Can I add a External SSD to my Asus AC3100 router, and use it for backup storage?

newls1

newls1

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I've been wanting to add some sort of storage device on my network to store docs and stuff that my 3 pc's in my house use most of the time. Was actually in the middle of making a cheap pc out of the hardware laying around and use it as a "file server" per se' but i dont need anything high capacity or fast... just need basic storage and anything over 250gb would take me 80 years to fill up, so i think going to file server route would be a to much and un-nessesary for my needs. I just remembered that my router (Asus AC-3100) has a few usb 3.0 inputs and was wondering if I was to just simply buy an external USB 3.0 SSD (Sata based) and plug it into my router, would this now give me storage over my network that all 3 pc's can dump stuff into?? Could it really be this easy? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks
 
I popped a 64GB USB drive in my router some time ago and it does a good enough job in providing network storage. USB thumb drive write speeds are not particularly fast, but if they're USB 3.0 they do pretty good on read speeds, close to a SATA SSD. You can use an m.2 SSD in a USB enclosure. I use one when I need to do maintenance and don't want to go to the trouble of sticking an m.2 drive in a motherboard. You're limited by network speeds anyway. A thumb drive should suffice. Easy enough to try it.
 
Yeah you wouldn't need to use an SSD. Even if you're wired to the router gigabit (forget wireless), you're not likely to see a difference between a HDD and an SSD, especially if you're the only one accessing the media.
 
You can, but it might not be the most efficient, nor the cheapest, way of sharing documents nowadays. If all you want to do is share documents between computers, cloud storage is easier, and probably a lot cheaper than building even a cheap PC.

The kids needed Microsoft 365 (i.e. Office 365) to do thir schoolwork from home during the corvid situation, so I got the family version for $99/£79. You can share it with up to 5 completely different account, each able to be installed on multiple PC's, and each with 1 TB of OneDrive storage. It's surprisingly cheap considering everything you get. And if you really want to go cheap and not pay anything, GoogleDrive gives you 15 GB of storage for free per account.

I still do use a home network, but that's to stream several terrabytes worth of high definition movies, but if all you want to do is share documents between your different PC's, cloud storage is much more convenient.
 
echn111 said:
The kids needed Microsoft 365 (i.e. Office 365) to do thir schoolwork from home during the corvid situation, so I got the family version for $99/£79. You can share it with up to 5 completely different account, each able to be installed on multiple PC's, and each with 1 TB of OneDrive storage. It's surprisingly cheap considering everything you get. And if you really want to go cheap and not pay anything, GoogleDrive gives you 15 GB of storage for free per account.
Click to expand...
did they not have o365 through the schools? all our students do and have licensing for up to five devices.
 
pendragon1 said:
did they not have o365 through the schools? all our students do and have licensing for up to five devices.
Click to expand...

Perhaps the more senior classes used them more often, but before this mess occured the kids weren't using laptops, much less MS Office. They just went to school as normal. But after the school shutdown, that was the only way to work.

Most families were encouraged to use their own computers or laptops, and we had one with a trial version of office that stopped working right in the middle of a school assignment. I already had the personal edition of MS Office for £59.99 for so it wasn't a big deal to upgrade to the family edition for £79.99 for the kids to use. If we needed help, likely the school would have temporarily loaned us laptop with Office on it, but that would have taken time, we were told to avoid physically going to the school, and other families needed it more than us.

Maybe there was a programme for licensing, but the whole decision to shut the schools happened so quickly...
 
The one thing I don't like about storing my data on someone else's computer (the cloud) is the dependency on an internet connection. Good for backups and sharing, but for data I use all the time I'd rather have it local. I keep a digital library of movies/shows and it's stored locally. Might be able to cloud store it cheap enough, but again there's that dependency on an internet connection, also lower transfer speeds.
 
little update: I just got home from a 48hr shift, and finally had a sec to try a USB thumb drive before I bought a external HDD to play with. I plugged the thumb drive into my router and entered the asus router 192.168.x.x setup page, it already found the USB device, and I just clicked a few things, and bam, now i have "USB Storage" over network drive showing up on all my pcs in the house. Testing out the transfer speeds, I copied over a 1gb file, AND THE SPEEDS WERE TERRIBLE!! im fairly certain its the thumb drive causing this as its a very cheap and old 32gb usb 2.0 drive. So I had a Bestbuy 50$ giftcard laying around and bought a 1Tb external usb 3.0 drive and it only cost me 4$ LOL! Im sure this new drive will perform way better and im pretty stoked with having storage over my network now. Didnt realize how much i needed this as its so useful. No more shoving files on usb thumb drives and plugging and unplugging them per PC, etc.... This is so much more convenient. Thank you for those who responded for all your input.... appreciate it
 
Those old cheap USB 2.0 drives are hideously slow. Even some of the USB 3.0 ones leave a lot to be desired. So far the best small inexpensive thumb drive I've come across is the Samsung FIT, gets about 200MB/s on sync read and 30MB/s on sync write. There are faster more expensive ones if shooting for speed. My USB SSDs are at the top, my Samsung T1 drives get about 550MB/s sync read and 500 MB/s sync write over USB 10Gb. Though if accessing over a 1Gb LAN, you're capped about 115MB/s so a decent 3.0 thumb drive is all you need.
 
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