Can I use an ethernet router as a hub?

[Muse]

Do you have any 802.11ac devices or think you will in the next couple of years? If not, there is no point in getting it.

I never heard of them until this morning and started reading reviews of the other model. I figured as noted in some online commentary, it would future proof my selection somewhat.

I just got my first smartphone, a Nokia Lumia 520. That apparently does not have an 802.11ac receiver. Maybe my next smartphone will...

Anyway, one popular review of the Asus RT-AC66U at Amazon was by a guy who tested it against the Asus RT-N66U at a distance and it did far better. I figure that's a big consideration, although it is quite possible it wouldn't make a difference for me, don't know, but as I say a refurb wouldn't cost me much more than a new Asus RT-N66U. Other than a few extra bucks is there a downside? I like future proof. I know, in technology just about nothing is future proof, but I still try to do it. I do have too much legacy stuff around.

 

[Muse]

I installed my Asus RT-N66R over the weekend, did it quickly. Can I get a critique here?

I have my DSL modem going to the router, an ethernet cable from the router to my TP-LINK TL-SG1008D 10/100/1000Mbps Unmanaged 8-Port Gigabit Desktop Switch, have all my ethernet connected devices plugged into that switch, not to the router. The router has 3 unused ethernet female plugs. Is there an advantage in using the router's plugs instead of going that extra step through the switch? The devices include:

2 desktops, a laptop (which has been my server machine with an external 2TB HD), a blu-ray player, my printer. I'm not sure any of those would benefit from being plugged directly into the router.

Now the 2TB USB HD, I figure, I can plug directly into the router and dispense with the laptop functioning as a server machine, I figure that HD will be accessible anywhere on my network.

Comments/hints appreciated. BTW, the router is running the stock firmware (actually the first thing that the automatic setup did was prompt me to install the newest firmware, and I did... I heard that it plugs security leaks).

 

[Carson Dyle]

That should work just fine. Can't think of any advantage to using the switch ports on the router. They should be pretty much interchangeable.

I know nothing about the use of the ASUS router as a file server. Try it. If it works as you like, you eliminate the need for the laptop being a file server. You might compare the transfer speeds to see if they're roughly the same, or maybe it doesn't even matter to you.

The only suggestion I have is an aesthetic one. If you stack the router on top of the switch, see if you can find a 1 ft ethernet patch cable (try Home Depot or Lowes) for a fairly neat connection between them.

 

[Muse]

That should work just fine. Can't think of any advantage to using the switch ports on the router. They should be pretty much interchangeable.

I know nothing about the use of the ASUS router as a file server. Try it. If it works as you like, you eliminate the need for the laptop being a file server. You might compare the transfer speeds to see if they're roughly the same, or maybe it doesn't even matter to you.

The only suggestion I have is an aesthetic one. If you stack the router on top of the switch, see if you can find a 1 ft ethernet patch cable (try Home Depot or Lowes) for a fairly neat connection between them.

Yeah, I figure just try it. I have the manual open (it's digital), haven't found that part yet.

Good idea about comparing download speeds, will do that. Those speeds do matter to me. That's the reason I got this router instead of my old non-N Buffalo.

Stacking the router and switch won't work...actually, the router's on top of a shelf that's just below my home theater screen (flat white Gator Board), that gets projected image from my HD projector. The antennas sticking up at more than about a 30 degree angle stick into my movie/TV image. Don't know if moving the router or its antennas will improve my wireless speeds, am checking download speeds. I could build a little shelf that hangs from the other shelf to get the router a little more centrally located and allow space for its antennas to swivel in all directions. I have no idea if doing that is worth the trouble, if I will get significantly faster download speeds. Another option is to get the 3rd antenna for my downstairs laptop's N wireless card (Atheros). That would probably be a significant upgrade, I think.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Good idea about comparing download speeds, will do that. Those speeds do matter to me. That's the reason I got this router instead of my old non-N Buffalo.

Check the transfer speeds over the wired network, not the wireless. That will test the speed of the hardware rather than the wireless network.

