Slow transfer speed to usb connected hard drive

[CanesVenetici]

I have an Asus rt-n66u gigabit router that two usb 2.0 ports on it. It supports hooking up hard drives as kind of a NAS storage solution and I thought that would be great.
Well I'm getting pretty terrible transfer speeds to the hard drives hooked up to it.

Being usb 2 I figured I might get roughly 30 Mb/S, give or take...
I've been averaging more like 6 Mb/S.
It doesn't matter what hard drive I try using it with, it averages about 6.

Does anyone else have this router and/or this setup?
Any ideas?

The computer I've been transferring from is hard wired in.

 

[bds1904]

Well, according to your post you are transferring at 0.75MB/sec on samba (windows) shares. That is excessively slow.

If you are saying that you are transferring at 6MB/sec that's about right for a device with the processing power that the rt-n66u doesn't have.

Even plugged right in to a PC typically you don't see more that 12-15MB/s out of a USB2 hard drive.

If you were looking for a high performance NAS you should have gotten a NAS, not a router that does everything but nothing well.

 

[CanesVenetici]

Yeah, okay. Perhaps I deserve the sarcasm, I've been awake way too long and I used a lower case b.

That's 6 MB/s.

And I'm sorry, but I've seen 30 MB/s +/- sustained through a usb 2.0 connection, though I didn't quite expect that with my current setup. I don't need super high speed, hence why I didn't go with an actual NAS setup.

Any reason for the hate on the rt-n66u?
When I got it everyone was loving it and it was recommended fairly highly.
I never used the aicloud so I wasn't too worried about the vulnerability. And that's been patched out since anyway from what I've seen.

 

[Liger88]

I don't think it's hate directed toward the Asus RT-N66U, because it's a fantastic consumer grade router, but just that. A router. Converge of technology tends to make everything being "converged" either average or just shitty in general.

The USB 2.0 chipset on the router is probably inferior to what you'd normally find even on a motherboard chipset. You can never expect a device that has one specific function with additional features to kill it on everything. Even routing and switching most consumer routers do a poor job, but good enough for most consumers needs that it isn't a problem. You can do a quick google search on the router and having slow USB throughput and see reviews pop up left and right confirming it's indeed just an added feature that isn't meant to be taken seriously.

 

[CanesVenetici]

I don't know what I changed, but I got it up to 16 MB/s, and I'm happy enough with that.
But 6... that was a drag

 

[gibber]

I don't think it's hate directed toward the Asus RT-N66U, because it's a fantastic consumer grade router, but just that. A router. Converge of technology tends to make everything being "converged" either average or just shitty in general.

The USB 2.0 chipset on the router is probably inferior to what you'd normally find even on a motherboard chipset. You can never expect a device that has one specific function with additional features to kill it on everything. Even routing and switching most consumer routers do a poor job, but good enough for most consumers needs that it isn't a problem. You can do a quick google search on the router and having slow USB throughput and see reviews pop up left and right confirming it's indeed just an added feature that isn't meant to be taken seriously.

I expect a basic decent wifi router to cost less than $50. It's a massively common widespread consumer electronic device which has had more than a decade for refinement of technologies including "all in one chips", reliability, optimization of both power efficiency and performance, design tweaks to facilitate rapid inexpensive production, lower rates of failures etc - all these can contribute to both better performance and lower cost. Eventually a basic wifi router becomes only several times more expensive/complicated to produce than the electronic solar calculator you find for sale at the DOLLAR store.

It is simply ABSURD to imagine that any company producing USB chipsets would even bother producing any chips with "inferior" performance that do not even measure up to the USB 2.0 standard.

Granted, they may make some which do not have extra features such as providing more than the minimum amount of current (one area where you expect motherboard chips to go above and beyond the "standard" is higher current output on USB ports for rapid charging of cell phones/tablets, or powering external hard drives more reliably etc.) But - when a USB port on a router is purpose built for connecting an external storage device, one expects they actually would build in a decent power supply to the port.

If a company is trying to market to us a "premium" router and adding a $50 - $100 price premium, then "just an added feature that isn't meant to be taken seriously" is far from acceptable and would be an amateurish mistake that should not be expected from such veterans of the industry as ASUS, Linksys, or Netgear!

Simply passing data from a disk along to a SMB stream seems like a fairly lightweight task for today's level of embedded processors that one finds in devices such as routers, or even what you'd see in a $79 smartphone.

Absolutely, the read/write performance should be bottled-necked by one of three things: the actual performance of the disk/flash memory, close to the theoretical limit of USB 2.0 protocol, or, the speed of the WiFi connection.

Anything less should indicate either a defect in design warranting a return of the product, a defective single instance of the product, or a configuration issue.

Here's a nice chart from PC World showing some newer model Routers in case people are curious about performance of some more current models:

( http://www.pcworld.com/article/2050...s-802-11ac-router-sets-lan-speed-records.html )