Your wireless would be throttling the speed there. Based on what you were saying with seeing varying wireless transfer speeds from one transfer to the next and such a huge difference in speeds, you have significant amounts of interference going on.
With mine, even when I am pushing the edge of my network coverage, I still have pretty consistent speeds (albeit slow). I have no interfering wifi networks though.
Unless you move to 11ac, the router you picked isn't likely to impact file transfer speeds versus connecting the drive to a laptop. At least not likely with what you have going on.
Until you can get wireless speeds in to the mid teens or higher, router file serving performance is not likely to be the limiting factor, but overall wireless performance.
On my N300 network I can get around 20-23MB/sec over wireless, which would heavily limit me if I connected a drive to my router (also granted my router hits a wall at about 6MB/sec...its an older router, but still N300). I am mainly access files, at least if performance is a concern, over a wired connection, where ANY router would be a horrible limitation.
Typical consumer router, even new ones, MIGHT manage mid 20's MB/sec on transfers. I think the new Linksys 1900AC router is the bestest out there and it hits a wall in the 60-80MB/sec range. Just a single Gigabit link can do around 117MB/sec and I have two links and SMB3 running with my server, so it hits a wall at 235MB/sec between my desktop and my server.
So, if you can get your wireless to push in to the mid high teens it might be worth moving the drive to some kind of actual NAS or server of some function. Until then, hanging it off the router is just fine.
For you, I'd suspect a lot of competing networks. Can you do 5GHz? What kind of PCI-e card is it in the laptop? I assume since you moved from a b/g wireless card to an n wireless card its a single antenna n card? If so, best you can hope for is around 10MB/sec. You could get a 2 or 3 antenna 11n card and just stick extra antennas in the laptop (easy to find, but maybe a hair tricky finding spots to run them to in the laptop chasis) and probably increase wireless speeds 50-150% depending on the card and if 2 or 3 antenna variety.