 

[Muse]

I have an issue maybe someone can help me with. I moved the 2TB USB HD that is my data repository from a laptop that was my server to the Asus router. It's seen OK by a wirelessly connected laptop. However, I had things configured on that laptop (and my other networked machines) to have the root directory of that HD mapped to W:. The HD is seen as RT-N66R. I can map any of its directories but I don't have the option to map the HD itself as W: ... is there a workaround for this? If it isn't doable I have workarounds, but I'll have to change data in a lot of places where paths are hard coded. Not a big deal, but it would be easier to map the HD as W: if doable. Thing is that HD seems to be seen like a computer, not a drive.

 

[Muse]

Check the transfer speeds over the wired network, not the wireless. That will test the speed of the hardware rather than the wireless network.

Hmm. I didn't do that. However, over the wireless (with the USB HD attached directly to the router) it appears to be significantly faster. The same 105MB file just downloaded in 16 seconds and it took 26 seconds when the HD supplying the data was connected to the laptop as server. Both those times were with the router's antennas pointing pretty much straight up, something I won't want to do because it goes into my home theater screen, as I said. I think I'll put the router elsewhere. I need to make a ~12 foot ethernet cable to do that. I have Cat6 and crimpers/plugs...

 

[azazel1024]

That is pretty slow. I'd do more than one test and I'd also check wired transfer speed.

Most routers have a hard time pushing 20MB/sec for file sharing, where as most modern-ish laptops and desktops (built, say, last 10 years) should be solely dependent upon network interface and disk speeds. So, even if that is a USB2.0 HDD, you should be able to push ~30MB/sec and if it is a USB3 HDD connected to a USB3 port, you should be able to push 80-115MB/sec depending on the exact disk and the network interface of the laptop.

Of course if it is an old laptop with a 10/100 port...10-11MB/sec is going to be all she wrote.

26s for 105MB though says 4MB/sec. That is pretty darned slow. Something else going on? Even 16s isn't very fast, that clocks in at less than 10MB/sec. Sounds like a wireless limitation here with something going on.

Also, yes, move your router. In general the beam pattern from the antennas is omni directional in a HORIZONTAL beam. It has limited vertical coverage. For something like the 5dBi antennas on your router, it'll cover something like a 30 degree arc super well, a 50 degree arc pretty well and anything outside of that not very well to very badly. So if you already have to angle them at a 30 degree angle...that is going to put a lot of devices outside of the best coverage...depending on where you are standing. In general you want them vertical. If you have a fixed device you are bridging, it might make sense to play with the antenna angle a little because reception and transmision depends on reflections as well as line-of-sight transmision, so sometimes you can actually get a little bit better speeds and connection strength by moving the atennas to "odd angles". That is the EXCEPTION, not the rule though. Since you have devices you are moving all around, the best angle is going to be straight up and down.

 

[Muse]

That is pretty slow. I'd do more than one test and I'd also check wired transfer speed.



Of course if it is an old laptop with a 10/100 port...10-11MB/sec is going to be all she wrote.

26s for 105MB though says 4MB/sec. That is pretty darned slow. Something else going on? Even 16s isn't very fast, that clocks in at less than 10MB/sec. Sounds like a wireless limitation here with something going on.

Thanks for this. So, now I know it is pretty darn slow. The laptop that's furthest away is pretty old (well, 2006), had a non-N wireless card in it but I bought a wireless N card for it and installed it about a week ago in anticipation of installing the wireless N router. The card in that laptop can accommodate 3 antenna wires, but the laptop only has two in it. I am pretty sure I can buy the 3rd wire on the internet somewhere, I'm looking into that. Meantime, I can try other things including the things you suggested.

My newer laptop, on the same floor (so it's virtually horizontal with the router), and about the same distance horizontally as the other laptop, already had a wireless N card installed, and my one download of the 105MB file before installing the wireless N router took 71 seconds. After installing the router it took 12 seconds. That's still very slow, evidently.

Yes, the serving USB HD is USB 2.0. It's a Western Digital Elements 2TB.

