10:00

Horribly slow and taxing an already overworked CPU even more making slow router even slower to respond to the web UI and crash more often when I tried it.

Also not sure how it is now, but was a total inability to handle GPT, drives larger than 2TB, drives with 4kb sector sizing and all too eager to pop up in the web UI that a drive needs formatting when it has stuff on it and worked fine on a non braindead operating system or a proper NAS via the USB port.

Those may have improved, but with a synology being so cheap now I do not see the point in persisting with a router as a nas.

Richard rich.ms

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#1663317 3-Nov-2016 13:44

richms:

Horribly slow and taxing an already overworked CPU even more making slow router even slower to respond to the web UI and crash more often when I tried it.

Also not sure how it is now, but was a total inability to handle GPT, drives larger than 2TB, drives with 4kb sector sizing and all too eager to pop up in the web UI that a drive needs formatting when it has stuff on it and worked fine on a non braindead operating system or a proper NAS via the USB port.

Those may have improved, but with a synology being so cheap now I do not see the point in persisting with a router as a nas.

exactly this, it is a useful feature in a pinch but i would not trust it to be exceptional

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JimmyH

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#1663443 3-Nov-2016 18:59

I agree. A dedicated NAS is a much better option. Doing what you want is possible but, in my experience, it will be slow and the performance will be awful.

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#1663452 3-Nov-2016 19:10

In that case I'll just use my desktop. turn it on and off when needed.

Ipv89

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#1663478 3-Nov-2016 20:45

joker97:

In that case I'll just use my desktop. turn it on and off when needed.

Another option is pick up a cheap laptop chuck in a big hdd and also a usb drive if you want. I ran one like this for years in my tv cabinet cheapest NAS I ever had haha

Mike

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Batman

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#1663484 3-Nov-2016 21:26

I have been doing that for the last 5 years :)

MikeAqua

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#1663544 4-Nov-2016 08:32

Ipv89:

Another option is pick up a cheap laptop chuck in a big hdd and also a usb drive if you want. I ran one like this for years in my tv cabinet cheapest NAS I ever had haha

How do you think an Intel Atom processor with 1GB of ram would handle that assignment?

Mike

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#1663545 4-Nov-2016 08:34

Mine is a quad core i7 with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD with the stuff loaded in the mSATA SSD not USB. I see they have PCI-e laptops now :)

Ipv89

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#1663561 4-Nov-2016 08:58

joker97:
Mine is a quad core i7 with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD with the stuff loaded in the mSATA SSD not USB. I see they have PCI-e laptops now :)

You might have issues with just 1GB ram but worth a shot with the lightest os you can find.

Mike

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