 

[Muse]

I have an issue maybe someone can help me with. I moved the 2TB USB HD that is my data repository from a laptop that was my server to the Asus router. It's seen OK by a wirelessly connected laptop. However, I had things configured on that laptop (and my other networked machines) to have the root directory of that HD mapped to W:. The HD is seen as RT-N66R. I can map any of its directories but I don't have the option to map the HD itself as W: ... is there a workaround for this? If it isn't doable I have workarounds, but I'll have to change data in a lot of places where paths are hard coded. Not a big deal, but it would be easier to map the HD as W: if doable. Thing is that HD seems to be seen like a computer, not a drive.

I didn't get any answers on this one so I went ahead and did my workarounds. It was a lot harder than I thought because I had a bunch of code that made network shares not work in my metadata. I finally got to the bottom of the problem, fixed the code. Had to create duplicate metadata for one of my legacy applications because it couldn't deal with network shares at all, such as \\RT-N66R. Got it all working now on all but one of my machines, will do that one later, but I know what I have to do now. It's nice to have my data available again 24/7. Having that laptop serving data 24/7 led to a meltdown of the machine's internal HD a couple of months ago. Having the serving external HD on the router should be much less stressful on my hardware. The USB HD evidently sits idle except when being used. I just have to make sure I back it up frequently!

 

[Managespaces]

sometimes we use our routers as switches. If you're going to do this, then turn off all the routing functionality, and don't use the WAN port.

 

[Muse]

sometimes we use our routers as switches. If you're going to do this, then turn off all the routing functionality, and don't use the WAN port.

Um, I don't comprehend this. Is that what I'm doing with the configuration I described in my post a couple days ago? People in this thread actually seemed to be saying that my TP-Link switch acts as a router in some way, that it directs packet flow to where it needs to go.

I currently have the modem going into the router's input port, only one of the outputs of the router is used and that's going to the switch and I have all my ethernet devices connected to the switch. This is giving me one more connection to the network than I would get if I didn't use the switch at all. It's not an important device, a rarely used alternate desktop.

There are several ways I could hook things up, obviously. I don't know what's better/best. At the moment, my wireless speeds are not very fast and what's got me vexed is the fact that they are very inconsistent. Transferring the same 101MB file can take twice as long sometimes as other times under identical conditions. D:

Edit: Oh, I think you were talking about my original question in the quote above...

 

[azazel1024]

So, it sounds like you are attempting to run the external HDD off the laptop connected wirelessly to your your and then your network? If so, stop.

Hardwire only.

Most routers cap out around 20MB/sec in file transfer performance through USB connect hard drives. If that. A lot are in the low teens or high single digits (not sure on the N66R, but I don't think it is terribly speedy). Most actualy computers or even cheap NAS can do significantly better than this. Even a 2006 laptop probably can, at least if it has a gigabit LAN port on it.

If not, you can probably get a PCMCIA gigabit card, or just a USB2 gigabit network adapter for it and plug it in to the switch/router to share files through the USB2 HDD connected to it.

Its going to be a lot faster than a wireless connection to the router and then to the rest of your devices or connecting the drive to the router itself. If you are connecting laptop to router wirelessly then to the device actually trying to access the file you are halving your wireless bandwidth because you have to make two wireless hops instead of one.

Never run a server wirelessly unless there is absolutely no choice (like someone is threatening your children at knife point to run it wirelessly, or else).

 

[Muse]

So, it sounds like you are attempting to run the external HDD off the laptop connected wirelessly to your your and then your network? If so, stop.

Hardwire only.

Most routers cap out around 20MB/sec in file transfer performance through USB connect hard drives. If that. A lot are in the low teens or high single digits (not sure on the N66R, but I don't it is terribly speedy). Most actualy computers or even cheap NAS can do significantly better than this. Even a 2006 laptop probably can, at least if it has a gigabit LAN port on it.

If not, you can probably get a PCMCIA gigabit card, or just a USB2 gigabit network adapter for it and plug it in to the switch/router to share files through the USB2 HDD connected to it.

Its going to be a lot faster than a wireless connection to the router and then to the rest of your devices or connecting the drive to the router itself. If you are connecting laptop to router wirelessly then to the device actually trying to access the file you are halving your wireless bandwidth because you have to make two wireless hops instead of one.

Never run a server wirelessly unless there is absolutely no choice (like someone is threatening your children at knife point to run it wirelessly, or else).

I have never run a server wirelessly. Actually I currently have the external 2TB USB HD plugged into one of the two USB ports on the Asus RT-N66R wireless N router. What I was doing before getting the wireless N router and a wireless adapter for my downstairs laptop was this:

Lenovo T60 laptop connected by ethernet cable to my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 802.11b/g wireless router, the same Western Digital Elements 2TB USB external HD was plugged into one of that laptop's USB ports. That HD had the data that I wanted to be able to access from all of the machines on my network, along with data I was generating on a daily basis. The most important of this data I was backing up, more or less frequently. So, no, not two wireless connections.

Now, I've been testing speeds on the network. Before installing the Asus wireless N router it was taking around 70 seconds to download a 101MB file to my OTHER Lenovo T60 laptop, which was downstairs (the DSL modem and router are upstairs). Now, the same laptop in the same location, but now with a newly installed wireless N PCI Express adapter card, and with the wireless N router newly installed (and the HD supplying the data connected by USB directly to the router), is downloading this file in around 21 seconds on average. The downloads (I've downloaded this same 101MB file dozens of times to my two wirelessly connected laptops) are varying quite a bit in speed, for reason(s) that completely escape me. Everything is the same AFAIK, and a few seconds apart the download times can vary by almost a factor of 2.

I might do a lot better with a dedicated server of some kind rather than having a HD attached to the router. Speeds might be significantly better (I am inexperienced and don't know), and I might have better backup support. I need to work out a better system of guarding against data loss due to HD failure. What I've been doing is very unsystematic. I had one of my Western Digital Elements 2TB external USB HD's fail on me suddenly and without warning a couple of weeks ago. I don't even know exactly what was on it. The most critical of my data was backed up elsewhere, fortunately, but I've lost some stuff that wasn't. I started a thread in the Memory and Storage forum, and I'm going to try to recover some of the data on the drive, if possible. I need to get another, bigger, HD in order to try the steps that people recommended in an effort to recover data.

BTW, all my devices have gigabit ethernet, and all the wirelessly connected machines (my two laptops) have wireless N cards. That's not counting my Nokia Lumia 520 smartphone, the only device for which I'm using the 2.4ghz band on the router for its wifi.

 

[Muse]

That is pretty slow. -snip-

26s for 105MB though says 4MB/sec. That is pretty darned slow. Something else going on? Even 16s isn't very fast, that clocks in at less than 10MB/sec. Sounds like a wireless limitation here with something going on.

I did some experimenting yesterday. Moving both my laptops (with wireless N cards) within 6 feet of the router, the fastest download speeds for the 101MB file were 9 seconds, that's around 11MB/second. What could be throttling the speed? 😕

 

[azazel1024]

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.

 

[Muse]

Well, the router is dual band and I'm using the 5ghz band for my two wirelessly connected laptops, both of which have wireless N network cards inside. The one I'm most concerned with is a Lenovo T60, which I upgraded just a couple of weeks ago to a wireless N card, the IBM FRU # 42T0825 Atheros AR5BXB72 802.11n Wireless Mini Express. That card has 3 antenna connections, the previous card (not N) had 2 antenna connections, so I'm only using 2 or the 3 antenna connections on the card. I can get another, and I presume it will improve my speeds. I'm going to look into it.

The other laptop I'm not using too much, so I won't worry about it just now, also it's 1/2 the distance from the router and gets somewhat better speeds.

The 2.4ghz band I'm only using for my smartphone and Kindle.

Thanks for this info. I'll bookmark it and come back to it as I try to figure out my network. There are plenty of other computers in the area, competing as it were but I suspect that most are 2.4ghz.

I think I did, but don't remember now, but will try seeing what kind of transfer speeds I get if the 2TB USB HD is connected to the laptop that was my server machine. That machine is connected by ethernet to the router through the gigabit switch. I could connect it directly to the router, but don't know that that would make a difference. I don't know if you saw my post explaining that all of my ethernet devices are connected to a gigabit switch, which is the only device connected by ethernet to the router. The router has 3 open ethernet ports. Carson Dyle, in post #53 here, said that I wouldn't benefit from connecting devices directly to the router instead of to the switch, but maybe that's not true. What do you think?